Maximizing the Potential of Your School's Website
By: Rob DiMartino
Simplify. Communicate. Engage.
That is my philosophy on Web site management for schools, period.
In this day and age, technology is ever changing, but your parents will always need information about their kids, whether it is directions to the baseball game, homework assignments, lunch menus or PTO meetings.
Simplify the way you manage your Web site. Communicate your message to your students, parents, faculty, alumni and community easily. Engage your audience to trust your Web site as the primary source of relevant timely information about every aspect of your school.
School Web sites have drastically progressed over the years. The average school Web site of yesteryear was a simple marketing brochure posted on the Web. Today's options include hiring a company to create and sustain your site, maintaining your Web site in-house after using a Web design firm, or purchasing Web-based content management and authoring tools that allow your entire school community to administer your site from any Internet connection.
The most versatile applications, combined with some Web site design and staff training, offer your school complete ownership of your Web site. This drives down the total cost of ownership of managing a robust Web presence and solidifies your Web site as a primary source of relevant, timely information for your constituents. This route usually involves an initial investment with a maintenance schedule or a subscription-based pricing model that allows your school to have a budget each year and stick to it.
Additional functionality sometimes is modular-based, where you can have a very scalable solution to grow into, such as adding functionality for advanced athletics, teacher sites, dynamic calendaring, alumni communities and parental portals. My philosophy is that you partner with a company that you can entrust as your partner and they do not treat you like a number.
The main benefit is that each school now has the ability to manage Web site content without having to hire a full-time person to manage design, content or servers. In this scenario, a single staff member is usually the lead person for your Web committee, working with a design team to bring the essence of your school to life for marketing purposes and sets up the infrastructure for your future site.
Why Bother?
First, marketing is the single most important facet of an independent school Web site. Through the Web, potential students and parents visit your school Web site for the first time. Within seconds, your school's image and essence is identified. From the first impression, prospective clients either continue investigating your school - or they will surf elsewhere.
Think of your Web site at the "front porch" to your school, giving visitors a feel for what the school looks and feels like without physically visiting. Your goal is to bring the essence of your school to the Web in a fashion that showcases your uniqueness, individuality, history and values. The use of stunning graphics and multimedia components of campus can bring that essence to life on the Web.
Marketing your school's students and activities has additional target audiences, including alumni, potential donors and community members. Showcasing sections for each on the Web should be a priority to help maintain strong ties and engage them to visit often. Through these efforts, your Web site fosters the preservation of school tradition and pride because each constituency is treated as an essential part of your school community. An online community for alumni often fosters interaction for networking, socializing and informing alums internationally and keeps the communication lines open for life after schooling.
Second, effective use of your Web site is a must for your communication goals. Whether you use it for marketing, community-building, teaching or internal communication efforts, your Web site can be and should be the new medium for communicating information to students, parents, faculty, alumni, donors and even the media to get information about your institution when they want it. The Web is available 24/7, so make sure it contains all of your essential information for all of your target audiences' informational needs.
Scalability
You can start with a content management system (CMS) or just add functionality to your existing Web site in modules. The following add-on modules make CMS a powerful, scalable solution to meet your immediate needs and future needs as well. Some modules can be stand-alone modules and incorporated with your existing Web site, if you are not looking for the total CMS solution right away.
. Admissions
. Advanced Search Engine
. Alumni
. Athletics
. Board Member
. Calendar / News
. Class Registration
. Directories
. eNewsletter
. Event Management
. Form Builder/Survey
. Photo Gallery
. Site Members / Intranet Communities
. Storefront
. Summer Programs
. Teacher Sites
. TV & Media
Selecting a Company
You should find a company and a solution that:
- Specializes in education and has a great track record in technology, support and design.
- Fits your technology plan in terms of functionality, scalability and price.
- You can implement and support in a real world scenario.
- Can set a budget for and find alternative forms of funding through eRate, Grants, Alumni and/or Donors/Sponsorship.
Most importantly, find a company that will treat you like you would like to be treated. Cost is not always the best decision maker, in most instances. You get what you pay for, so I suggest that you research diligently on the best company and tools that fit your schools needs. This research can save you thousands of dollars and numerous hours of staff time in the long run.
