Planning Your School Website

Perhaps the most critical element to building any web presence and the most often neglected one is planning. To build a website that accomplishes something for you or your school, you must plan before anyone starts thinking about HTML coding, images to be used in the web page or even the information you want to publish. You must establish the task you want to achieve with the site and the strategies for using the Internet to achieve it.
Who Should be Involved in the Planning?
This is a difficult question to answer. Your planning team depends on the character and culture of your school or school district. The number of participants is also critical. The smaller the number, the faster you will be able to move. At the same time, critical people who can be instrumental in helping plan a more successful web presence can easily be left out.
Some of the people you might consider are:

School administrators	Media Specialists
Representatives from each Grade Level or Department	Representatives from the PTA or PTO
Technology Savvy Students	Technology Savvy Parents
Representation from the Central Office (communications officer and/or technology director)	Clerical Staff

What is the Planning Process?

It is important to structure your planning session(s) as much as possible. Otherwise, the meetings can deteriorate into issues that are not relevant to the construction of your school website. Below are some questions to be answered in the planning process. These questions can serve as a structure for your meetings to bind discussions to the task at hand.

1. Who is the intended audience of your website? Who are your stakeholders? Parents, the broader community, people who are considering moving to your community, the central office, local and distant political officials are a few examples.
Think also about your audience in terms of how to best design your web site. What is their reading level? What kind of access to the Internet do they have? Will they have high speed or low speed access? Are they beginners or sophisticated users?

2. What are your goals? Your goals should be based on your audience, not the school. Your goals should never be, "I want to publish this information." They should be behavioral goals. By this I mean, How do you want to affect the behavior of your audience? How do you want to affect their decision making, their attitudes, their knowledge, or their beliefs? How do you want to help them, help you do your job?
Your goals should be clear and always up front in your mind during the continued development of your website. It is a good idea to post your goals in large text above the computer where most of the web design and building will take place. When the design and construction of the site begins, it is easy to lose site of the goals amid the technical and formatting decisions you will have to make.

3. What information do you already have that will help you accomplish your goals? In considering the information that is already available or being generated on a regular basis, discuss the procedures that will be necessary to transfer the information to web format (HTML). There are two ways to think about this:

What will it take to convert the information to web format. If the school secretary is typing up (with a typewriter) a monthly newsletter that you would like to include on the web, then get him or her a computer with word processing software that will easily convert files to HTML format.
How should the information present itself? Understand that getting information onto the web is easy compared to getting the information from the user's screen into his or her understanding. Laying out information so that it presents itself effectively for accomplishing your goals is perhaps the most challenging part of creating a website. Think about how you best understand information. Typically, people understand a picture better than prose, graphs better than tabular data, charts better than outlines.

4. How will you structure your website? The important thing to understand about the World Wide Web is the fact that it presents information through a three-dimensional information environment. From any one point, we can go in a variety of directions depending on our information needs.
Designing your website's structure should take this fact into consideration. Who will your audience be? What problems are they likely to be trying to solve by coming to your website? Where can you put the answers so that they can reach them with the fewest number of mouse clicks?
Always consider your goals and your audience, and the reason's that they have come to your website. Arrange your information and links for ease, convenience, and speed.

5. Facilitate review and feedback It is easy to provide e-mail links in your web page so that people can e-mail the webmaster with complaints and suggestions. Users of your website, however, seldom use this feature. You must be more proactive in pursuing input from your web customers.
Here are some ideas:

Teachers, as they participate in parent conferences, can ask the parents: Have you used the website? What information were you looking for? Did you find the information? Did you enjoy the experience?
If your school has an end of the year survey for parents, include some questions about your website.
Include a form on your website that asks for input from users. The form should be short. It should look as if it could be completed within one minute. If it looks like it will require more investment of time than one minute, they won't answer the questions. Your form should not ask more than four questions. If you have more than four questions, then cycle them through each week. Ask four questions one week, then four different questions the next week.
Ask parents during PTA meetings to raise their hands if they have used the website. Ask them to raise their hands if they found the information they were looking for. Ask them to meet with the webmaster after the meeting if they have any suggestions on how to improve the service.
All websites generate a log file. This file includes a complete record of the site's use -- each time it was accessed, what pages were accessed, what days of the week and times of the day. There is software available over the Internet (some of it is public domain) that will analyze these log files and generate detailed reports on the usage of your site. The reports will tell you what parts of the site are being used the most and which parts are not. This information can give you important clues in how you might restructure your site to get people where they want to go in fewer button clicks.

