Get more parents to visit your Preschool
Help families in Japan find your school.
Create a preschool or kindergarten homepage that instills trust, shows up in search results, and stays up-to-date.
"I know they would join, if they would just come in for a visit."
Preschools and kindergartens are busy places, and updating your homepage might not be your biggest priority.
It's time to get help from a partner experienced in early childhood education in Japan and knows what parents and search engines look for in a homepage.
Get seen by more parents today.
Get the right kind of attention, by having a well designed and organized school site.
We will work with you at every step, to ensure that your schools unique identity shines, while polishing up the rough spots.
Help, in Japanese or English, is always an email or phone call away.
Apply for a site or website review.
We start to work on your new site.
We work with you to organize, refine your school information, and build a new site for your school.
Know that your site is up-to-date, showing up in search engine results, and is helping new families find your school.
Why Sites for Schools?
All schools need the help of a dedicated web and marketing professionals, but don't need it all the time. I started Sites for Schools as a way to support more schools.
I have worked with international preschools and kindergartens in Japan for over eighteen years and see their value for children, families, and the community. But I also see many schools whose online presence doesn't reflect the value of the school.
Larger schools have dedicated marketing and IT staff, which is fantastic. I want to share those same skills and resources, in the right amounts, for a fair price, to help independent schools get more students.
Our success relies on helping schools do more to grow. I hope schools grow enough to outgrow our services and have their own dedicated web/marketing staff.
Until then, Sites for Schools is ready to help.
I believe that a business or a school should have strong values and reflect those values. Transparency, honesty, and respect are some of the values that lead our growth. We try to be clear about costs, expectations, and responsibilities.
Sites for Schools offers a very focused service for a small group of schools, but we hope you let us be a part of your team and your success. I hope you will use us and grow with us.
Thank you,
Kenji Szczepanski
Why not Wordpress, Wix, or Squarespace?
Why not Wordpress, Wix, or Squarespace?Wordpress is a great system that has been around a long time. Squarespace and Wix are convenient and low-cost.
But they have their drawbacks.
Wordpress is a free, open-source system that you host on your own server. With that low cost comes the burden of constantly updating the build and your templates. For what a small school needs from a homepage, the cost of lost time and/or missing updates equals fewer students.
Squarespace and Wix sell a really great idea. Both let you get up and running quickly, but there is a lot of unnecessary code that you don't see. The tradeoff of their ease of use and low price is poor performance.
Working with a designer/developer who will manage all the hosting details and updates, and can provide a custom design, maintenance, and support is the best way to move forward with your school.
Should my page be in English or Japanese?
Deciding the majority language of your homepage is a decision that needs to reflect your school community and audience.
Although search engines are now good at figuring out your site's language, several methods in code and site structure will let you be in greater control.
Will you host our site?
At Sites for Schools homepages are all hosted by us. Hosting allows us to use our library of licensed resources like fonts and images. It also allows us to update and maintain your sites quickly.
We use Google Firebase and Webflow depending on the needs of your site.
Hosting in our system allows us to use licensed fonts and images without charging you for each
resource separately.
If you eventually outgrow our service we will help you move your domain
to a new server. Please remember, that although we will host your domain, your school's
domain, content, and branding are always 100% yours.
Do I need to track analytics or worry about SEO?
Yes.
It is important to track certain metrics and it is vital to tailor your sites format and content to do well with SEO.
SEO, which means "search engine optimization", is the practice of preparing a web pages content, structure, and backend-code, to ensure that it is correctly indexed by search engines. A site with good SEO practices will have a greater chance of being in SERPs (search engine results pages) for their target audience.
SEO is organic, meaning it is based on the contents of the site, and does not rely on paid advertising to get views, and improves discoverability across different search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, or Baidu.