Establishing a school or school district website involves many considerations. The potential benefits are enormous, but the potential for problems is nearly as significant. Publishing a school website is very much like opening the doors of your building and your classrooms to anyone who wants to come in and visit them. This is why it is important to plan your site carefully and to establish goals that you want to accomplish through your website.

In the same way that you must control the physical environments of your school(s) in order to assure that effective learning takes place, you must also control your web presence to assure that your goals are achieved and that problems do not result. This is why it is important to establish a Web Publishing Policy (WPP) that spells out exact how your website will be accomplished, maintained, and why. The following sections describe issues that you must address in your WPP to assure quality, value, and protection in your publishing endeavors.

Security should also be considered. It is important not to publish information that might put educators and especially students at risk. The main thing to avoid is making any connections between a student's network and physical presence. Most WPPs prohibit including student addresses and phone numbers. Many prohibit the posting of individual student pictures and names. Once again, these are issues you must struggle with in setting your policies.

It is also essential that you include references to your school or district copyright policy in terms of the intellectual property of information that will be posted to your site(s). Your Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) should also be referenced. These three documents (WPP, AUP, & Copyright Policy) are interrelated and should all be referenced when establishing clear guidelines for how network communication will be used in your district or school, and the consequences for its abuse.

Who exactly should be publishing on your website and under what conditions? This is an important decision to make and one that must be incorporated into your WPP. There are important reasons why the principal and teachers should be able to publish information to the website. There may also be a great deal of value to giving parents and students the ability to add content. This, of course, depends on the goals that you have established for your site.

Another way of looking at the "When" issue is considering under what conditions certain people will be able to publish, or who will have oversight over what will be published on your web? If a number of people are given the right to add content, then who will assure quality control and when. It should be part of your WPP to identify the people who will be responsible for generating and posting content and the system or path of quality assurance.

These procedures and standardizations must be clearly described, with appropriate training provided and software (FTP clients and HTML editors) supplied. These procedures should be as convenient as possible for your content people in order to encourage the regular adding and updating of web pages.