A little less than a year ago this time, visitors perusing the individual school web sites of the Harrison School District 2 (HSD2) in Colorado Springs, Colo., would have had a tough time trying to find many unifying features.

Many of the sites were built using different templates, there was no content management system or cascading style sheets, and there was little uniformity in terms of the architecture of the sites’ content.

“Our school sites were all over the board, with some using a basic kind of template and some just doing their own thing entirely,” said NSPRA member Jennifer Rexrode, HSD2’s webmaster and graphic designer. “The major complaints we got from parents were if they had kids in elementary and a kid in middle school or high school. They would go from one site to another and stuff would be located in different sections.”

But, thanks in large part to Rexrode, visitors today are greeted by an impressive district site and a template approach to the school sites that makes finding relevant information on any school site an easier and more intuitive process.

Rexrode and the communications staff at HSD2 redesigned the site using Drupal, an open source content management system that is growing in popularity and was used by the Obama campaign and to build www.whitehouse.gov. HSD2 settled on Drupal after considering other open source systems, like Joomla, and companies with ready-made school web site templates and software.

“We looked at open source and then at companies where you pay a yearly subscription as well,” Rexrode said. “We considered both but we didn’t have a lot of money – our students come from very low socio-economic homes. We felt we could do a lot with open source and that it would cost very little money, so it seemed like the right way to go. We considered Joomla and one other option, but in the end it seemed like the Drupal community was bigger and more big companies and organizations were using it, so it felt a little bit more stable.”

So after hours of scouring other district web sites – including NSPRA electronic media award winners – for ideas, attending the meetings of a Drupal organization group in Colorado Springs, reading a few books on site useability and web design, and discussing the project with fellow COSPRA members, Rexrode and the communications staff came up with a general template to share with school principals and assistant principals.

The Next Step

To get the site off the ground, HSD2 paid a third party (local company Monarch Digital) a one-time setup fee for the basic site architecture and cascading style sheets (CSS), which was built according to the specs the district put together. From there, Rexrode worked with the IT staff to put finishing touches on the design and roughly three months – including many nights – migrating the content over from the previous web sites.

When the work was finished – though web sites are never necessarily “finished” products – the schools and the district had simple templates allowing them to easily update content. Rexrode trained the designated people at each school and at the district level to make the needed updates.

Among the positives

District and school sites that are clean, consistent in terms of design and message, and easy to update. For Rexrode, her life is easier because any changes she makes – even to the design of the site itself – is automatically carried over to the corresponding pages on the school sites. “We wanted to make it easier to find information and easier to update pages,” Rexrode said. “What we had before was a little like FrontPage. It wasn’t user-friendly, so if someone was trying to update a page but didn’t have any HTML background, they just got frustrated and would stop making updates.”

Room to grow. Because Rexrode has the web knowledge to operate the sites, she can add Drupal modules as she sees fit. Monarch, the third party vendor, added a calendar module for the school, but Rexrode and the IT department have the ability to add more modules down the road. As of now, the sites are still developing in terms of new media content (Rexrode will be adding a superintendent blog this summer), but they feature regular news updates and have the ability to grow the sites out as they see fit.

Marketing benefits. Rexrode pointed out that one of the keys in the new site design was that they wanted there to be information for groups beyond simply parents and students. The “Information for Visitors” block on the front page is a way of helping the district recruit teachers and students – a key factor for a district with a large military population.

Flexibility: You can work on the site from anywhere. Since there was no software to purchase or install, anywhere you have an Internet connection, you can work on the HSD2 web site. That affords the district flexibility and saves it money in terms of software purchases.

The Challenges

Migrating the content from the old web site. This is a huge job and one any district must confront if redesigning.

Less freedom for schools. Rexrode admitted there was some – not a lot – but some resentment to the district taking a large role in the design and management of the sites.

“Some of the schools may have been a little disappointed, but they didn’t have much of a choice because the superintendent explained that this was what we were doing and we were trying to be more consistent,” Rexrode said. “I know some teachers were using the school sites as a way for their web design classes to get practice, but they can build sites of their own and they can still put together information on clubs and sports, but they just can’t be the ones to upload that content to the site. It just gives the site a little bit more of a professional feel.”

By Michael Piper, NSPRA communication specialist. Questions or comments? Contact Michael.