A Website for a Language School or Private Tutor: Filling Groups Before the Term Starts
Late August, and the phone rings for the seventh time today. A mother asks whether there are still places in the group for her thirteen-year-old and how much the course costs. You give her the figure, hear “thanks, I’ll think about it”, and never hear from her again. In the evening you paste the same paragraph about prices into four separate messages, and at 22:00 somebody asks on Facebook whether you run German for adults.
The school across town fields far fewer of those calls this week, because its prices, group timetables and a sign-up form all sit on its website. A parent checks everything at 21:30, fills in a few fields, and by morning you have an enquiry with the child’s name, school year and preferred days. This article is about what actually has to be on the site of a language school or a private tutor so that sign-ups keep coming in while you are in the middle of a lesson.
Three people, three completely different questions
It looks like one service, but the decision is made by three different people who are looking for different things.
A parent is buying for a child. They want to know who will teach the group, when lessons finish, how far the bus stop is and whether a missed class after an illness can be made up. Price matters, but it loses to the feeling that the child is in good hands.
An adult buying for themselves has other worries. Will they look foolish next to a group that speaks better. Can they start from zero after twenty years away from the language. Does a 19:00 class clash with nursery pick-up. Will they lose their money if work sends them abroad for a fortnight.
A company buying for its staff thinks in administrative terms: an invoice with payment terms, classes on site or online, an attendance report for HR. Someone writing from a company address wants to work out in two minutes whether you are easy to deal with.
The conclusion is simple: these deserve three separate pages, each written in the language of its reader. A single catch-all “Our offer” page speaks to everyone at once and lands with nobody. The general rules for writing those pages are in our piece on what to write on a business website.
A level is not yet an offer
A table running from A1 to C1 means something to a teacher and nothing to the parent of a thirteen-year-old. People do not search for “B2 course”. They search for “English tutoring for the final school exam”, “German for adults from scratch Kielce”, “Spanish conversation classes online”.
So build the offer around goals and leave the level as a detail inside the description. Every goal deserves its own page with specifics: how many hours the course runs, where the syllabus ends in June, what the student can actually do by then. Add one sentence about how you assess someone’s level at the start, because that is the first real obstacle to signing up. A free online test or a fifteen-minute chat with a teacher removes the fear of landing in the wrong group.
Price: staying silent is not a negotiating advantage
“We don’t publish prices because we prefer to talk first” sounds reasonable until you count how many of those conversations end the moment you name the figure. The customer will learn the price anyway, only two phone calls later, having checked three other schools that published theirs straight away.
Give the numbers in the form people compare them in:
| Type of class | How to present the price | Example wording |
|---|---|---|
| Group course | per term, with the hourly rate worked out | PLN 1,890 for 60 lessons, which is PLN 31.50 per hour |
| One-to-one | per lesson, with the length stated | PLN 130 for 60 minutes at our place, PLN 150 if we travel to you |
| Pairs | per person | PLN 85 per person for 60 minutes |
| Corporate course | a range and what moves it | from PLN 4,500 per term for a group of up to 6, invoice at 14 days |
Those figures are an example of format, not a market rate card. Your prices come from your town and your costs, but the way you present them decides whether the customer understands what they are paying for. Next to the table, answer what people ask anyway: a sibling discount, monthly instalments, your cancellation rule, whether the coursebook is included.
Timetables and a sign-up somebody can complete at 22:00
A parent who knows the price but cannot tell whether the group for her son meets on Tuesdays or Thursdays still has to ring you. A timetable on the site ends that.
For each group, publish the level and age range, the day and time, the start date, the number of places left and the teacher’s first name. The count of free places both informs and gently nudges, because “3 places left” reads differently from silence. When a group fills up, update the entry instead of deleting it, because “full, next intake in January” is also an answer.
Make the sign-up itself a form rather than an invitation to call. Ask only for what you need to get back in touch and place the student: name, age or school year, the goal of the classes, the level or a plain “not sure, please test me”, preferred days, phone and email. The enquiry has to land in your inbox immediately so you can call back the same day. How to build a form people finish is covered in our piece on the contact form that actually gets enquiries.
Teachers with names
“Qualified staff with years of experience” is a sentence every school in the country has on its website, so it now means nothing. Replace it with short profiles: first name, surname, what they teach, how long they have worked with that age group, one human sentence about how they run a lesson. An ordinary photo taken by a window beats anything from a stock library.
For children’s classes, answer the question a parent will not ask out loud: does the same teacher stay with the group all year, and who covers a sick day. A tutor working alone can be honest about what they do not teach, and a line like “I don’t take children under ten” saves both sides a phone call.
Online and in person are two different searches
Someone searching for “online English conversation evening classes” and someone searching for “language school Rzeszów for kids” live in different worlds. Putting both offers on one page means neither answers its query well.
For in-person classes, give the address, the floor, public transport, parking and the neighbourhoods your students usually come from. For online, say which platform you use, whether lessons are recorded and what students get between classes. Online removes the geographic limit, so people from the other end of the country can reach you, but only if there is something for them to find. The local half of that puzzle is explained in our piece on local SEO for a small business.
The school year is built into demand
This industry has the most predictable calendar of any service. August and September are the peak of enrolment. January brings a second wave: new year resolutions and parents reacting to first-term grades. February and March belong to exam preparation, July to holiday intensive courses.
The conclusion is about timing, not content. An article on preparing for a language exam in three months makes sense published in November, because it has time to be found. The same article posted in April waits a year. That is why a website should not stop at launch day. With Sitario, once the site is live the system writes posts based on what people in your area actually search for, leaves a short weekly summary in your dashboard saying what came of it, and the fixes it suggests go live with one click.
Where a site like this comes from
There are three routes: a freelancer, assembling it yourself on a website builder, or the done-for-you model, where you describe the school in a form and look at a finished site about an hour later. At Sitario the Start plan costs PLN 249 once, including the first year of hosting; you pay after seeing the finished site, and if you do not accept it you get your money back. The domain is registered in your name, so it is yours from day one, and renewal only starts in year two, at PLN 149 a year on Start. If you want to run a blog for seasonal searches straight away, the Business plan at PLN 399 includes 60,000 characters of posts. All the routes with their price ranges are compared in our piece on how much a business website costs.
When this is not for you
A tutor with a full roster of students who come by word of mouth and no wish for more does not need a website. A Google Business Profile and a phone are enough.
It is also not worth building until the offer exists on paper rather than in your head. A school teaching six languages while also doing sworn translations, summer camps and nursery classes will produce a site about everything and nothing. Decide first where the money actually comes from.
The last case is a large school with its own booking system, online payments and a student portal. There an informational site is not enough, and you are better off talking to someone who will integrate with your existing system.
What to do this weekend
Write down the three courses you most want to sell this season and put a price and a group start date next to each. Ask two teachers for a photo and three sentences about themselves. Note the five questions that came up on the phone this week and treat them as your list of pages to write. That is the whole raw material for a site that will take the eighth August phone call for you.