School sites: where every child doesn't matter

A trawl through nine hundred school websites tells me one thing: they’re not built with young web users in mind

We know that the world has moved on from the communication tools that many of us had as kids - public phone boxes, chewed cassette tapes and stamps you actually needed to lick. We know that children and teens are increasingly technically-literate and take a digital lifestyle completely for granted. And we know that the biggest day-on-day gatherings of these digital savants is within schools.

Following the above lines of thought to a logical conclusion, you’d expect school websites to be the most child-centric, pupil-friendly, technically-savvy, media-rich destinations on the planet.

Except, of course, they’re not. They’re largely awful. And I say this with some authority, because I’ve spent some time recently looking at several hundred of them as part of our research here at Paperhorse.

During this process, my browser has frozen so many times that I now keep a can of Homebase de-icer handy. I know that I never want to see Comic Sans again. I have discovered that sky blue and mustard isn’t a winning colour combination.

This can't go on. So Paperhorse are going to up our game this coming Autumn with an exciting new service for schools that you should know about. Watch out for the next posts.

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