In an effort to improve the usability and attractiveness of our website for members of the school community and the public, the district’s strategic communications planning committee is working through the early stages of a process that will result in a redesign of the ADM Schools website. In my new role as director of technology and communications, I’m facilitating our exploration of the possibilities available to us.
As an initial component of this process, the committee spent time identifying the strengths and weaknesses of our current website, in addition to identifying features that were successfully implemented on other school district websites around Iowa and the nation. Some of the key features and considerations that we identified include:
- Design
- professional, modern image
- easy and consistent navigation
- non-overwhelming layout
- more student and other district photos
- design consistency
- prominent and easy-to-use event calendar
- usable on mobile devices
- Content
- social media integration
- build upon existing wealth of content
- teacher/class web presence
- well-organized departmental pages
- integration with other services where possible (rSchool, Google Apps, Moodle, etc.)
- database-driven, minimizing redundancy and opportunity for errors
- Management
- staff can easily update content relevant to their positions
- easy-to-use update interfaces
- publishing / expiration dates for content
- separation between content and design updates
- Active Directory integration for management accounts
Over the next couple of months, the group will be working to develop recommendations to give to the board in terms of potential avenues for the redesign, including getting proposals from web design companies. If you are a staff member, student, parent, community member, or interested observer, feel free to get in touch with me regarding any specific input that you would like to provide in terms of our consideration of new website design possibilities.
We’re very excited about getting started with this process, and about the possibilities that it can bring in terms of how we’re best able to serve our community.
