School Websites

oxygene

oxygene

oxygene

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Hi guys!
So I've recently gotten myself a step on the ladder for an IT career and I'm very excited... its for a technician at a school (I'm the only IT guy there so its great), but one of the things they mentioned to me in the interview is they were looking at revamping their website.
Now what I was wondering is, beyond looking through every school website in the country one by one, does anyone here know of a school site they looked at and thought "hmm thats really good", something easy to use for adults and kids, clear, intuitive, etc.
Ideally not in Flash though as I have no experiance with that!
 

K.C. Leblanc

K.C. Leblanc

K.C. Leblanc

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The edugeek.net forums would be well worth a look.

Also think of your own workload, it's not just a question of designing a site. You also have to make sure that the content is upto date and interesting. It's important that you have a site that the muggles can update. It's also important that management understand this and make sure content is being added quickly by the right person and not just dumped on your desk. For instance there is probably someone at the school he's responsible for maintaining a central calender of events. It should be their responsibility to keep the calender on the website up to date, not yours.

I would start by researching content management systems. Wordpress is the most popular, Concrete 5 is also well regarded.

EDIT: Also it's education, so there will a specialist product out there. It'll cost the earth, look like it was made in 1995 and at least one member of the school's management team will believe the salesman when he say's it's the best product on earth.
 
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oxygene

oxygene

oxygene

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Yeah they use wordpress currently, and one person is in charge of keeping that updated. So it would more likely be a case of me designing the framework and templates for them to work within!
That website looks very handy, This is my first foray in to my chosen IT career path so I'm not familiar with any of the resources tbh.
 

mtalk

mtalk

mtalk

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I will suggest you to try moodle as they are the best CMS application for educational websites for kids and adults.
 

cats_five

cats_five

cats_five

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Since they are already used to using Wordpress to keep it up-to-date I'd stick with that. As to what should change, they might already have some ideas. Have a look at the stats to see what the most popular pages are and make sure they are easy to access. Unfortunately you don't know what pages people have bookmarked, but probably the popular ones, so either don't change their URLs or make sure they redirect the viewer on to the new URL.
 
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