A school’s English-language website is the first place every potential partner and every international learner looks, often even before making direct contact.
The common problem is not that a school lacks an English version, but that the version translates only the general introduction and skips exactly the sections international readers need.
This article sets out ten essential sections, ranked in order of priority for when resources are limited.
What international readers are looking for
Before discussing content, it helps to understand three groups of readers and their different purposes.
Potential partners. They are assessing whether the school is worth partnering with. What they care about is scale, accreditation status, areas of strength, and who the contact person is.
International learners. They are looking for programmes, admission requirements, costs, and how to apply.
Domestic learners researching the school’s international activities. This group is rarely thought of but is real, and they are looking for information about exchange opportunities.
The three groups need three different sets of content, and the website should clearly separate these paths from the homepage rather than mixing them together.
The ten essential sections
One: a short introduction with figures. Not a passage about tradition, but scale, founding year, institution type, and main fields of training, with specific figures.
Two: accreditation status. Which body grants accreditation, and at what scope. This is the first thing partners check, and it is also the section most often missing from the English version.
Three: programme catalogue. Programme names in English, level of study, duration, and most importantly, the language of instruction for each programme.
Four: admission requirements for international learners. Complete, including language requirements and prerequisite subjects.
Five: costs. Tuition fees with the unit and academic year specified, other mandatory charges, and an estimate of living costs.
Six: application guidance. Step by step, with timelines and a list of required documents.
Seven: information on existing international activities. Active partnerships, exchange programmes, and joint activities already underway.
Eight: contact point. The department name, the title of the person in charge, an email address under the school’s own domain, and the working language.
Nine: practical information. Housing, local cost of living, and what learners need to know upon arrival.
Ten: a downloadable institutional profile. A file that partners can save and share internally.
Order of priority when resources are limited
If all ten sections cannot be built at once, the order below gives the highest value per unit of effort.
Do first: sections two, three, four, five, and eight. These five sections answer most of the questions asked by both partners and learners, and they are all short pieces of content.
Do next: sections six and ten. These two sections sharply reduce the volume of inquiry emails the school has to answer.
Do later: sections one, seven, and nine. These three sections matter but can be filled in gradually.
Worth noting: section one, the introduction, is in practice often the only section that gets done, even though it falls in the lowest-priority group. The reason is that it is the easiest to translate, whereas the other sections require gathering data.
The school’s English-language website and translation quality
Three principles determine how credible the page is.
Do not use machine translation that has not been reviewed. Readers notice immediately, and that affects their assessment of the school as a whole. For a page whose purpose is international cooperation, this is not a detail to cut corners on.
Keep terminology consistent. Programme names, department names, and job titles must be translated consistently across the entire site and in every other document. Discrepancies between sources cause problems when learners use the information for official procedures.
There should be an internal glossary, and everyone doing translation should use the same one.
Translate for readers unfamiliar with the Vietnamese context. Many concepts obvious to domestic readers are hard to understand for outsiders: how education levels are classified, what different types of institutions are called, how the academic year is counted. A brief explanation is needed rather than a word-for-word translation.
Mistakes that make the page worthless
The English version has only a handful of pages while the Vietnamese version has hundreds. Readers immediately understand that the English section is there only for show.
Links that lead back to the Vietnamese pages. The reader clicks a section and lands on content they cannot read.
Thông tin cũ. Tuition figures from three years ago, a programme list that is no longer accurate, or the name of a contact person who has since moved on.
No update date. Readers cannot tell whether the information is still current.
A contact address that no one answers. This is the worst mistake, because it turns a good impression into a bad one. If there is no one to respond, it is better not to publish the address at all.
A download file that is too large or broken. The reader tries once and gives up.
How to maintain it with little effort
An English-language website that is not kept updated does more harm than having none at all. Four ways to keep it accurate.
Limit the scope. Ten pages that are always up to date are better than a hundred stale ones. Schools should choose a scope that matches their real capacity to maintain it.
Attach the update task to an existing process. When a new tuition rate is issued, updating the English page should be a step within that process, not something remembered afterward.
Note the update date on every page. This helps readers and also helps the school itself spot pages that have gone untouched for a long time.
Assign one person responsible. This need not be a full-time role, just one person with a clearly defined duty and the authority to request data from other departments.
Reviewing the entire page once a year, ahead of the enrollment season, is the minimum cadence to maintain.
Content worth having that few schools bother with
The three items below are not mandatory but make a clear difference.
A page dedicated to potential partners. Stating clearly which fields the school wants to partner in, in what form, and what it can contribute. A page like this saves many rounds of initial back-and-forth.
Stories from international learners who have studied there. With their consent, and these should be real stories with specific details rather than generic praise.
Information on the context of Vietnam’s education system. A short page explaining the levels of the education system and how they convert helps partners place the school correctly. Comparative data across systems from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) can be linked so readers can look further into it themselves.
For content related to degree recognition, it is best to link directly to the framework of The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) rather than making claims of recognizability on one’s own.
Choosing a standalone page versus a bilingual version
Two ways to organize this, each suited to different circumstances.
A separate English-language site. With its own structure and content, not a translation of the Vietnamese site.
The advantage is that content is written specifically for international readers, with an entirely different order of priority. The drawback is having to maintain two separate content systems.
A bilingual version on the same structure. Each page has two language versions.
The advantage is that it is easy to keep in sync. The drawback is that a structure designed for domestic readers is often not suited to the needs of international readers.
For most schools, the sensible approach is a hybrid: a dedicated area for international readers with the ten sections described above, plus a bilingual version for other important pages.
What to avoid is translating the entire Vietnamese site into English. This approach takes the most effort, is the hardest to maintain, and the result is usually a long page where international readers still cannot find what they need.
How to test the page
The most effective way to test it costs nothing.
Ask a foreigner who knows nothing about the school to try reading it and answer five questions: where is this school, how big is it, what fields does it teach, how much is tuition, and who to contact.
If they cannot answer within five minutes, the page needs to be reorganized.
Send a question yourself to the published contact address and time the response. This is the same number every reader is experiencing.
Test it on a phone. In many markets, most readers access the internet mainly on a phone, and many pages display poorly on small screens.
Click through every link. This takes half a day and usually turns up many broken links or links that lead back to Vietnamese content.
Measuring how well the page performs
Three simple metrics show whether the page is serving its purpose.
The number of inquiry emails asking about information already on the page. If many people still ask about tuition even though the page publishes it, the information is hard to find.
Which page gets the most views. The results are often surprising and show what readers are actually interested in, which differs from the school’s assumptions.
The number of downloads of the institutional profile. An indicator of serious interest from partners.
These three metrics require no complex tools and should be reviewed every quarter.
A fourth metric worth tracking if measurable: the rate at which visitors leave right after the landing page. A high figure usually means the landing page fails to answer the reader’s most basic question.
Summary
A school’s English-language website should include ten sections, of which the five highest priorities are accreditation status, the programme catalogue, admission requirements, costs, and the contact point.
The general introduction, which is the only section built at most schools, actually falls in the lowest-priority group.
And the most important principle is to limit the scope to what can be maintained: ten pages that are always current are worth far more than a hundred stale ones.
Next Steps
Ask someone who knows nothing about your school to read the English page for five minutes and answer the five questions listed above.
The questions they cannot answer are exactly your to-do list, and it is usually much shorter than a project to rebuild the entire website.
