We have been building school websites for nearly ten years. Prep and primary, state and independent, in Surrey, across the UK, and in Saudi Arabia.
Ten years of this work in the education sector has taught us where we are useful and where we are not.
We are at our best with prep and primary schools: the years when a parent is choosing a school largely on feel, on a visit, and on whether their child looked happy walking round it. That is a marketing problem we understand well, and it is a different problem from selling a sixth form on results tables and university destinations. Secondary schools are not our specialism and we would rather say so now than discover it together at proof stage.
We also work with a lot of nurseries and kindergartens, which is where all of this started back in 2008. If that is what you are, there is a page for you.
We learn more from an hour walking round a school with the Head than from a fortnight reading prospectuses.
Every school has a personality, and so does every Head. Our job, with your help, is to make sure the website carries both. That is difficult to do from a brief and an image library, and straightforward to do from a corridor at break time.
The pupils’ perspective is the part most often left out. What your children say about your school is the most persuasive material you own, and it usually sits unused. We go and get it.
A good school website is also alive. Something happens at your school every single week that is worth putting online, and the sites that show it are the sites that convince.
Almost every school website is written for one person: a parent, usually a mother, usually at half past ten at night with fourteen tabs open. That is the right person to write for. She is not the only person you are writing for.
Children look at school websites. Prospective pupils are shown the site by their parents, often sitting on the same sofa, often before the visit is booked. Current pupils go looking for themselves in the news pages. A seven-year-old will not read your governance statement, but she will absolutely notice whether the children in the photographs look like her, whether anyone is laughing, and whether the place looks like somewhere she would want to spend Tuesday.
This matters commercially, and not in a soft way. A child who comes away from the website unenthusiastic is a child who is harder work on the day of the visit, and parents of prep-age children take their children’s feelings about a school extremely seriously. You are not marketing to one decision-maker. You are marketing to a household.
So we build for both:
The two audiences do not fight each other. They just need somebody to remember that the second one exists.
Pupil recruitment runs on a cycle, and the website has to work with it rather than sit still through it.
We build with the Registrar’s year in mind: open days announced at the right moment and taken down when they have passed, enquiry forms that go where they need to go, visit bookings that do not require a phone call, and a clear route from “I saw your website” to “we have registered.”
Our designs are friendly to look at. They are also measured. We care about the number of open day bookings, the number of registrations, and the number of children who start in September. Website visits are interesting. They are not what pays your staff.
If your website is not filling your open days, that is a fixable problem, and it is one we have fixed before.
Book a call, tell us about your school, and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it.
We work with schools in Saudi Arabia, both British curriculum international schools and Saudi schools serving Saudi families. We are currently finishing a project covering three schools and their holding company.
International school marketing is not UK school marketing with a different flag on it. The parent audience is more mobile and often arrives mid-year, families are frequently comparing schools across countries rather than across a county, and a website may be the only thing a family sees before they land. Multiple schools under one group also bring a structural problem that nobody enjoys: keeping each school’s own character intact while the group looks coherent. We have just spent a project solving exactly that.
We would like to do more of this work, and we are actively looking for it in Dubai and the wider UAE. If you are a school or a school group there, we would be glad to talk.
Have a Look: Beech Hall School Riyadh
A beautiful school website that nobody finds has not helped you.
Most of our school clients take the whole thing from us, and it is the arrangement that works best: the website first, then the SEO to get it ranking for the searches that matter in your catchment, then ongoing SEO month after month because school search is seasonal and your competitors do not stop, and then paid advertising in the run-up to open days when you want to reach families who are not searching yet.
You do not have to take all of it. Plenty of schools come to us for the website alone and that is a perfectly good place to start. But if your website is not converting, your open days are quiet, and nobody is quite sure what the marketing budget is doing, those are connected problems and they are better solved together.
Rotating images or video, and direct routes to admissions, term dates, and contact.
In the Head's own words, not a governor-approved paraphrase. This is the page prospective parents read most carefully.
Announcement pop-ups, a booking form, and a confirmation email, so nobody has to be at a desk for an enquiry to be captured.
School term dates are searched more than almost anything else on a school website. Burying them costs you goodwill for no reason at all.
Exams, fixtures, concerts, INSET days, pushed straight into a parent's iPhone or Android calendar.
Header, footer, and every page. Nobody should ever have to hunt.
Whether you publish the numbers or ask for an enquiry first, the page should be unambiguous about which you are doing.
Your statutory policies as clean, viewable PDFs that your office can update without ringing us.
Staffing is hard. A proper job board with online applications does more for you than a PDF and an email address.
Your public news wins parents. Some photographs should only be seen by current families, and we can password-protect those.
All of it is editable by your office. If you would rather it were not your job, we run a fully managed service with named support staff
and a ticketing system, and we will do the updating for you.
Our specialism in marketing for Early Years Education began in 2008 when we were commissioned to design a website for a single nursery in Edinburgh.
That project evolved into a further 35 nursery web designs, and over the last 18 years, we have worked with hundreds of nurseries and kindergartens throughout the UK and beyond.
From working on hundreds of projects, we have a clear understanding of what parents look for, and how your information should be presented to ensure visitors become parents at your nursery.
Business has got tougher for independent schools, particularly in the last few years.
To stand out from the crowd, you need to understand what makes your school different, and your marketing needs to be clear, effective and most importantly, cost-effective. Whether your website isn’t converting, you’re not sure what socials to post, or you’d like to start advertising, we can help.
Three Girls Media have been working with independent schools for more than 10 years. Let us bring our expertise to your marketing challenges.
No. Most of our school clients have historically been independent schools, but if your state primary school could do with a new website or additional marketing, we’d love to help.
We don’t rule it out, but it is not where we are strongest. Marketing a prep or primary school is about a visit, a feeling, and a family’s confidence in the people looking after a small child. Secondary marketing leans much harder on results and destinations. We know we are good at the first one.
Most school sites take eight to twelve weeks from first meeting to launch. The two things that move that date are content and photography: the design is rarely the hold-up.
Yes, and most do. Term dates, news, calendar entries, policies and job vacancies are all editable without ringing us. If you would rather we did it, we offer a fully managed service with a named contact and a ticketing system.
Yes. We work with British curriculum and Saudi schools in Saudi Arabia, and we are looking to take on work in Dubai and the UAE.
Yes, and for most of our school clients we do all of it: website, SEO, ongoing monthly SEO, and paid advertising around the admissions cycle.
Results-oriented services delivered by an in-house team of dedicated experts
