General Advice for Macintosh-using Educators

Every school has a website. Some of them appear to be professionally designed, while others look like they've been forgotten about entirely. I was fortunate enough to take over a site that was already in great shape. But for various reasons, many elementary school sites tend to have the hardest time staying current and presentable. Here are ten steps to improve your site, regardless of what condition it's currently in:

1. Find one (and only one) enthusiastic webmaster within your staff: Yes, that's probably going to be you. But whether it's you or someone else within your school, be sure that the person in charge is willing to put a lot more time into your school's website than he or she is likely to be compensated for!

A school website is not something to be updated once per year, so make sure that your webmaster knows what he or she is getting into before taking the job. A properly updated website will require its webmaster's services on a fairly regular basis. In addition, you don't want a dozen different people with direct access to your web server, or you'll end up with a nightmare of missing index pages, duplicate content, and who knows what else.

2. Get modern software: When I took over my school website, I had the choice between the equally ancient Netscape Composer and Claris HomePage. Neither one stood a chance of creating a modern website, so I had to look elsewhere. It's a shame that HomePage died when it did, but it's dead, and that's a fact. We must collectively move on. The "big three" modern web design applications are Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, Adobe GoLive, and Freeway from SoftPress. I chose Dreamweaver primarily because I could get the education edition for only $99 through the Apple Store for Education. It's done well for me so far, but I routinely hear good things about Freeway and GoLive as well. The truth is, all three are overkill -- but until Apple or someone else goes and creates an insanely great consumer-level web design tool, we'll have to swim with the big boys and use professional tools.  One caveat: avoid FrontPage at all costs -- not because it's from Microsoft but because it's non-compliant, buggy, produces overly bloated code, and the Mac version of FrontPage is a joke.  The last thing you want to do is muck up your Mac advantage by using inferior tools.

3. Learn how to use your software: The book "Dreamweaver, the Missing Manual" helped me greatly in learning how to make the most out of my new tool, and redesign my site in the process. But until I was ready for the public to see my redesign, I kept it to myself, allowing the world only to see the old site design. You don't want the world to see your new site until you're comfortable with what you've created. It doesn't need to be flashy, but it does need to represent your school well. Don't worry about learning all 10,000 features of your web design software; simply focus on the dozen or so features you'll actually need. Learn the complicated stuff later.

4. Get a recognizable domain name: If you're like me, your school's true website address looks something like http://www.district.k12.state.us/yourschoolelementaryschool. If your address is so long and complicated that even you can't type it correctly half the time, then your students and parents have little chance of ever visiting it. Go get a real domain name from register.com for around $35 per year, and then set that domain to auto-forward to your actual website. That way, you can simply tell your students to go to "yourschool.com", or even better, use your school's initials. If you want my personal advice, ignore the fact that an address ending in dot-org might technically be the most suitable for a school, and go ahead and try to get a dot-com or dot-net address.  A dot-org address will make people think you're a museum!

Every district does things differently, so you might be able to get your district to "adopt" your new domain and point it to your existing website, or you might need to pay register.com for the forwarding service ($49 per year). Try to work with your district's "head honcho of websites" in order to ensure that you're not breaking your own district's rules by doing this. If you can't figure out how to pay for the domain name out of your school's budget, ask your PTA to buy the domain name for you. Then return the favor by dedicating a portion of the website to the PTA.

5. Choose a professional web designer with great scrutiny: The absolute worst situation you can be in is that you can't update your own website because an outsider designed it for you, and then disappeared. If you're going to hire a professional web designer, be absolutely sure that this person is going to be willing and able to update your site as often as needed. With budget cuts always lurking around the corner, you may find that you suddenly can't pay for professional web design anymore. So if you're working with a pro, then be sure that you'll be able to take over the site yourself, if such a financial emergency rises.  And no matter what, make sure that your domain name is registered in your school's name, not the name of your web designer.  You don't even want to think about how messy things could get in that case.

6. It's all about the content, baby: Our stakeholders decided right from the start that content, not style, would be the priority when it came to our website. Our site isn't the slickest-looking in the world, but it's chock-full of relevant information and recent events. Go into every school event as if you were a reporter. Document it with a digital camera, take notes in your Palm, do whatever you need to so that you can turn the event into a page on your website. And forego the big flashy but useless logo on your index page. Instead, use that space to provide quick access to as much content as possible. You want parents and students to discover all that you've got to offer quickly, before they lose interest.

7. Update constantly, no matter how minorly: Most of us are maintaining our school website in addition to our main job duties, so unfortunately, adding new content to the website can't always be your top priority. But you want your visitors to come back as often as possible, and this won't happen if your site never changes. My suggestion: put a headline or two near the top of your site that reminds visitors of upcoming events at your school. That way, even if your content isn't changing, your index page is. If you know that you won't be able to get anywhere near your site for two weeks, put up a headline advertising something that takes place more than two weeks into the future.

8. Market your site like it's a corporate website: Once your website is up to your standards, you'll want to let all your stakeholders know how to access it. Go to your PTA meeting and present the entire site, page by page, to attendees. Put your site address in the header of your school newsletter, and regularly write articles for the newsletter that let everyone know about your newest content. If you have a school event such as a carnival, place large banners everywhere that advertise your site address. If your school has a marquis, use it to advertise the website to passers-by. Create a desktop picture that advertises your website, and install it on every computer in your school. The more often your students and parents see and hear about the website, the more likely they are to visit it!

9. Plan exactly what you want to add to the site: Even if you're only able to build up your school's website gradually, go ahead and make a wishlist of the features you'd like to add in the future. The basic necessities are school background and contact info, monthly calendar, school newsletter, faculty and staff page, and principal's page, among others. As soon as you can, you'll want to add additional resources such as a PTA page, school supplies list, community resources page, and so on. Once you've got the basics set up, work on building up a "current events" section. As you are able to bring various teachers into the fold, help them to create individual classroom pages within the site. If this is too much to handle, direct them to an automated page-building service such as the one offered at Scholastic. Although such pages tend to reside on the site of the company that created them, you can always link to these pages from your own site. As you build up your own skills, you'll be able to add more ambitious content to your site, such as QuickTime movies of completed iLife projects.

10. Share your site with the world: Go to the various search engines and make sure that your site has been submitted. That way, people throughout the nation and the world will be able to enjoy your site. Occasionally perform a search for your school's name, to ensure that you're ranking highly enough for people to find you. But don't forget that all the search engines in the world won't bring as much traffic to your site as will encouraging all of your students to go home and send an email to their grandparents, telling them about your website.

Never be bashful when it comes to mentioning your site to members of your community or anyone else who has a stake in the well-being of your school. And whenever you're online, tell the whole wide world about your site as often as possible -- which leads me to the part where I provide a link to my own school's site. Before you take a look, I'll warn you that I just went live with a complete redesign of the site this morning (new school year, new school theme, therefore new design), and our school year doesn't start for another five weeks.   So you're bound to come across a few barren pages awaiting content, and bugs that I just haven't discovered yet...but feel free to take a look at it anyway: dbes.net .

If you have contributions or suggestions to help improve this article, please send them to billpalmer@mac.com. You won't hurt my feelings. Remember, we're all in this together.

Charles Gaba of Brainwrap Web Design, who has experience in designing school websites professionally, contributed to this article.

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