Helping my kid’s school build a useful website

I’m posting about a project I took on over a year ago.  The project was to help my kids’ elementary school with their website.

I’m proud to announce we finally launched the site last week.  Now, this by itself really isn’t that big of an accomplishment, but I do have some interesting things to write about the process we went through, the audiences (consumers and producers) and the technology involved in this endeavour.

As with any web project, we began with the basics.  An environmental scan  – what other schools are doing online? Why are they (or are they not) succeeding with their website?    Branding information - I know, I know,  it is a public school – but understanding brand attributes and qualities is helpful even when you’re not selling anything!

We also did a brief situation analysis - Who would be involved in keeping this site up and up-to-date?  What existing processes existed in the school?  Can managing web content and a web site actually be integrated into the school?   How, longer term, was this going to be maintained?

Then it was on to figure out who would be the site’s target audience? and their needs?  We planned to do an online poll and were delighted to find out that one of the parent’s ran a company that specialized in engaging interactive polls – thank you Pollstream!

Around this time another parent joined in and we launched the poll.  We got great feedback and it was unanimous – it is difficult to keep track of what is going on at school – everyone wanted a school calendar!  So we did some IA work to determine the layout and organization of the site. 

Warning: confessions of an interactive designer follow…  We didn’t do any IA testing (gulp).   Probably for a couple of reasons, 1) it was hard enough to find time to meet and work on the site, 2) we were the target audience and were also interactive designers – we knew what we needed as parents and the teacher representing the school knew what was needed by teachers.  I think we are OK even though this is not ideal  and 3) there are loads and loads of school sites on the internet, good and bad – we did a lot of research and from our own interactions with others sites, were able to draw conclusions about relevant and good IA – OK, moving on.

From the environmental scan and situation analysis we identified a few key issues.

1. Generally, teachers are not very technical  and the existing tools made available by the school system are very technical (i.e. Dreamweaver) and therefore make managing sites and content extremely difficult
2. Generally, the majority of teachers and clerical staff don’t have a whole lot enthusiasm for this type of activity (Post launch note – there are some very keen teachers – pleasantly surprising – but far from the majority)
3. The off-line processes aren’t pretty to begin with so attempting to piggy back on existing processes was not going to work for content creation

What makes or breaks these types of sites is the level of engagement of the people who control the content.  Without content there is no website as we all know.  The ability for teachers to use the site to manage the content would be critical.  We also payed attention to the fact that teachers, principals and parents move on – so we had to have a solution that could be passed on easily to new staff and new parents for support and ongoing maintenance.   One lesson learned from the school website that existed before we started, was that it was a ‘one man show’.  No one knew much about how to manage it or was involved in content creation.

So our challenge:  make it easy to use for content creation, make the technology manageable, create an engaging user experience that allows parents, staff and students to find what they are looking for – oh and it can’t cost much – today or ongoing – what could be easier than this.

A strategy, which the teacher involved is working on, is integrating the web site’s management into her classroom curriculum.  Students would be responsible for collecting and posting information and would learn about the production process (images, editing), have to meet deadlines and work with other people – all of us are excited about this - we think this would be an excellent way to integrate the website into the school and not rely on the goodwill of parents and willing teachers to make it thrive.

My role was in the up front research and the back end architecture – the other mom, Karen Maxwell,  a creative director, really handled the visual design and for the most part the IA – and as you can see she did a superior job!

So what did we use and why

Site platform - WordPress

• built in content management
• huge free motivated developer network
• easy to use
• content managers can be administer (basic approval work-flow, role specification etc.)
• accessible from the Internet – teachers can do this from home, from they computers in the classroom (no FTP to manage content, no specialized tools like Dreamweaver need to be installed etc.)
• It has built in search

All in all we’re happy with this choice – but we did need some help to get things going.   PHP is a pretty funny language and we don’t know it very well.  Also, suffice it to say, we also didn’t know WordPress that well either. We had to dig pretty deep into how WordPress works to achieve what we wanted.  Since we don’t view ourselves as very technical and we could do this with just the little help that we recieved (thank you Richard Smallbone) then I think we made a fairly good platform choice.

Online web calendar – 30Boxes

We’re OK with this choice at the moment.  It allows RSS of its content and tagging of events – so ultimately promises to work well – we’re still figuring it out – currently we only use it as a single widget on the site; an entry point to 30Boxes to view the calendar.  I would like to see them pushing less ‘get an account’ nonsense at our users – why don’t they just advertise based on the event information that is displayed?

Photo and image management – Flickr

We needed a way to store photos and graphics.  Flickr was familiar and we know it is good at syndication (RSS) and tagging and it also has good long term prospects (e.g. not going belly up anytime soon).

Site hosting – Dream Host

• Have all the supporting technology (MYSQL, PHP etc.)
• Have one click install/upgrade process of WordPress and other tools
• They are cheap (~$10 /month)

Site hosting was a late decision – we explored using the school system services – but they didn’t have the right versions of MYSQL or PHP, they also didn’t have any plans to upgrade these and this would only matter if we could convince them to install WordPress on their servers – an uphill battle that we just weren’t prepared to fight.  In the end, it would be too complicated to try and use the school systems. 

So what’s next for the site

Apart from training the staff on WordPress and basic HTML, add a google map  and fixs some things in the navigation technically.  Other than that we want to see the reaction – what are people drawn to or not?  And what makes the most sense to do next.