A model for your school website

Selecting the right web site technology for your school is an important undertaking. The expectation of being able to find things "on-line" is so pervasive now in our culture that not being able to do so is simply unacceptable. And with respect to a Charter School, it is essential to good governance and school administration.

Building a website is not that difficult anymore. There are many hosting companies that actually install website building software right into your hosting account. All you have to do is fill in a few blanks, check a few boxes, add a couple of pictures, and you have a website…. well sort of. What you end up with is a few pictures, a paragraph or two about your school, a contact us page, and maybe directions to your location.

Sadly, there are still administrators that believe this is adequate. And while I respect their opinions, my opinion is that is wholly inadequate, for a number of reasons I will discuss in this article.

Putting up a website that will serve your Charter School is important because it can actually reduce the cost of administration when designed correctly. In order for this to happen, your school website needs to be more than just a few pictures, a paragraph, a map, and a telephone number. A successful website implementation can save countless hours of phone calls, emails, sticky notes, and personal interruptions. And if I were the teacher, I would make every administrator write that last statement on the chalk board 50 times!

However, the fundamental challenge in deploying a useful website boils down to one simple problem…. Managing content! In every case, the addition, modification, and removal (archiving) of content on your website is always more difficult and time consuming than publishing it in the original instance. I cannot overstate the importance of understanding this principal.

You can manage your School Website without spending thousands of dollars for its construction or administration. Once setup, this can be done using Open Source (meaning free) software, an internet browser, and literally thousands of plug-ins (optional features) that are also free.

If you can type, create a digital image, or produce media such as video and music, you can create an impressive website that will serve your school in a multitude of ways.

Here is a list of the important content that should be on your school website and a few ideas of how it might work for you:

• Academic Information: Curriculum, homework, student resources, and classroom management information are specific to not only a given grade, but often a specific teacher within that grade. Each teacher can easily logon to a content driven site and upload her lesson plans, homework, suggested study materials (links), and other relevant information to help students succeed.
• Contact Information: School, administrators, staff, and support organizations all have contact requirements. These are often static (not changing) but can change if individuals leave, go on vacation, change roles, etc. And why would you fail to have a robust map on your website? This simple tool will help you avoid hours spent giving directions. While you are at it, ensure your site is mobile phone friendly for the growing number of users that rely on PDA or mobile browsers; they can look at your map while they are enroute.
• Legal Information: Disclosures, public hearing notifications, meeting and legal notes are often required by law. If it takes days or weeks to get a page added to your existing website, instead of a few minutes, you are not providing adequate notification to you community.
• News Information: Events, clubs, PTO, recognitions, school closings, calendars, etc. This list is almost endless, and the requirements are diverse and very time sensitive. Giving each organization their own "page" on the website and the authority to update it as often as possible will greatly improve the process of being involved by your volunteers.
• Policy Information: Enrollment, attendance, discipline, rules, handbooks, dress codes, approved vendors, etc. should all be easily found on your website preferably by a site specific search engine. Typing a few "keywords" should be all the effort required of site visitors to find the information they need.

As you can see, some of this information is static and relatively unchanging, such as policy information and contact information. But the rest can be very dynamic with additions to content occurring almost every day. And without a full time technical person to add content to your website, it would quickly become out of date and your users will not remained engaged; that is unless you have a content management system as the underlying technology running your website. This is where "distributive authoring" comes into play. And this is a crucial concept that needs to be understood, especially at the leadership level of the organization.

Distributive authoring is giving the key stakeholders in your organization the authority, training, and vision of this key role and then giving them the needed tools to publish material relative to their area of responsibility. In other words it is allocating a large task to a group of individuals in order to keep the size of the task manageable. In order for this to occur, you must first designate a group of individuals to take the lead in this process. And based upon my experience, unless the Principal or other key administrator is leading this team it will not be an effective effort.

The technology of which I am most familiar is Joomla, another is Word Press. They are both Open Source solutions which have no licensing fees. There is also Microsoft Sharepoint Technology (not free). These programs are widely adopted, have a worldwide user base, and excellent reliability and stability. There are other programs as well. Do a simple Google search for "Content Management Systems" and see for yourself.

If you are a School Administrator and have failed to implement this sort of technology for your school, you are in my opinion lacking the leadership and vision needed to make fundamental improvements in your organization. Information is power. Empowering students, enabling teachers, and providing administrative efficiency is the responsibility of every Charter School Administrator. And improving your website technology may be the very most important step you take to accomplish this goal. Next week we will discuss social media and how to manage it in conjunction with your website.