Options for Creating Your Website

Join Websites for Schools (SharePoint 2010)
- The Websites for Schools initiative offers state schools a solution for creating and managing a public website - providing useful information for current and prospective parents, and community.
- Participating schools follow a structured training program, where they learn the latest web publishing skills and techniques. The resulting sites are centralised in a new web hosting environment using SharePoint 2010, which streamlines the process of creating, publishing and maintaining a school website.
- NOTE: This installation exclusive to Education Queensland schools and staff.
Use the Web Content-Management System for Schools (Joomla!).
- Joomla! is an open source Content Management System (CMS). It is intended to allow authors without HTML knowledge to build and maintain web sites.
- Joomla relies on a system of templates to control the 'look and feel' of web sites. This allows a great deal of flexibility but the initial customisation to suit particular schools but can be daunting for users without HTML knowledge.
- NOTE: This installation exclusive to Education Queensland schools and staff.
Use a web design program or text editor to create the site.
- The site will then have to be uploaded to the MIS WWW directory using a File Transfer Protocol (FTP). More information about web design programs and configuration is available through the ICT Communities Knowledge Base - ( Requires a MIS staff login)
Engage an external Web Designer to construct your site.
- Schools using people or companies outside the department to develop their websites, should follow FNM-PR-014: Purchasing Goods and Services.
- Before employing external contractors, review the MIS configuration settings by reading theWeb Publishing on the MIS document on theICT community website - (Requires a MIS staff login). The MIS webspace security (such as PHP settings) settings will NOT BE ALTERED to support 3rd party solutions.
- Copyright of ALL design and content belongs to the Department of Education and the Arts. Schools MUST obtain signed copyright clearance for any media (movie clips, audio, images, photographs and text) from the copyright owner. (See section 'Publication of personal information to school websites')
  - Consideration Outline for Publicly Accessible Personal Information on School Websites
- Non-EQ supplied Joomla! templates and other Content Management Systems, are NOT supported by DETA. Support will need to be organised through the external supplier.

An important consideration when building your school website is how it will rate on search engines. This is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This is a complex and ever-changing area. Some points to consider are listed here.

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This page was last reviewed on 13 Jan 2012 at 04:14PM