Have you ever thought about who visits your school district’s home page? If you are like most school or district leaders, you probably assume that the home page is the most visited page by your parents, students, and staff as a stepping off point for information for which they are most interested, such as the lunch menu, a link to staff or student email, assignment information or for grades.

But if you look at your website analytics, you may be surprised. My colleagues and I find that in most cases, students, parents, and staff have bookmarks to the web pages where they most frequent.

Therefore, when you review site statistics, you may be surprised to learn that most of your visitors to your home page are not your parents, staff, and students, but people from outside the district, including, most notably, parents who are considering moving into your district.

With that in mind, try to remember to test assumptions about your stakeholders and how they inform themselves. For your website, this is made easy with tools like Google Analytics.

As it specifically relates to your website, make your homepage a key piece of your marketing plan for external audiences.