Education Web Design

Education web design is website design for schools, kura, training providers and the bodies that support them. The work splits two ways. A school site is a utility that parents use in short bursts and a board has to keep current. A training provider site is a sales site sitting behind a decision that takes months.

Building the second thing for a school, or the first thing for a training provider, is the mistake we most often get called in to fix.

School websites start from $3,000 + GST for a straightforward site and run to $15,000 + GST and up once course catalogues, portals or system integrations are involved. Most school projects land between $8,000 and $12,000 + GST.

Where yours sits comes down to three things: how much of your existing content needs restructuring rather than moving, whether the site has to talk to your student management system, and how much of your identity has to be designed rather than applied. We quote on scope, so you are not paying for functionality a primary school will never use.

A straightforward school site takes 4 to 8 weeks from kick-off to launch. A larger build with a full design process behind it takes 8 to 12 weeks.

The thing that moves that most is content, and in schools it is almost always the policies. Photos and staff lists come together quickly. Fifteen years of accumulated policy documents, half of them PDFs and some of them contradicting each other, is what becomes the critical path.

Term time matters too. If you want the site live for the start of a year, we need to start it in Term 3, not Term 4.

Most of our school clients sit on managed hosting at $100 + GST per month. That covers the server, free SSL, nightly backups, uptime monitoring, and us doing the WordPress core and plugin updates rather than you.

That is the one we recommend for schools, because the person who would otherwise be doing it is the office manager or a teacher with a release day, and neither of them should be spending it on plugin updates.

If you do have someone in-house who would rather handle it, hosting-only plans start at $50 + GST per month. Same servers, same backups, but WordPress maintenance sits with you. Domain registration and premium plugin licences are quoted separately rather than bundled in.

Usually, yes. Most student management systems used in New Zealand schools will publish a calendar feed the website can read, so term dates and events are entered once in the system your staff already use and appear on the site on their own.

How far that goes depends on the platform. KAMAR, Hero, eTAP and Edge all differ in what they will expose and how. Tell us which one you run and we will tell you exactly what can sync and what still needs a person, before you commit to anything.

As content you can edit, never as a PDF. If your school has an enrolment scheme, the board has to advertise the number of out-of-zone places, the application deadline and the ballot date, and those change every year.

We build that as a page your office can update in a couple of minutes. The alternative is what we usually inherit: a PDF from two years ago that someone has to find, edit, re-export and re-upload, which is why so many school sites are advertising a ballot that has already been drawn.

Not legally, and we build to them anyway. The New Zealand Government Web Accessibility Standard requires WCAG 2.2 Level AA and it applies to public service departments. Schools sit outside that mandate and are encouraged rather than required to comply.

The reason to do it regardless is not the standard. Every school community contains people who use a screen reader, read English as a second language, or cannot use a mouse, and a school is the last organisation that should be making those families ring the office to find out a term date.

Yes, and it is worth asking, because it is a common place for school sites to quietly fail. Macrons have to render correctly everywhere, not just in body text: page titles, menu labels, staff names, form fields, and the automated emails the site sends when someone reports an absence.

Deanwell carries its whakataukī bilingually in the hero rather than tucked into an about page, which is where a school’s identity should sit if the school means it.

You know your school and we know what a website needs, so it works best as a split. You supply the substance and we structure it, cut it down and make it work on a phone.

We give you a page-by-page outline of what each section needs and roughly how long it should be, so nobody is staring at a blank page. If writing is genuinely the blocker, tell us at the quote stage and we will work out an option with you.

What we will not do is launch a site full of placeholder text. We would rather go live with fewer pages that are finished.

You do. The domain, the design, the content and the WordPress installation are yours, and that is in writing.

It matters more in education than most sectors, because boards and principals change and the next one should not discover the school’s website is locked to an agency. If you ever leave us, we hand over the files and the database and help your next provider get set up.

Yes. Roughly half the education work we do is training providers, industry bodies and the organisations around them rather than schools.

I-CAR is the training body for collision repair technicians across New Zealand and Australia, and we built their sites plus myI-CAR, the platform their technicians learn on. The School Business Managers’ Association is the national body for the people running the business side of schools. Different buyer, different site, same understanding of who is on the other end of it.