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How to Design High School Websites
by Paul Dohrman
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Step 1
Maintain a page for emergencies. When no snowstorms or the like are impending, the page can be used to explicate the procedure. When a snowstorm approaches, the page would indicate whether school is closed or when the decision to open or close will be made.
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Step 2
Maintain a page with a listing of the various home games. A posted schedule may not significantly improve the support of a team that already enjoys high visibility (football, e.g.), but could significantly help a soccer, field hockey, or swim team with populating the stands.
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Step 3
Include a page that provides updates sent to the school on alumni's lives. Assign the duty of the page's maintenance to an alumnus, someone who will aggressively solicit such news. An active pursuit of connections with alumni also promotes an active connection between alumni. Such promotions of good feeling toward one's former classmates can translate into good feelings toward one's school, and therefore greater alumni support. To that end, introduce a log-in page to access contact information for former classmates to reach each other. Concerned alumnus should approve the availability of his/her own information, of course. Keeping the information on a page that only those in the same graduation year can access would help maintain a reasonable degree of privacy.
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Step 4
Post any changes to the rules or daily procedure. Posting the rules in their entirety when changes are made is insufficient. It is unrealistic for school administrators to expect students to read through a manual of rules start to finish to find the new changes. Two presentations should be made, both the most recent changes to be posted explicitly on their own, and a PDF or similar file of the school rules in their entirety.
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Step 5
Allow students to maintain a news section, where they can practice their journalism and web designing. However, students should not have editing rights over all web pages. Emergency decisions, alumnus information, and so on should remain under the purview of faculty only.
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Step 6
Including a tutoring page and a page for each faculty member that wants to post homework assignments online. Students should know the schedule of the tutoring lab, if the school has one. Such a page may be the first that many students learn of the lab's existence.
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Step 7
Provide a store with the school logo on various items. You may be surprised how much demand there is for pendants, boxers and polo shirts advertising the school in simple lettering. Remember, the alumni are visiting your site too, and the store can bring in their "nostalgia dollars."
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- Don't worry about search engine optimization, especially if a web designer wants to charge you for it. Viewers will find the site easily enough by cross-searching on the school name and city. Otherwise, you could spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a web design consultant that does little to raise the site to a higher level of visibility than it likely already enjoys. Word of mouth and advertising in local newspapers should be very effective ways to let people know about the website.
- Don't worry about search engine optimization, especially if a web designer wants to charge you for it. Viewers will find the site easily enough by cross-searching on the school name and city. Otherwise, you could spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a web design consultant that does little to raise the site to a higher level of visibility than it likely already enjoys. Word of mouth and advertising in local newspapers should be very effective ways to let people know about the website.
