Schools and school boards have turned to the Internet as a way to increase communication within their school communities. By creating websites, they are able to highlight initiatives, promote events, and provide important school information. However, schools and school boards must exercise caution when posting information on websites and must be mindful of obligations under the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
By adhering to best practices, schools and school boards will be in good position to find the balance that must be struck between the free flow of information and the protection of personal privacy.
• Review your site and ensure the school website pages are current and relevant
• Backgrounds should complement the school’s colors/themes, not detract - White is ALWAYS the best background color!
• Pictures of students should not be associated with specific names
Remember:
Your websites are being evaluated by members of the community, KPR staff, KPR school board members, and visitors. These websites are a representation of your school, and for many people, their first impression of your staff.
Maintaining a great website is easy and won't take very much of your time at all if you follow some simple guiding principles.
1) Define Your Audience
With the continued growth of Edsby in our schools and classrooms, the information that schools and teachers normally provide on their websites is changing.
A website has the wonderful advantage of being a time saving way of posting information once and referring any number of people to that content - you don't have to do things over and over..
So, given that you have a whole bunch of people that want to know (and often need to know) what's going on in your school, make a point of listing who you are talking to when you post content to the web.
Your Audience:
Parents and Guardians of your students
Your students themselves (once they can read of course)
Families that might want to send their children to your school
Local businesses and groups that might want to help you out
and Community partners
2) Clarity
Your audience wants clear, concise, relevant, succinct, and easy to find information about what is going on in the life of the school. That is ALL they want.
Keep it SIMPLE! Less is More
3) Be Consistent
Once the website has all of the important information (address, school history, policies, the focus should be just on what is new. Regularly posted news and events truly are 90% of your website's value. Its the ONLY reason people will come to see your site. But they won't come back if you start out well and don't keep up the stream of information. That's why you shouldn't set your sites too high and make a huge site that will take you a great deal of time to keep up. Remember what road is paved with good intentions....
4) Use The Right Tool For The Job
Pages
Use web pages for information that doesn't change very often at all; things like addresses, policies, school history, etc.
Feeds
School or Team news, calendar events and other things that change (or are added to) often, are much better published using dynamic methods where you simply add the new information to previous information. Feeds are a wonderful way to post news, reminders, special events, and other information that has a limited lifespan, but that requires a rich presentation (text and images etc.) to be effective. All it takes is a simple message to your feed and the information will instantly be on the web, at the top of the list of posts. As new posts are added, older ones get pushed down - but they don't go away unless you want them to.
If you consistently post to your news feed, you will find that your website will be well used and worth the time you spend keeping it up to date. You don't need to do very much work to make your website a crucial resource for parents and the community.
Calendars
Calendars are a great way to keep the community appraised of upcoming events succinctly and easily. Unlike Feed posts, calendar events sort in the order that events will occur, not by most recent post first, so you can fill up a calendar with events way into the future and they will show up on the web as those events approach.
Calendars can be made to display as an ordered list of events or as a traditional looking monthly calendar.
Images
Great care must be taken when using images in your website.
Pictures add an awesome dimension to any website as they, according to the old adage, are worth a thousand words each. However, the simple fact is that you are transmitting any images in your website to hundreds and possibly thousands of different computers, and like any hose, highway, or hallway, there is a limit to how much traffic that can fit the transport medium - in this case, the internet connection.
Posting large images to your website - say, straight from your digital camera - means that you are transmitting far to too much data each time a visitor looks at your picture. Digital camera pictures are very high resolution, suitable for printing or even blowing up to posters. Pictures on a computer monitor look fantastic at only a small fraction of the resolution they are when saved from your camera. Digital camera images are typically anywhere from 3 Mb to 10 MB (Mega Bytes). Images in a website should generally be no larger than 100 KB (Kilo Bytes). This is a data size reduction of 30 to 100 times!
To put this all in terms that explain just why this is important, here's a scenario that is playing itself out thousands of times around the world right now as you read this;
A visitor to a website has an internet connection that isn't as fast as yours. Let's say they have 1 Mbps downstream bandwidth.... OK... what does that mean? Well, that means they can download up to 1 Mega bit (not byte) of data every second. To break this down further (sorry), a bit is exactly 1/8 of a byte - meaning that there are 8 bits in a byte. One Mega bit per second of bandwidth means that they can receive UP TO 1 Mega BYTE every 8 seconds. Remember from above that the average digital camera produces images that are between 3 and 5 Mega BYTES? Well, let's just say your camera's image size is 5 MB. That means that, for the web visitor to view just one of your images, they need to wait about 40 seconds! Imagine if you put 10 images in a slideshow.... They'll have time for coffee before they can watch it...
Do you really want to do that to the poor visitor to your website? Of course not.
Now, if you re-sized your pictures using any one of a million programs designed to do this, many of them online and free (http://www.pixlr.com) , you could reduce the images to a tiny 100 KB each, and not notice one bit of degradation in how the pictures look.
Now your 10 slide slideshow could be viewed by that same web visitor in 8 seconds instead of over 6 minutes! Much better... You get the idea.