Over the past three years I have been asked to build several school web sites. Initially, these were built as one-off systems. However, it soon became apparent that most schools required almost exactly the same features and facilities for their sites.
To that end I have put together a modular web site package for schools that can be easily customised to each school's own particular requirements. The system is flexible and can cater for several different graphic and menu styles as shown by the examples on the right.
Some of the standard features of the package include:
- Menus - these are under the full control of the site owner who can add as many menus to the system as required.
- General Pages - any number of pages can be created and attached to the menus as required. Images and other media can be uploaded and, in the case of images, resized during the upload if required, and placed anywhere on the pages. Simple built-in commands can help with specific layouts such as tables and lists.
- Daily Calendars - multiple calendars may be set up, each one can be dedicated to a particular "area" such as: sports events, holidays, governor meetings, parents' events.
- Document Handling - different types of documents (e.g. Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, text files, PDFs, even music files) can be uploaded and grouped for display by genre, application, subject area etc. For example, a category of documents can be created to do with Shakespeare and these can be listed together on a page using a single command. When new documents are added to a category they will automatically appear on any page that is already listing that category.
- Message Boards - multiple moderated message boards can be set up and added to any page. The boards are protected from automatic spamming via a captcha control (where the user has to enter a random code that is displayed in a temporary image generated solely for that one input).
- News Pages - news can be added to the site either as a single page or split by user-defined subjects (e.g. sports news, sixth form news, news for parents etc.). News items are set up with publish start and end dates so that out of date information is automatically removed from the site without further user intervention.
- User Defined Forms - an frequent requirement is for a specialised form to be added to the site (e.g. for an adult education application). These can be set up so that, when a form is filled in, an email can be sent to a designated person within the school. Forms can contain any number of normal input fields such as text boxes, radio buttons and check boxes.
- Customisable Back-End Administration. Each user has their own user name and password. Users may be restricted to their own small area of the administration so that data cannot be accidentally accessed by those without the authority. Each user record can optionally contain profile information and a photo. If required (and if available upon the selected hosting), the back-end administration can use SSL Security to prevent plain text from being sent over the Internet.
- Staff Lists - automatic staff lists can be generated from the user records if required.
- User Friendly Administration - all administration is performed using simple web forms with help information displayed alongside the form.
A full user manual is also available which describes how to operate the web site. This is kept up to date as additions are made to the basic system.
Prices for a basic site start at around £400 (excluding hosting) - this will include the ability to add any number of pages (compare that to web design companies who will charge £300 for a single page!). Please contact me for a quote for your own particular requirements.
Some of the schools that currently use the system include:
