It’s useful to have an online presence for your Kindergarten that provides a quick and easy way for your audience to find you and access information and resources over the Internet.
Planning your online presence
In planning how you will create an online presence, firstly identify your audience, what it is they want and order these things in priority. This will help you plan what key information you want to communicate online.
Design & ‘User’bility
Consider visitor behaviour (scrolling, different screens) – browsers are happy to scroll and click through pages, but won’t read through loads of text. There are tips to help in the design phase, such as highlighting relevant key words, reducing the word count, replacing text with images & having a clear layout and design.
Search Engine optimisation
If you’re going to make your online presence public you need to promote it! Just by creating something online doesn’t mean it will automatically be found through an Internet Search Engine such as Google. There are thousands of sites to compete with.To make your site search-engine friendly include keywords, have an identifiable web address (URL) and promote your site! More visitors will increase its popularity in web search results.
What CMS is right for you?
CMS (content management system) simply means a computer application that allows you to create and edit the content and publish it online.
There are different types of CMS so which one is right for you?
You could create a website, a simple website in WordPress CMS, or a third party host like Wix, Weebly or Squarespace.
Some Kindergartens use Social Media pages such as Facebook to establish online communities and encourage people to contribute and share content.
Other Kindergartens manage a Blog as their main online presence. Blogs are less formal than a website, updated regularly with activities & in a conversation style.