Private schools face a lot of challenges toward getting their information across. They have to compete with other private schools with potentially similar academic and cultural offerings, and with tuition costs that usually only grow over time. A private school is more like a business than those in the public sector, and leaning into what makes a particular school unique is often the best way to start new branding endeavors online.
The best private school sites don’t pull any punches, offering the most exciting things that make the school stand out. Sometimes this is an area of academic specialty, as with some STEM-focused and Liberal Arts schools, and at other times it can encompass the very culture of the school based on the traditions of its alumni over decades or even over a century.
The schools included on our list break the mold
…with presentations of institutional and student character, expertly communicated traditions, and no one-size-fits-all approach to intellectual stimulation.
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Albuquerque Academy
With over 1000 students to their name, Albuquerque Academy does a great job presenting their school’s values over the 60 years they’ve been open. Their well-placed social media links are right on the homepage, and their navigation menu gives quicklinks to their regularly updated blog run by the dean of the school. Their main video loop depicts the artistic, athletic, and academic lives of joyous students deep in the school’s culture. Scrolling down brings visitors to short video interviews with current students who offer insight about their day-to-day experiences and how faculty are helping them achieve their own future goals.
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Gilman School
Gilman is an all-boys school that provides an inviting, brightly-colored photo collection in grid-style layout that include small animations for playful image rotations and snappy headlines advertising upcoming calendar events. Their large menu offers well-organized drop-down options for easy navigation and their social media presence is highly developed via links from the homepage footer bar to their Instagram and Twitter accounts. Their scrolling list of colleges that accepted their students is a smart way to display the school’s devotion to helping their seniors matriculate into college and adult lives.
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Summit Country Day School
Summit Country, located in Cincinnati, marks their 125-year anniversary with compelling design features, including a page devoted to student and parent testimonials. Their general focus is more business-like than most schools, with customer satisfaction ratings on prominent display to communicate their more white-glove care toward the comfort and success of students. Their well-stocked video collection offers thorough information about their three student-body age ranges (lower, middle, and high-schoolers) while featuring even more alumni and welcoming student parents devoted to describing their extremely positive experiences with Summit’s standards for care and education.
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The Archer School for Girls
The personalizing design elements, like bright colors among social and academic depictions of students, make the Archer School for Girls feel trendy and rigorous simultaneously. Their navigation menu floats on top of the homepage’s video loop of the campus grounds and brings visitors to the next section scrolling down after a click. Their attention to detail regarding student backgrounds is impressive — they have an entire page devoted to information about current student endeavors for grandparents! Prospective students and family members can connect to the school’s culture easily via links to the leader of the school’s social media accounts for updates on emerging information and current events.
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Times2 STEM Academy
With a creative name, Times2 STEM makes their areas of scholastic focus apparent before you even reach the homepage. Their header photo’s snappy text and more descriptive intro paragraph communicates the school’s commitment regarding scientific education and their ability to help students apply such lessons to their professional lives. The awards page offers their high rank in evaluative publications such as US News & World Report and includes helpful calls to action for enrolling students and those looking to see if the school is a good fit. The school’s daily news posts help keep visitors of all kind abreast about what’s happening and offered at Times2.
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Poudre School District Northern Colorado
The Poudre School District has over 30,000 students with over 40 schools and a handful of charter schools, so the audience for their services is going to be quite large. The site includes distinct sections for faculty, staff, parents, and students so anyone connected to the school network has access to information most relevant to them as easily as possible. Their subsections have thorough layers of information for especially invested visitors, and the attractive navigation menu helps users have fun exploring the website without getting lost on the abundance of information about the district.
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Ross School
Ross School, a boarding school based in the heart of East Hampton, NY, provides a minimalist approach with very well-sequenced content and well-articulated values. The homepage’s video loop of school life for current students depicts a bustling atmosphere of social and academic priorities to help communicate the seriousness of their scholastic and community-building mission. The website’s sub-category menu for their upper, lower, and boarding school practices uses warm colors and videos of their campus highlights for an immersive run-through of the school’s institutions on-site.
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Cary Grove High School
Cary Grove’s homepage video brings the school’s culture and academic rigor to life with high-res shots of athletic events, energetic and attentive students during class time, and emerging opportunities at the school. With a variety of informational graphics and strong website organizers, like calendar schedulers, media feeds, and more, they’re better positioned to keep families and the student body informed about current and historical information about the school. The homepage’s long scroll-list of different learning environments and events within them makes learning about the school’s opportunities a breeze.
