SCHOOL WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT - An Introduction from personal experience.
This page contains my own biased experience in dealing with the development of school sites, it can be useful for new Designers wanting to learn general characteristics of this particular field and could be useful to Schools that might want to look seriously on out-sourcing the development of their new site.
Share the enthusiasm
I love developing websites for schools. Schools offer a unique challenge and an ever changing source of creativity for designers and technical challenges for developers.
From small to large shools the oportunity is always there, even small schools have several teachers and around 100 students, they are all capable of producing reports, news, photos, math problems and solutions, science experiments and theory, video, podcasts, blogs. There is a huge range of activities that can enrich the website as the virtual ,meeting place for sharing and learning.
School sites – Design Philosophy:
The fact that I have a philosophy that applies to school site design is an oddity already. Most school sites out there are simply a $50 template or a bonified MS Publisher published online.
School Principals heard “You must have a web site” there is almost no need to explain why a web site is very important for the school, they know it will help with enrolments while facilitating communication with parents and the community in general.
Explaining well to School Principals what they are signing for is crucial, the risk is though, once your pitch goes over the 5 minutes mark, Principals and school staff in general will begin to think that their time would be better spent doing school work, most of the minute details will be lost together with the critical information.
One liners and simple dot point presentations are a must.
Long discourses in the past have lost me the chance to work with good schools simply because I was too verbal, too passionate and gave the school Principal a huge amount of non-sense lingo and a headache.
Over the years I developed simple and specialized documentation for Principals, trimmed down to the bare minimun, leaving the essential and some numbers and graphs. I leave those on the table for further reading and record keeping.
In terms of Web Development for schools I chosen the “almost unatainable” building community websites . My success criteria from the very beginning is to achieve full participation from the school community. I believe that as a designer/developer anything short of that would be cheating the school out of its full potential.
I believe that the “Design, launch and move on” approach is almost dishonest in today’s internet landscape. It can only be justified for very small sites and schools today are well past that of an online brochure.
The next 3 schools are representative of what Schools in Victoria are like: Big, Medium and Small.
…to be continued
