How to create a school website in Nigeria

1. What a school website is actually for

Worth being clear about, because it changes what you build. A Nigerian school website has three jobs, in this order:

1. Convincing a parent who has already heard of you. Someone was given your name at church, at work, in a WhatsApp group. They search for you at 10pm. What they find decides whether they call.
2. Answering the same questions for the hundredth time. Fees, admission, resumption dates, uniform, bus routes. Every answer on the site is a call the office does not take.
3. Being findable at all. A parent new to the area searching "secondary school in Ikeja" should be able to find you.

Notice what is not on the list: impressing other schools, or winning design awards. A plain site that answers a parent's questions beats a beautiful one that does not.

2. Step one — gather your content

This is the real work, and the step schools skip. Before anyone touches a computer, write down:

• About the school — what it is, where, when it was founded, how many pupils.
• Vision and mission — you almost certainly have these on a wall already.
• A welcome from the head teacher — three or four paragraphs in their own voice, signed with their name.
• What you offer — crèche, nursery, primary, junior and senior secondary, and the curriculum.
• How admission works — the steps, in order, with dates if you have them.
• Fees — even if only "fees on request", say something. Silence here loses enquiries.
• Contact — address, phone numbers people actually answer, an email address, office hours.

Then the photographs, which matter more than any design decision on this page. Take them yourself, on a good phone, on a bright day:

• The building from outside, with the sign visible.
• A real class in progress — pupils working, not posing.
• The laboratory, the library, the field, the bus.
• A clean portrait of the head teacher.

3. Step two — choose a domain

Your address on the internet: greenfieldacademy.com.ng. Pick something a parent can spell after hearing it once, and avoid hyphens and filler words.

For Nigerian schools the realistic options are .com.ng (cheapest, most familiar), .sch.ng (says "school", usually still available) and .ng (short, premium). .edu.ng is restricted to tertiary institutions and is not open to you.

One rule above all others: the domain must be registered in the school's name, not in the name of whoever builds the site. We have written about why that matters and what each ending costs in more detail.

4. Step three — pick a design

Two questions decide this, and neither is "which looks nicest on my laptop":

• Does it work on a phone? Most of your parents will never see the site on anything else. Open any candidate on your own phone before you decide.
• Does it show what you have? A design built around ten staff portraits looks broken when you have three. Pick one that suits the content you gathered in step one.

Beyond that, taste is taste. Schools tend to overthink the design and underthink the photographs, when the photographs are what a parent actually looks at.

5. Step four — put the content in

With step one done properly, this is an afternoon's typing. A few things worth doing while you are there:

• Write for a parent, not for an inspector. "We offer a rounded education" says nothing. "Thirty years in Ikeja, 420 pupils, a 1:18 teacher ratio" says a great deal.
• Put the phone number where a thumb can reach it. The commonest thing a parent does on a school site is try to call.
• Say the fees position plainly, whatever it is.
• Do not publish pupils' full names beside their photographs, and get consent for the photographs you do use.

6. Step five — school email

If your school still writes to parents from a Gmail address, this step is worth more than the website itself. office@greenfieldacademy.com.ng reads as a real institution; greenfieldschools2019@gmail.com does not.

Technically it means four DNS records on your domain — MX (where mail is delivered), SPF and DKIM (proof it is really you) and DMARC (what to do with forgeries). Get them wrong and your mail lands in spam or bounces. Get them right and it simply works, on any phone.

Either use a provider that writes those records for you, or budget an hour with someone who knows what they are doing. Do not leave it half-configured — half-configured is worse than Gmail.

7. Step six — fee payments

Optional, and transformative for the bursary. The normal Nigerian arrangement — parents transfer to an account and send a screenshot to WhatsApp — costs somebody hours of reconciliation every term and produces arguments no one can settle.

A payment gateway puts a Pay button on the site, settles into the school's own account, and gives both sides a receipt with a reference. The details, including what each gateway charges, are in our guide on collecting school fees online.

8. Step seven — publish and register with Google

Publishing does not put you on Google. This is where most Nigerian school websites quietly fail: they exist, they look fine, and they cannot be found by anyone who does not already know the address.

You need to register the site with Google Search Console, prove you own it, and submit a sitemap — a list of your pages. Then create a Google Business Profile for the physical school, so you appear on Maps when a parent searches for schools nearby. We cover both in getting your school found on Google.

9. What it costs

Honest ranges for a Nigerian school, per year:

The trap is the one-off build. A ₦400,000 website with nobody paid to maintain it is a ₦400,000 website that is out of date within a year — and quoting it back at the person who approved it is uncomfortable for everyone. A smaller recurring cost that includes someone keeping the lights on usually ends better.

10. The part nobody plans for — keeping it alive

Most Nigerian school websites are abandoned within two terms. The pattern is always the same: everyone is excited at launch, one person becomes "the website person", that person gets busy, and by the second term the latest news is eight months old. A parent reading a 2023 announcement concludes the school is disorganised — which is worse than having no website.

Three things prevent it, and none of them are technical:

• Name the person and put it in their job description. "Whoever has time" means nobody.
• Make it five minutes, not an afternoon. If posting a photograph means emailing a developer, it will not happen. The person who takes the photograph should be able to publish it.
• Tie it to the calendar you already keep. Resumption, mid-term, PTA, inter-house sports, closing. Those are your posts, and you already know the dates.

A school site with eight honest posts a year and current term dates beats a beautiful one frozen in 2023, every time.