1.	Who is the intended audience of your website?	Who are your stakeholders? Parents, the broader community, people who are considering moving to your community, the central office, local and distant political officials are a few examples. Think also about your audience in terms of how to best design your web site. What is their reading level? What kind of access to the Internet do they have? Will they have high speed or low speed access? Are they beginners or sophisticated users?
2.	What are your goals?	Your goals should be based on your audience, not the school. Your goals should never be, "I want to publish this information." They should be behavioral goals. By this I mean, How do you want to affect the behavior of your audience? How do you want to affect their decision making, their attitudes, their knowledge, or their beliefs? How do you want to help them, help you do your job? Your goals should be clear and always up front in your mind during the continued development of your website. It is a good idea to post your goals in large text above the computer where most of the web design and building will take place. When the design and construction of the site begins, it is easy to lose site of the goals amid the technical and formatting decisions you will have to make.
3.	What information do you already have that will help you accomplish your goals?	In considering the information that is already available or being generated on a regular basis, discuss the procedures that will be necessary to transfer the information to web format (HTML). There are two ways to think about this: What will it take to convert the information to web format. If the school secretary is typing up (with a typewriter) a monthly newsletter that you would like to include on the web, then get him or her a computer with word processing software that will easily convert files to HTML format. How should the information present itself? Understand that getting information onto the web is easy compared to getting the information from the user's screen into his or her understanding. Laying out information so that it presents itself effectively for accomplishing your goals is perhaps the most challenging part of creating a website. Think about how you best understand information. Typically, people understand a picture better than prose, graphs better than tabular data, charts better than outlines.
4.	How will you structure your website?	The important thing to understand about the World Wide Web is the fact that it presents information through a three-dimensional information environment. From any one point, we can go in a variety of directions depending on our information needs. Designing your website's structure should take this fact into consideration. Who will your audience be? What problems are they likely to be trying to solve by coming to your website? Where can you put the answers so that they can reach them with the fewest number of mouse clicks? Always consider your goals and your audience, and the reason's that they have come to your website. Arrange your information and links for ease, convenience, and speed.
5.	Facilitate review and feedback	It is easy to provide e-mail links in your web page so that people can e-mail the webmaster with complaints and suggestions. Users of your website, however, seldom use this feature. You must be more proactive in pursuing input from your web customers. Here are some ideas: Teachers, as they participate in parent conferences, can ask the parents: Have you used the website? What information were you looking for? Did you find the information? Did you enjoy the experience? If your school has an end of the year survey for parents, include some questions about your website. Include a form on your website that asks for input from users. The form should be short. It should look as if it could be completed within one minute. If it looks like it will require more investment of time than one minute, they won't answer the questions. Your form should not ask more than four questions. If you have more than four questions, then cycle them through each week. Ask four questions one week, then four different questions the next week. Ask parents during PTA meetings to raise their hands if they have used the website. Ask them to raise their hands if they found the information they were looking for. Ask them to meet with the webmaster after the meeting if they have any suggestions on how to improve the service. All websites generate a log file. This file includes a complete record of the site's use -- each time it was accessed, what pages were accessed, what days of the week and times of the day. There is software available over the Internet (some of it is public domain) that will analyze these log files and generate detailed reports on the usage of your site. The reports will tell you what parts of the site are being used the most and which parts are not. This information can give you important clues in how you might restructure your site to get people where they want to go in fewer button clicks.