15 Best School Website Designs [And How They Did It!]
First impressions of your school now begin online, not at the front door. In today’s digital world, a school's website is expected to reflect its values, achievements, and community spirit. A well-designed website acts as a dynamic gateway, offering insight into the institution and setting the tone for prospective families, students, and staff.
To inspire your web design, we’ve curated a selection of standout school websites from higher
education and K-12 institutions. These examples demonstrate what great educational web design looks like.
When designing a school website, the right CMS is key. A CMS built for educational institutions will offer tailored functionality to create a truly engaging website. Be sure to review CMS platforms with a design portfolio that features schools like yours, so you can get a clear picture of what to expect.
Let’s dive into what makes these websites so effective and break down the best practices for your own school’s web presence.
Top School Website Examples
Here are the best examples of school websites that stand out thanks to their unique features:
- Cotati Rohnert Park Unified School District - Quick link direct to essential resources
- Bishop Foley Catholic High School - Vibrant imagery and clear messaging
- Khan Lab School - Minimalist design and innovative approach
- Bright Star Schools - Visually cohesive design
- Vista Charter Public Schools - Dynamic and impactful homepage
- TanenbaumCHAT - The structured layout
- The Association of Theological Schools - Homepage with prominent calendar
- Precious Lamb Preschool - Clear call-to-actions
- Zaytuna College - Rich imagery and thoughtful design elements
- Athabasca University Graduate Students’ Association - The standout event calendar
- AGBU Manoogian-Demirdjian School for Children - Intuitive navigation and engaging visuals
- Park University - Powerful program finder
- Ross School - Stunning website designs and highly visual layouts
- Bow Valley College - Balancing the site’s text and imagery
- Putney High School - Unique typography of the content page
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1. Quick Link Direct To Essential Resources
Cotati Rohnert Park Unified School District (CRPUSD)’s shines with a sleek, modern design and user-friendly navigation. Despite having a lot of information, it remains clutter-free and creates an inviting experience.
Our Favorite Feature? The quick links at the top of the homepage make it effortless for users to access key resources like the Parent Portal and School Calendar, ensuring efficient navigation.
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2. Vibrant Imagery And Clear Messaging
Bishop Foley Catholic High School's website combines a clean, professional look with a welcoming tone that reflects the school’s community spirit. The use of vibrant imagery and clear messaging helps to communicate the school’s values and mission effectively.
Our Favorite Feature? The bold call-to-action buttons like "Apply Now" and "Schedule a Visit" make it easy for prospective families to engage directly. Morweb’s intuitive content management system (CMS) enables organizations like Bishop Foley Catholic High School to keep their website constantly updated with drag-and-drop editing tools.
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3. Minimalist Design And Innovative Approach
Khan Lab School’s website excels with a minimalist, modern design that aligns perfectly with its innovative educational model. Bright visuals and concise content engage visitors while highlighting the school’s forward-thinking mission.
Our Favorite Feature? The immersive homepage video captures immediate attention, offering a real glimpse into the school’s culture and learning approach. Built on the Morweb CMS platform, KLS leveraged features like blogs, event pages, and web accessibility tools, seamlessly combining functionality with an inspiring design.
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4. Visually Cohesive Design
The Bright Star Schools' website captivates with its vibrant, user-friendly design that mirrors the institution’s dedication to quality education. The use of bold colors and engaging visuals draws visitors in, while the intuitive layout makes it simple to find key information about programs and enrollment. Built on the Morweb platform, the site efficiently manages nine schools under one domain, each with its own content but a unified design. Morweb’s flexibility allows seamless navigation and easy content management, making it an essential tool for both users and administrators.
Our Favorite Feature? The homepage prominently displays powerful statistics that highlight Bright Star’s impact.
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5. Dynamic And Impactful Homepage
Vista Charter Public Schools' website is designed for simplicity and ease of use, offering streamlined navigation that ensures visitors can find what they need quickly. The cohesive layout and responsive design make it accessible on any device, enhancing user experience.
Our Favorite Feature? Their testimonial videos are seamlessly integrated into the website’s homepage, offering a dynamic and visually appealing way to explore the school’s impact.
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6. Colorful Icons
TanenbaumCHAT’s website combines vibrant icons and a polished design that perfectly represents the school’s academic rigor and dynamic community. The structured layout and intuitive navigation ensure that visitors can easily access key information.
Our Favorite Feature? The "About" page excels with a clear display of the school’s mission and values, complemented by strong visuals that bring student life and academics to the forefront.
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7. Homepage With Prominent Calendar
The Association of Theological Schools (ATS) website features a clean, professional design suited for theological schools and educators. Its organized navigation makes it easy to find key information like accreditation, resources, and educational standards. The minimalist layout, clear fonts, and ample white space enhance readability and user experience.
Our Favorite Feature? It is the prominent homepage calendar, which highlights events and resources that support member schools with best practices, peer networks, and research. This design effectively communicates ATS’s mission while providing valuable tools for its audience.
