School Sites

3 min read

A. Creating a school site: who does what?

In creating a school web site, decisions need to made early in the design process regarding who does what. Specifically:

1. Who administers the site? How easy is it to administer?
2. Who maintains the content on the site? How easy is the site to maintain?
3. Will users of the site be able to contribute content? If so, how will their rights to create and edit content differ from the official site maintainers?

Question 1. When I say "site administration" I imply some of the design elements, such as organization of content and visual layout of the elements on the page. Most schools have at least one (very overworked) IT professional with responsibilities that include overseeing the website. While site administration and design can be tricky, it is a very manageable task -- particularly if you emphasize function over flash. If a site administrator/designer does their planning ahead of time, they can guarantee a clean, simple, intuitive design. And, once the site is live, a well designed site is easier for a site admin to maintain.

And, solid organization -- with graphics that reinforce, rather than distract from that organization -- translates into a site that is easy to navigate. We will revisit this aspect of developing a school site in more detail in a later post when we talk specifically about content.

Question 2. This is the area where most school sites run into problems: site maintainers (ie, those who have sufficient priviliges to create new content, and edit and delete old content) are not sufficiently comfortable with how to maintain the site. If updating content is not sufficiently easy, the content on the site never changes, the site stagnates, and people stop using it. Using Drupal to maintain the content, combined with effective training, goes a long way toward empowering site maintainers to do their job well.

Question 3. If users will be given the right to create content, the scope of what they can create needs to be clearly delineated, and the content they create needs to play a meaningful role on the site. In short, user contributed content needs to be more than lip service. Examples that I have seen work include discussion forums regarding school club events, athletic events, and fundraisers.

In independent schools, some development directors and/or other administrators object to giving users the ability to create content that goes live on the school web site. Their concern centers around the possibility of a user posting inappropriate content that is then viewed by people both inside and outside the school community, thus damaging the school's reputation. This is a valid concern, and should be considered in light of the mission of the school and the purpose of the school site.

B. Next Steps.

As a next step in further clarifying what constitutes a good school site, please identify school sites that you think are particularly good. In your survey responses, please be as specific as you can. In a future blog post that will examine the content of school web sites, some of these submitted web sites will be used as case studies demonstrating what works.

Next: Class Sites