For schools, a functional, engaging website is essential for communicating with parents, students, and the wider community. But what seems like a simple service agreement with a school website provider can often turn into a financial nightmare due to hidden, unexpected charges.
Many schools sign up for what appears to be a reasonable package, only to discover later that simple tasks are subject to punitive fees. It’s time to shine a light on these practices so your budget doesn’t suffer an unnecessary drain.
Hidden Charges for Small Brand Changes
Your school’s brand identity is crucial, and maintaining it should not be a costly exercise. Unfortunately, many providers treat the simplest updates as major development projects.
Imagine needing to adjust your primary school colour from navy blue to royal blue, or perhaps changing the font size on a navigation bar. These are minor CSS adjustments that take minutes for a professional developer. However, many school website providers will charge a minimum service fee, often billed by the hour, for tasks that are little more than administrative updates.
- Colour Changes: A simple refresh of your brand’s colour palette can trigger a service fee.
- Adding New Elements: Want to add a simple counter or a new testimonials section that uses existing code? Expect a charge.
- Creativity and Layout Adjustments: Introducing a slight design change to a page layout鈥攑erhaps moving an image from the left to the right鈥攕hould be straightforward. When it requires the provider to log into the backend and make the change for you, you’re opening the door to a charge.
These charges often rely on the fact that schools are not given full, easy access to their own website’s core code or content management system (CMS), forcing them to rely on the provider for simple changes.
The Cost of Adding New Features
While major feature development is rightly chargeable, many providers charge substantial integration fees for elements that should be standard or easily plug-and-play. This often includes:
- Linking to a new third-party service (e.g., a new sports booking system).
- Adding a simple blog or news section that wasn’t included in the original template.
- Integrating social media feeds.
Always read your contract for what is included in the “standard” package and what qualifies as a “custom development request.” The line can be blurred to the provider’s financial advantage.
are easily added into realsmart school websites via a plugin any site admin can access.
The Migration Trap: Fees for Leaving
One of the most significant, and often hidden costs comes when a school decides to move to a new platform or provider.
This is the “exit fee” in disguise. School website providers know that if they make the process of leaving prohibitively expensive, schools will stay simply because they cannot afford the move.
Data and Content Export Fees
The content you created your text, images, documents, and news archives is your property. Yet, providers frequently charge hefty fees to “prepare,” “export,” or “release” your data. This process, which can often be automated or completed quickly, is manually extended and heavily charged for, ranging from hundreds to thousands of currency units.
Domain Transfer and Hostage
In some worst case scenarios, providers will make the domain name transfer difficult or charge excessive fees to release control of the school’s domain (e.g., yourschoolname.org). Always ensure your school legally owns and has administrative access to its domain name, separate from the website hosting agreement.
What about realsmart?
At realsmart we have no hidden costs, we don’t charge for changes to your brand, tweaks to pages or integrations with 3rd Parties. We don’t charge any exit fees, we don’t charge to move you over to newer platforms and access to our support team is also free.
Need some training? We will happily jump on a call, again no charge. Looking to move away to another provider? No exit fees to get an export of your posts and pages.
You may be thinking why do we not charge fees for some of these services if other providers do charge? Well we simply don’t believe you should be charged, it’s as simple as that. We form partnerships with our clients and if you leave we always want to leave that door open with a good previous experience.