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8. Clear Calls-To-Action
The Precious Lamb Preschool website features a warm, inviting design with heartfelt imagery and personal stories that instantly connect with visitors. Its simple layout and intuitive navigation make it easy for users to quickly understand the school's mission and find ways to support it.
Our Favorite Feature? The homepage is filled with clear Calls-to-Action, encouraging visitors to get involved. Built on Morweb platform, the site is easy to manage, featuring an Events section for upcoming activities and Galleries showcasing the children and school in action.
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9. Rich Imagery And Thoughtful Design Elements
Zaytuna College’s website is both elegant and informative, embodying the institution’s scholarly and cultural values. The use of rich imagery and thoughtful design elements reflects the school’s unique identity as America’s first accredited Muslim liberal arts college.
Our Favorite Feature? The interactive programs section on the homepage offers a clear and engaging way for prospective students to explore academic offerings, making it easy to learn about the college’s distinctive programs.
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10. The Standout Event Calendar
The Athabasca University Graduate Student’s Association (AUGSA)’s website is sleek and user-friendly, effectively conveying essential information to students in an approachable manner. Its clean layout allows for quick navigation, making it easy for users to find what they need.
Our Favorite Feature? The standout feature is the events calendar, which gives students easy access to upcoming events, important dates, and deadlines, helping them stay engaged and informed. Using Morweb’s event templates, schools can easily create an event by inputting a title, date, description, ticket price and photo. All events are automatically generated on the events page by date and several are featured on the homepage for quick registration.
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11. Intuitive Navigation And Engaging Visuals
AGBU Manoogian-Demirdjian School’s website effectively captures the organization’s mission and values through a clean and professional design. The site’s intuitive navigation and engaging visuals make it easy for users to learn about their programs and initiatives.
Our Favorite Feature? The program highlights section is particularly impressive, showcasing key initiatives and success stories with compelling imagery and concise, informative text.
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12. Powerful Program Finder
Park University’s homepage is visually striking, featuring high-quality images and easily digestible information that draw visitors in. Redesigned on WordPress with the assistance of a web design agency and web developer, the site includes essential elements like featured posts, a prospective student sign-up form, an interactive campus map, and a social media live feed. The virtual tour adds extra value, especially while campus visits are restricted.
Our Favorite Feature? The site’s program finder tool allows prospective students to sort by location, field of study, and program level to find the courses they’re interested in.
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13. Stunning Website Designs And Highly Visual Layouts
Ross School built their website using Squarespace, renowned for its stunning designs and highly visual layouts.
Our Favorite Feature? Ross School website’s vibrant imagery and bright colors create an engaging design. Scrolling down reveals aerial footage of the campus and a live Facebook feed showcasing students. Navigation is seamless, with three options: quick links on the homepage, a top navigation menu, and a collapsible menu for detailed information. For supporters, the embedded donation form categorizes options and provides clear descriptions of how contributions will be used, making it easy and compelling for visitors to give.
One drawback of using Squarespace for nonprofit websites is that it lacks functionality for on-site donations and event registration. Ross School makes use of an embedded donation form which offers a better user experience than externally linked pages, however, embedded forms don’t have options to customize the design to match the rest of the site.
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14. Balancing The site’s Text and Imagery
Bow Valley College Bow Valley College designed their website using Sitecore, a powerful CMS suitable for larger sites. However, it can be challenging for non-developers to navigate, so having someone on staff for maintenance is often necessary. While Sitecore offers attractive design options, there’s limited flexibility for those without coding experience.
Our Favorite Feature? The homepage features recent stories covering student experiences, campus events and teacher spotlights. But what’s really great about this website is the photography featuring real students and the various campuses. They do a great job of balancing the site’s text and imagery to convey their message.
15. Unique Typography of The Content Page
Putney High School’s web design has very slick animations with a unique navigation menu that drops down when you hover over the main categories. The homepage features multiple news stories and photos that animate as you scroll down the page. The high school's online donation page and parents portal link to external platforms to handle the added functionality.
Our Favorite Feature? The interior pages have unique typography and colorful images of the students to capture your attention.
School Website Best Practices: Our Takeaways
We hope you’re feeling inspired! If you’re unsure what elements to include when relaunching your school’s website, we’ve condensed all of this information into a few design best practices.
Remember, your CMS will power your school website, so before anything else, choose a platform that’s catered to meet schools’ unique needs. Designed specifically for educational institutions, Morweb makes it easy for school administrators to design engaging, informative websites without the need for a developer.
With this in mind, let’s explore some commonalities between the best school websites, and how our tools help you elevate your digital presence.
Feature Multiple Ways To Give
Alumni giving is on the rise, and your website plays a key role in boosting donations. School websites that feature multiple ways to give make it easy for donors to contribute in ways that resonate with them. Diversify your giving opportunities by featuring the following donation opportunities on your website:
- A donation page is the foundation of your online fundraising strategy. The best donation pages offer a simple, secure, swift, and mobile-friendly giving process. Our fundraising module makes it easy to add suggested donation amounts, recurring donation options, and the ability to designate gifts to certain funds like scholarship funds.
