.SCHOOL Domain Extension

Why choose a .SCHOOL domain?

This is the most concrete word in the family: a school is a building, a yard, a time it opens and a time it closes. And here is what people forget: the site’s first audience is not the pupil, it is the parent. They are the ones looking for term dates, the kit list, the time of the evening, the policy when the weather closes everything. A school website is first of all a piece of family logistics.

The building

Address, entrances, parking, drop-off, coach access. Elementary, and still the leading source of confusion every September.

The calendar

Term dates, inset days, reports, parents’ evenings. The most-visited information of the year, always looked for at the last minute.

The parent

Uniform, absence, lunches, after-school club, closure in bad weather. Write for somebody reading at seven in the morning, standing in a kitchen.

The staff

Leadership, teachers, support staff, vacancies. Knowing who to contact prevents a great many emails sent to the wrong person.

The other sense

Driving school, dance school, music school, school of thought. The word reaches well beyond the state system, and so does the suffix.

What it actually changes

• It names a place, not a field. That is what separates it from .education, which names the sector, and .academy, which needs no building at all.
• It serves well beyond formal schooling. Driving, dance, diving: the word is free and applies everywhere.
• No registration restrictions. No teaching licence or accreditation to show the registrar.
• It works as an email address too. office@stlawrence.school is said over the phone without spelling.