Cost of a school website

[Galron]

I have been asked to investigate the options for outsourcing our school website. It would involve creating a new site as well as ongoing support and tweaks when needed. The content would generally be managed with a CMS. It would be good if day to day changes such as new links and standard pages etc could still be added or changed by school staff (in something like Wordpress?). We are a large secondary school.

 

Sites such as these would be the rough sort of thing we are eventually looking for as our Head has pointed out that he particularly likes them:

 

https://www.marlborough.oxon.sch.uk/

https://www.stags.herts.sch.uk/

 

We certainly wont be copying anyone else's site but these are the type of site we are looking for.

 

Can anyone suggest how much we might need to budget for this? I will contact the companies that created them for ideas on costs but I thought I would ask other schools as well.

 

Thank you!

[Chrisauk]

Hello,

 

The website company we use are: Greenhouse School Websites. We moved from Wordpress to them after i was finding i was investing too much time in tweaking the site or dealing with changes to Wordpress with each release. If you want a low cost solution though its definitely the way to go.

 

As for cost of having someone do it for you Greenhouse School Websites actually outline all their costs on their website so are very transparent with how much it will ultimately cost. https://www.greenhouseschoolwebsites.co.uk/school-website-prices/secondary/

 

There are also bolt-on's to add different features such as a social media wall etc.

 

In terms of price, i have found that they sit roughly in the middle of most website design companies, e4Education being one of the more expensive ones, although dont get me wrong their service is very good. (Used them in a previous school i worked at).

 

Hope this helps.

 

Thanks

Chris

Edited January 21, 2019 by Chrisauk

[yac2016]

Agree, Greenhouse are good.

[Galron]

Thank you for the suggestion of Greenhouse School Websites. They do seem to be quite good value. I have been phoning a few companies and fortunately they are quite candid and upfront about costs. I will contact Greenhouse and get some examples of their secondary school sites.

 

I'd be glad to find out about any more companies that people think are very good.

[Jcx500]

i Was Impressed with my greenhouse website would highly recommend. https://www.sa.solihull.sch.uk

[noelmm]

We use schudio.com, we moved to them around 18 months ago and haven't looked back. The level of support we had during the new site creation was outstanding and that hasn't dropped off since, if we have a problem and can't do something or want a change to the site that we can't do we can just drop them an email and someone always picks it up and helps, sometimes within half an hour.

[Danp]

All depends, I've known schools to spend upwards of £30k for a site, photos, content etc etc!

[Cat_Jam148]

We've just recently been looking into this and it's great to hear that many others recommend Greenhouse School websites. Looks like we made the right decision. They were quite a bit cheaper than other companies and so far the contact we've had from them has been good.

[Sonic007]

I've seen some shockingly bad websites where schools have paid crazy money for sometnhing that looks like it was made in the 1990's.

 

The only advantage I've seen in taking out a contract with an outside company is when they help you to keep on top of GDPR, offer user management, etc

 

A decent self hosted wordpress site is not complicated and can look so much more proffesional.

 

So many school sites I've seen have fancy little pictures and are made to look kiddy friendly when in fact the main users are going to be parents, not kids.

[theeggmaster]

We use RealSmart for our website. We use more than just their website service, but they do offer just websites too.

[browolf]

Schudio Here too. We have a social media apprentice we got from the local college managing the site and liasing with them. What little dealings I've had with them, they've always done their best to help. Edited January 22, 2019 by browolf

[jodierocks]

Have also used Greenhouse School Websites when I was in my last schools. Hoping to get a new Greenhouse one at my new school soon too when I can convince everyone to release money! They were brilliant at setting up a site as we wanted and a bargain compared to do many others. Team always quick to change anything as needed too I.e. school phone number updates or new badge to add to banners. Main thing for me was how easy the CMS is so I could train up other people to update the site without needing everyone to be a geek like me!

http://www.greenhouseschoolwebsites.co.uk

[T-800]

Another vote for Greenhouse School Websites here. They are great to work with and very flexible in design choices etc. I was very picky doing ours, so we went backwards and forwards a few times with design ideas etc, but they were always happy to make the changes I wanted until we had something we were very happy with. As others have said, the CMS is also really easy to use and their pricing is very transparent.

[TJ-Diggers]

We use Creative Schools. Hosting two website and an online uniform shop

[mavhc]

Question is really: does whoever you pick provide the features you want, PWA, OneSignal, sync your internal calendar to the website calendar, easy to create galleries, secure sections, a database of who's in which photo so when someone complains you can easily find them all.

 

And if they don't, how much will they charge to add it?

 

Do you want a generic design, something more custom, can you do the graphics yourself, or want to pay them? Do you want someone to come and take a load of photos to use on the site, or do it yourself?

 

And most importantly: when you want to leave that company, what happens? Start from scratch again, or upload a copy of the website to another host?