- Monthly giving opportunities help you create a reliable pipeline of support. On your donation page, include a recurring donation option. You can even create a separate page that explains the program, how it impacts your school, and how donors can opt in.
- A matching gift page teaches donors they can double their contributions through employer matching gift programs. A well-designed matching gift page like the one below provides clear instructions on researching employers’ programs. Be sure to integrate a searchable database of companies that participate in matching gifts to help donors determine their eligibility.
Your school's website is a powerful fundraising tool. By featuring multiple ways to give like those above, your school can boost donor engagement and simplify the giving process, empowering you to invest more in your students’ education.
Include An Interactive Event Calendar.
An interactive events calendar informs students, parents, and staff about upcoming events such as back-to-school activities, sports games, parent-teacher conferences, and fine arts performances.
Plus, it enhances engagement by allowing users to filter events by category, add them to their personal calendars, and even register or RSVP online. Featuring an events calendar ensures that your school community is well-informed and actively involved, fostering a sense of belonging and participation.
Add our beautiful event pages to your school’s website, so you can easily sell tickets and collect RSVPs. The simple online registration process will make managing your events easier for everyone!
Maintain An Active Blog
An active blog is a cornerstone of the best school websites and an important marketing tool. It provides a spot to share your school’s stories, showcase the vibrancy of school life, and highlight educational achievements.
From detailed accounts of school events to sharing insights into classroom activities, your school can provide valuable resources and enrich your website’s content. In turn, this can boost your school’s visibility in search engines, drawing in prospective students and their families.
Morweb’s robust blog module offers features to manage your posts, including category and tag management, scheduled published dates, social media integration, instant image optimization, video embedding, auto-saving, and post search. You’ll be able to maintain a blog that reflects your school’s commitment to transparency and educational excellence.
Make Your Website Accessible
Adherence to accessibility standards is a hallmark of the best school websites, ensuring that all members of the school community, regardless of their abilities, can easily navigate the site. This commitment to inclusivity involves designing with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) in mind, which includes:
- Providing text alternatives for any non-text content like images and videos
- Ensuring all functionality is available from the keyboard
- Using a sufficient contrast ratio between background and foreground colors
By implementing these standards, school websites not only comply with legal requirements but also affirm their dedication to providing an equitable and barrier-free educational environment.
To help, our platform offers built-in accessibility options, such as alt tags, descriptions, custom URLs, and so on. With our accessibility widget, users can increase font size, highlight links, change site colors to grayscale, and more.
Feature An Engaging Online Catalog
The best websites offer an interactive showcase of educational opportunities available. Create a digital catalog that details your academic programs and extracurricular activities paired with multimedia elements that bring these offerings to life.
Morweb’s catalog feature is ideal for school websites that need to showcase programs to potential students. Create new program pages that feature images, videos, faculty information, and more. Our Program List Module offers a powerful search filter, SEO-friendly URLs, social media integration, and custom call-to-action buttons to drive leads.
By providing prospective students and their families with a detailed exploration of your school's curriculum and offerings, you can communicate your school’s unique strengths and educational values.
Actively Market Your School’s Website
Impactful school websites are vigorously marketed to reach potential students and families. Start by sharing your website’s content on social media. After all, 41% of students rely on social media to obtain more information about universities before applying. Site visitors should also be able to easily share pages, events, and blog posts from your website via social media integration.
From here, paid advertising can complement your SEO efforts, helping to boost your school’s website in search results. Specifically, Google Ads can amplify your school’s events, fundraisers, and offerings. Organizations associated with schools can even tap into the Google Ad Grant to gain free access to the Google Ads platform.
While the Google Ad Grant is unavailable to schools, philanthropic arms of educational institutions are eligible to participate and receive up to $10,000 per month in Google Ads credits.
Using Google Ads effectively requires you to select relevant keywords, create compelling ad copy, and continuously optimize campaigns based on performance. Through the platform, your school can target specific demographics, geographic areas, and interests, ensuring that you’re reaching those who’d be a good fit for your school.
The Gist
Building a strong online presence for your school shouldn’t seem like it’s out of reach. With the right website platform and inspiration from your peers, your school’s website can go above and beyond to engage students, parents, teachers and your community.
Looking to dive a bit deeper into the world of school web design? Check out our favorite web design resources for institutions just like yours:
- 9 Best Website Builders for Schools and Teachers. Explore the top website builders for schools so you can pick the right CMS for your institution.
- 21 of the Best College Websites (And Why They're So Great). Check out this list of beautiful college websites for inspiration.
- Top 12 Nonprofit Website Templates Any Organization Can Use. Check out some top templates from Morweb and other content management systems to create a compelling school website.
