| CREATING SCHOOL WEBSITES |
Creating a school website
Many schools see the benefit of a school website; however a school website done badly can be worse than no website at all.
There a number of decisions to make before you start and of course it is worth looking at what other schools are doing.
Why do we want a website? Value and share children’s work, advertise the work of the school, inform parents? Inform prospective parents. Vehicle for children’s writing? Etc.
A key decision to make is whether the site will be static or dynamic.
Static
This essentially a web based copy of the school prospectus and provides information, contact details etc and is generally updated once a year with the prospectus.
Dynamic
This site represents a vibrant web presence for the school and need to be updated on a regular basis. If visitors arrive three times and there is nothing new it tends to be a long time before they come back again. There is nothing worse than a site that pretends to be dynamic and goes for months without any updates.
Consider also how the school website will function in relation to a learning platform. This relationship is becomming ever more important.
The next questions also need answering early in the process.
Do you want to create your website using a CMS (Content management System)? This is a template based system which while it limits the degree of flexibility a little, does make it easier for lots of staff to add material. Cumbria/ CLEO have their own CMS which is based on the Lancashire version. Information can be found at http://www.cumbriagfl.org.uk/index.php?category_id=213 including a download of the user guide.
OR
Do you want to create your website from scratch? This gives much more flexibility but involves someone creating each individual page and can make it more difficult to enable all staff to contribute material.
Editors
Websites can be created by writing the code – few people do this but some snippets are actually worth knowing.
WYSIWYG (Whizzywig) editors – What you see is what you get – these allow you to create pages in similar fashion to using Word. They need a certain amount of manual work to make it all stick together and the process is hard to distribute. Examples of this are Dreamweaver, Front page – they are powerful and have an associated cost. Free editors are available such as Sea Monkey or KompoZer.
A good listing is available at http://www.thefreecountry.com/webmaster/htmleditors.shtml
You may have Front page included as part of an MS Office suite.
Adobe Contribute
This is our preferred software at present. It combines the two main elements of creating the webpage and also uploading it to the website in one package. It also allows any number of other people to publish and update their own pages. It sends the technical details for uploading to each user in an encrypted form so they neither have to do anything too ‘tecchy’ nor does the secure password etc have to be shared. This application edits pages ‘on the fly’, it downloads the page, allows you to make changes and sends the new version back up. If you can use word, you can use Contribute.
Skills / knowledge/tips
It is helpful if any contributing staff are familiar with the use of Word or similar including the insertion of photographs.
Most digital cameras images will need to be made smaller before adding to a website. The minimum way of doing this is with free software such as Irfanview or using the free MS Powertoy - ‘Image Resizer’. Best way is with Photoshop Elements or similar.
There is a need to understand the concept of ‘links’ and of making navigation straightforward.
Keep accessibility in mind for those with sight impairment.
Adding extra stuff
You may wish to add other media apart from pictures. It is straightforward to add movies, Powerpoints, slideshows to your site. There is a good listing of the tools needed on the Staveley website under Free Stuff.
See also Writing Webpages on the Staveley School site
Final word
Keep it simple – avoid garish colours, fancy fonts and things that flash, spin or move.