Planning Your Site

Planning is the key to a good website. These are some points to consider:

What is the major purpose of having a website?
Who is your audience?
Why do they visit the site?
How would they use the site?
Do different groups use the site differently?
What information do they need to achieve their goals?
Should the information be public (Internet) or private within the school (Intranet)?

Purpose

Schools may have a number of reasons to establish a web presence, including:

Legislative Requirements
To display information about the school and school programs
As a way of communicating with the school community (eg: news and calendars)
To support student learning

Audience

Who will visit the site and how will they use the information available?

Potential students?
Current students ?
Parents ?
Community members?
Teachers?

Is your audience more likely to consist of experienced or novice users of the web?

The content, navigation and design need to match the audience's level of understanding and cater for any constraints they may have, such as visual impairments or slow connections

Costs and Resource Usage

The set-up and ongoing maintenance of school web sites requires budget allocations. To ensure that resources are adequate, schools should:

Include school web publishing in the Annual Operational Plan so that adequate resources are available
Train staff and students in the skills to manage web publishing
Include the stages of planning, content creation, design, implementation and maintenance in the web publishing process

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