Who is your audience?

This question is of fundamental importance in the design of any educational web site.  During the design of the site there are many issues that you must be concerned with.

Is bandwidth an issue? Will users be using fast or slow connections to the Internet? Perhaps you  expect a large proportion of your users to be using  slow connections and older browsers? Keep this in mind when you design your graphics and layout your  pages.

Large graphics and fancy plugins will lose  many of this audience. Attractive layouts which look fabulous in the latest browser version will be  ignored by older browsers and may even be so changed as to be unusable. If this is your target audience then you've wasted your time and theirs.

With some idea of who your audience will be you  can target your ideas and presentation to address their needs. If the user is looking for fast information perhaps a text only or text and minimal  graphics site is what you need.

However, you must not underestimate the "coolness" factor.  For web sites that target elementary age students the site probably needs to have some "cool" image or some pictures that the students relate to or find meaningful.  Again this is another issue that you and your client need to discuss.