Benefits of a Hosted CMS Solution
First is quality control. You can allow users to edit specific areas of the site while locking them out of design aspects so content is up to date and the design components are always consistent with your marketing and branding.
Second, with a hosted solution, you no longer need a server in-house, someone to maintain that server with patches, updates, and making sure it is running 24/7. Make sure your provider has a great track record when it comes to up-time, redundancy and data back-up.
Aspects to Address
Give users a reason to return to your site. Up-to-date content is king.
If Content is king, then ownership is queen. You need to have up-to-date content on your Web site with the proper owners so that your game plan is not only rolled out well, but maintained well, and your visitors will become to trust the site for valuable timely information that is relevant to what they would like to find on your site, such as delays and closings, lunch menus, sports scores, homework assignments, board and PTO meetings, and the list goes on.
Allow for your CMS to be flexible in your design. You have your own essence and identity and your Web site should portray that. Do not settle for less.
As of 2004, Web Hosting is eRate compliant. This is a big factor in terms of management and funding. You no longer need a physical server in-house to host your Web site.
What to Watch For
Do not overestimate the CMS. Although putting this process into place will streamline your management and communications, you must be ready to implement in all facets of your CMS game plan.
Someone needs to steer the ship. Having a top-down approach always allows for the best implementations.
Content, such as text and wording, should be updated on a daily basis either manually or through timed publishing features. Give your users a reason to come back and trust the content is going to be there in a timely fashion and that they are going to be able to find it easily.
Developing and managing robust, dynamic, data-centric school Web sites has never been easier. With specialized options in the educational marketplace, make sure you research and select a solution that will provide the services and functionality that you need at the subscription price that your budget will allow.
Rob DiMartino is the marketing manager for finalsite.com, a web solution provider for schools.
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Product Roundup
SchoolPointe from IndexBlue
IndexBlue specializes in developing information portal web sites for the K-12 market using advanced technology for effective communication. Their education specialists have spent more than three years developing a product to meet the needs of K-12 school districts. They can assist your school in gaining prospective graduates and developing a more informative communication system using their modular SchoolPointe package. This powerful tool assists your school with your day-to-day demands. They work individually with each school to assist in achieving individual goals, whether it is building alumni connections, improving school-to-home communication or tracking athletic events. IndexBlue offers IT consulting, Web hosting and e-mail filtering to provide a burden-free environment for your school staff. They create a partnership in the development of your Web site that is carried out beyond deployment.
www.schoolpointe.com
DynaSite EDU from Transformyx
Transformyx is a Louisiana-based technology and telecommunications company. Their primary market focus is K-12/University Education, Food and Beverage, and Professional Services companies. For Educational entities, Transformyx offers a wide range of services for both public and private schools and universities with its DynaSite EDU platform. DynaSite EDU is poised to become the platform of choice for those educational entities seeking a fast, easy and professional way to deploy schools sites, teacher sites, e-commerce systems and school e-mail alert systems. They are also one of the premier ERATE vendors in Louisiana and offer technology planning services.
www.transformyx.com
LightSky
LightSky is a Web services company that collaborates with schools to create unique portal systems that reflect each school's IT systems, organizational structures and internal processes. LightSky respects your existing approach to education and tailors their work to fit your parameters. Typically, LightSky portals include accounts for students, parents, teachers and administrators to collaborate and share real-time information like assignments, grades, school announcements, event calendars and more.
www.lightsky.com
finalsite Independent School Package
Bring your essence to the Web with finalsite Independent School Solution. They offer sophisticated front-end Web design with powerful management tools to take 100 percent ownership of your site. They offer modules for Alumni, Athletics, Academics, Development and more. The finalsite Independent School Package can be used for both small and large independent schools, and they have priced their product so you can phase in the cost and the growth of your Web site. No HTML knowledge or programming experience is needed. Training takes less than 20 minutes for content managers
www.finalsite.com
SchoolSites.com
SchoolSites.com offers schools an innovative way to obtain the web site of your dreams at a fraction of the cost. Included in every SchoolSites.com site is a suite of Web software products to help schools increase their efficiency, decrease costs and improve communications. The suite includes Classroom Portals for every teacher where they can easily update and post information to the Web, a lunch menu system, a multi-level news and alert module, event calendar, and the ability to manage the adding and editing of all pages on the Web site without the need for HTML coding.
www.SchoolSites.com
