e4education Reviews

[lmrogers]

Good Afternoon,

 

I'm looking to get some feedback on e4education and how good they are at delivering a website. Ideally from scratch a full bespoke site through to user support and maintenance after launch.

 

If anyone can provide that would be great. It would also be good to hear from their customers in Kent if anyone on here is from that area.

 

Thanks

[RLR]

We use e4education but I wasn't really involved in the setup and creation of the website. Was mainly dealt with by our marketing department. If you want to take a look around our website: www.stephenperse.com

 

I remember they did provide initial website designs which we were able to review and provide feedback on before it went live.

[CHiLL]

We're with e4education, though like others, we weren't involved in the process. They mainly offer sites from a handful of templates from what I remember and you purchase more 'rows' of content (or something along those lines).

[minimoo]

It's quite interesting how many schools are happy to pay for websites, but then don't involve their IT teams in it.

 

Students/Parents/Staff don't look at school websites - as they are often using the schools VLE - whether it's google classroom / teams/ moodle / fronter / itslearning etc etc.

 

Spending lots of money on a website does seem like a waste of funds - especially given the templates that are available from microsoft/wordpress etc for free

[Edu-IT]

We're with e4education, though like others, we weren't involved in the process. They mainly offer sites from a handful of templates from what I remember and you purchase more 'rows' of content (or something along those lines).

I think they have two options, from memory, and this is the cheaper one.

 

If you have a bigger budget you can go fully bespoke design.

[Edu-IT]

It's quite interesting how many schools are happy to pay for websites, but then don't involve their IT teams in it.

 

Students/Parents/Staff don't look at school websites - as they are often using the schools VLE - whether it's google classroom / teams/ moodle / fronter / itslearning etc etc.

 

Spending lots of money on a website does seem like a waste of funds - especially given the templates that are available from microsoft/wordpress etc for free

In the current climate the website is often the first window in to the school. So £4000 initial cost may seem a lot but if it secures a few extra children on role because it fully showcases the school, and they then proceed to visit to find out more, then its actually not that expensive.

[jthompson]

Been using them for years. The service has been very reliable - no uptime issues. The initial design stage discussions and implementation was well managed. 2FA on the site management accounts, too.

 

It's always held up and done its job on snow days and the like.

[DeGrimmy]

Similar to the others, our school uses e4education to host our website and I wasn't involved at all in the process - My predecessor was, though. I know that we chose the cheaper option of picking a template and tweaking it a little to our taste. My experience since taking on the responsibility of the website has been positive, I can't think of a time where we've had a major issue with them. I logged a support ticket earlier this week and I had a reply the next day which completely solved my issue. The CMS is pretty easy to use, as well.

[synaesthesia]

Lots of schools in our vicinity use them and they're all decent quality with excellent uptime, which usually means they're doing something right

I agree with the above though - there are very, very few instances where any school website is the first port of call any more and it literally serves as a box-ticking Ofsted compliance exercise and for Google's spiders to do their thing. Of course a few people will still look at the website first and foremost but MASSIVELY overshadowed by social media, where efforts should be concentrated and where you will find the day to day goings on.

HOWEVER - budget spent on a website by an education site specialist is money well spent regardless because it might only provide one bum on a seat, but it only takes one bum on a seat to pay for it.

[jthompson]

One feature of their CMS that I've found really handy (whilst not necessarily unheard of elsewhere) is the friendly URL option for a page. E.g. schoolname.net/hire. It means you can give pages URLs that are well suited to use on posters, social media and even phone calls. Given how difficult it is to organise a site structure for a school (everyone wants their obscure section prominently displayed), and the fact the the homepage is often not people's first port of call anyway, that's a really useful feature to have on a school website.

[TechMonkey]

It's quite interesting how many schools are happy to pay for websites, but then don't involve their IT teams in it.

 

I'd say, depending on the structure of the School or the purpose of the website, it is up for debate if the IT Team should be involved. Most websites are now a marketing tool and managed by the office or a marketing person, so apart from an initial query with the IT team for any essential technical requirements, why would IT be involved with a marketing exercise?

[kennysarmy]

I'd say, depending on the structure of the School or the purpose of the website, it is up for debate if the IT Team should be involved. Most websites are now a marketing tool and managed by the office or a marketing person, so apart from an initial query with the IT team for any essential technical requirements, why would IT be involved with a marketing exercise?

 

I agree.

 

I have no involvement at all in our school website! Nor our Facebook page or Twitter feeds etc!

[msi_school]

We use E4 and on the whole I am happy but just before the launch we had a strange issue where about 60% of the pages where timing out. We went round in circles for about a fortnight before the Head told them that if it was not resolved we would be cancelling the website. After this they quickly found that there was a strange issue with page names causing the ISP firewall to drop the connection and a solution to prevent this from happening again.

[ITGURU]

Poor reliability from experience - when snow days occurred, their infrastructure couldn't cope with the demand with parents checking messages etc. Have since moved websites back to self hosted. limited flexibility, will charge for any major changes the school want, whereas local hosted endless and can make it unique rather than all schools using a same template.

[lmrogers]

Thanks for all the feedback, good to hear that generally the service and experience has been good, but also good to hear where it has been found lacking.

 

Has anyone ever gone through the process of leaving e4education?

[eddiebaby]

I hear e4education have just joined Juniper Education - I wonder how that will affect their products and services.