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Planning Your School Web Site
1. [Audience] 2. [Human
Resources] 3. [Hold a meeting] 4. [Plan the structure
of your web site] 5. [Plan your Home Page] 6. [Design
Issues] 7. [Useful Web sites]
1. Audience
1. Decide first what you are wanting to achieve
with your web site
2. Decide:
who your web site is for - is it for
parents, learners or teachers?
who is going to contribute?
who is going to maintain it?
2. Human Resources It
is important that you consider carefully the impact of the web site on your
staff. Web site building and maintenance is very time consuming. Whoever
builds and/or maintains your web site MUST have the time to do it. By that I
mean not just their spare time. You will need to consider whether time can be
set aside in Staff meeting time and/or INSET time. It
goes without saying that whoever builds your site will be enthusiastic but the
web site is like a dog - it is for life. There has to be a strategy for
keeping the web site going. Even if you have the web site built professionally
it has to be kept alive with content and SOMEONE needs to do this. This someone
needs the time to do it. These are
the questions you should ask yourself: 1.
Who will build your site? 2. Who will
maintain your site? 3. If you
maintain the site in-house where will you find the time to do it? 4.
If you use a member of staff, have they the right skills to do it? 5.
Can you afford the additional costs (time and money) including:
for self-training, courses, building and maintaining the siteCourses
- to learn the new skills such as web page building Software
- beginners will need authoring software such as Front Page, Dreamweaver etc
Will this be available in the classrooms for the children to use? If so you will
need a multiple users licence. Hardware
- are your computers up to the task? Do they have a modem, enough memory,
hard drive space for storing your web pages? Is the speed of access to the
internet fast enough on your current network or modem?
3.
Hold a Meeting You
are planning a web site for your school or school department and this will
involve other people. It is important to hold a meeting at an early stage of
everyone involved. If you do you are more likely to have their cooperation, they
will support the aims and objectives of the web site and hopefully they will
contribute to the web site. It is important that everyone understands and
contributes ideas to the purpose of the web site and what resources are
available to contribute to it. It is important that everyone feels they have
"ownership" of the web site.
4.
Plan the structure of your web site Decide
what pages you want in your web site. School include many different categories
and it is a good idea to look at other school web sites in deciding your own
layout. Plan your site on paper before your start. Suitable pages may
include: - Contact information
- Information
on the school including a map
- Information
on feeder schools and partners abroad
- The
staff
- The Governors
- Information
for Parents - school holidays, events, meetings, newsletter
- Teaching
Resources - such as lesson plans, web sites etc
- Learning
Resources - worksheets, web sites
- Children's
work - art, photography, stories, poems, etc
The Home Page
The Home Page is the first page of your web site that the surfers
see. It MUST have a rapid download time so limit the number and size of
your graphics on this page. You can get a rough idea of download time using bobby. (Site
last visited 20/11/02)
Try to design it so it fits in one screen so that readers do not have to
scroll down but don't let this dictate to you the design of the site.
Think about your audience(s) and what they want to know. This will help
you plan the contents of your Home Page. The Home Page can have a feel of
its own so you don't have design your Home Page the same as the other pages.
It must, however, try to introduce surfers to the ethos of your school.
How will you achieve this?
Standard items include:
School Logo or Crest
Contact Information - Name of School, telephone number, fax number and
email address
Links to other parts of your site
A footer with copyright, date when the site was last updated, contact
email address and navigation such as [Home] [ School Work] etc
Add other items which give surfers the "feel" of your school -
eg. a photo, news, a recording of the children's voices
Useful Web Sites
1. Create a web site in a day: Channel
4 Web Whizz project
(Site last visited 20/11/02)
Includes details of Channel 4's CD ROM. The CD
ROM is a cheap solution to web design and includes simple web building software
and a video. The video is worth buying as it shows how one school organises the
production of its web site - in a day!! Impressive stuff.
2. Advice
from the Channel 4 Web Site Web Whizz on planning your web site
(Site last visited 20/11/02)
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