A school website that has to talk to parents, not to itself
Dunnellon Christian Academy has been teaching here since 1983. The site had to answer what a parent asks before they will book a tour.
- Client
- Dunnellon Christian Academy
- Where
- Dunnellon, Florida
- Type
- K through 12 private school
- The job
- Website design and build
The problem with most school websites
School websites tend to be written for people who already attend the school. They lead with news, calendars, portals and announcements, all of which matter enormously to current families and mean nothing at all to the person the site actually needs to reach, which is a parent deciding where to send their child next year.
That parent has a short and very consistent list of questions. What grades do you take, what does it cost, what do you believe, how big are the classes, is my child going to be alright there, and what do I do next. If a site does not answer those quickly, the parent leaves and calls somewhere else, and the school never finds out it happened.
What we built instead
We put the deciding parent first and the current families second, without pushing the current families off the site. The top of the homepage answers the basic questions immediately: the grade range, where the school is, what kind of school it is, and how to arrange a visit.
Academics, athletics and the faith side of the school each got proper space rather than a paragraph, because those are the things a family is weighing against the other options in the area. A school that has been running since 1983 has a lot to point at, and the previous presentation was not pointing at much of it.
The whole thing was built to load fast on a phone, because a good number of these visits happen in a car outside another school.
Why the local part mattered
Nearly everyone searching for this school is within a short drive of it. That makes the search job unusually clear. The site needs to be the obvious answer for people looking for a Christian school around Dunnellon, and it needs Google to understand exactly where the school is and what it does.
We are in Dunnellon too, which helped. Knowing the area means knowing which families are realistically in range and which nearby towns are worth being visible in.
What to notice
Open the site and time how long it takes to find out what grades the school teaches and how to arrange a visit. That number is the entire measure of whether a school website works.
See more of this kind of work on the DCA Eagles project page, or browse everything on the work page.