Maintaining a successful school web site

Keep it small

Corporations and large non-profits have teams dedicated to planning and managing their web sites. Even with that committment they can find that keeping the content they want online organized and usable to be daunting. Given that the average school web master might spend an hour a week on the web site, expectations must be in line with what is realistic.

A single page that has up to date contact and event information along with some basic information about the school is far more useful and practical than 30 pages of content that are not maintained well. Consider what must be on your web site and think twice (or thrice) about anything else that you put up.

Dress Code

Within a school building there may be multiple dress codes. General staff may be able to wear a smart-casual dress code while administrators conform to more business-casual dress code.

Similarly, while teacher web sites may have pretty loose standards and often be pretty ornate, the school web site is an extension of the school office and should be much more restrained. It is not a school web site’s job to entertain and please but rather to inform and establish or maintain credibility.

Assign Responsibility

If you find yourself posting more than a page or two, you will likely find that no one person can adequately care for the site. Identify the people in your organization that have an interest in the content on your web site and enlist them in keeping it up to date. If folks are only responsible for keeping a page or two of content that they care about up to date, things will be maintained more faithfully.

Look for ways to extend what is already being done onto the web

If you already have mechanisms in place for collecting stuff for a weekly newsletter, consider how that can simply be expanded into posting that information online. If somebody is already maintaining a calendar of events for the school, see if that person can maintain the online calendar at the same time. Who updates the marquee on the front lawn? That would be great information to be displayed simlarly on the web site.

Look for ways that your school already communicates and let the web site be an aggregation of those methods.

Identify your audience

Far too often, things get posted on web sites with no real consideration of why it is being put online or who for. Identifying who you are speaking to with your web site can help you focus your message and speak clearly to those you are addressing.

Here is a methodology I use in establishing my audience.

First, what are the general types of folks that might visit my site? You might start inside your building and consider your staff and students. Outside of the building your audience may include parents, community members and families that are potentially moving into the area.

Once this has been established, you need to consider how you will sculpt your web site to fit these audiences. I like to imagine how members of each of these groups would be greeted at the front door of the school. Who would pass by with only a smile knowing that they knew what they were after and were they were going and who would be stopped, talked to and shown to the office for a more formal welcome? With this in mind it makes it pretty easy to craft the front page with a message that is for those people that are least familiar with your school. The front page becomes a place that establishes the creditiblity and message of your school and not necessarily the one-stop shop that it often becomes on web sites where the natural inclination with all things important is to ‘put it on the front page’. Off of your front page, you can create areas for other groups to find what they are after. Create a page for parents and another for students. Create a place for staff information (or choose to keep internal matters off the site altogether and put them in your school section of Docushare).

Now, when you are putting something on a page of your site, you can ask yourself “is this the audience that I’m trying to reach?”

Post what is necessary, save what isn’t

When web sites aren’t updated regularly and information gets old, site maintainers can start to get desparate and just start posting anything. With your audience in mind, put yourself in their shoes (or ask them!) what information they are after. Focus on putting content online that is really useful to and welcomed by the audiences you are addressing.

If you aren’t sure why you are putting it online, then don’t. Also, be concise in what you put online. You might have video and 100 photos from a recent event. You could spend a day formatting that content in a way that was satisfactory to you and the results may not be much more effective than if you had chosen one great photo and put it up with some good text.

Be what people expect

I’m sure you’ve been to a web site where you couldn’t find anything you were after. You went to the web site with expectations of what you would find and you were disappointed when they were not met. What do people expect when they come to your web site? Are they just looking for a phone number to call your office? Are they looking for your address because they need to drive there or are just wondering where your school is? Are they wanting to email one of your staff? These are all things that are reasonable to assume that somebody visiting a school site are interested in. It can be very frustrating then for a visitor when they have to wade through a page of distracting colors, animations and information they have no interest in to get something that should be very easy.

Consider what is expected by visitors of your site and do those things very well. Everything else is either bonus or a distraction.

Be kind

Nobody is reaching out of the computer screen to give a handshake and a smile to the person visiting. Use text that greets, comforts and directs people that are new to your site. “Welcome”, “Please” and “Thank You” have their place on web sites too.

Updated June 19, 2017