Who cares about website traffic?

Principals have a lot of more important things to worry about than the amount of traffic on their website. Who cares if Highland Park increased their traffic by 100 times?

It's not that the website traffic itself is important, but the huge increase in traffic means something interesting is going on.

• One hundred times more traffic means people find the site a lot more useful. Otherwise, so many people wouldn't keep come back.
• The site is more useful because it's easier to maintain.
• A good website with a lot of traffic makes a strong impression of professionalism about the school to a lot of people every day.

How it happened.

In 2002, Highland Park High School in Dallas asked us to improve their website. The site had very little traffic.  That was not a surprise.  There wasn’t much information out there and much of the information that was there was out of date. Links were broken.  Why would anyone visit the site?  Principal Patrick Cates and Assistant Principal Dan Martin envisioned something entirely different.  They wanted an information hub, a central repository of the information that makes a school work: information about courses, teachers, assignments, extracurriculars, social events, policies, room reservations and so on.  Accessible to all from anywhere at any time, a school website is the natural information hub.

Our solution was not to simply redo the site and update the information.  That would have been a short-term fix but the real problem was maintenance:  how to maintain a level of excellence over the long term.  We built a powerful tool for Webmasters that makes it easy for the people who have the information to get it on the website, without requiring technical knowledge, yet keep the administration in control of the content.  Did it work?  You bet.  The site is far more extensive and useful today.  Where the old website got one or two thousand page views in a good month, the site today averages over 10,000 page views per day, seven days a week.  That’s over 100 times the traffic.  What it means is that a lot of people find useful, timely information and they come back often.  Take a look for yourself at http://hs.hpisd.org.

What questions should a school website answer?

What’s my math assignment?  When is my daughter’s next biology test?  Where is the debate team’s meet?  What’s for lunch on Tuesday? Hey, look at these great pictures of the baseball game!  I need a parental consent form for tomorrow’s field trip.  When and where is the committee meeting?  What’s my new teacher like?  How does the content of Chemistry 1 compare to the state learning standards?

Just as the Web has become the “go to” information source for questions about business and daily life, a school website should be the first source that students, parents, teachers and the community accesses for current and detailed school-related information.  Academic information is the first priority, but the school experience is much more than classes and the website should be too.  If this much information is destined for the website, the Webmaster needs new tools to make it happen.

What does your website say about your school?

As the first source for information, websites have become the first impression organizations give reflecting their professionalism and competence.  Just as a school must maintain its physical appearance, it must also maintain the appearance, effectiveness and utility of its website.  It’s a very visible reflection of how the school is run.  As Web traffic increases, that impression is made more frequently.

Why do so many school websites fall short of the information hub goal?

Nearly every school has a website these days.  But why do so many fall short of the information hub goal?  Why do we see so many school websites with out-of-date information?  Why do we see so many school websites with only the most generic information:  address, perhaps a faculty list and a calendar of school holidays and vacations?

Why?  Because it’s hard.  It doesn’t have to be so hard, but the way most school websites are set up and managed, it is hard.  Because it’s hard, information on the site often becomes neglected.  Neglect leads to calendars, faculty lists and other information becoming out-of-date.  Because it’s hard, Webmasters and administrators are reluctant to put very much information on the site.  The more information that’s out there, the more there is to maintain, so the more there is to neglect.  Because it’s hard, many schools have all requests for changes to the site funnel through one person:  the Webmaster.  As well intentioned and hard-working as he or she is, it’s easy to overwhelm a Webmaster as a website grows in complexity.  In spite of the Webmaster’s Herculean efforts, the site remains limited in scope or sections start to suffer from neglect.

Technology is supposed to help.  Why is it made so hard?

Most of the people who want to exchange information through a website have no interest in Web technology whatsoever.  They don’t want to learn HTML.  They don’t want to learn how to FTP (transfer files) from their computer to a website.  They don’t want to know how to reformat a photo to conform to a website’s design standards.  They don’t even want to know what the standards are.  But they do want to post assignments for their classes or make class handouts available or make the SAT testing schedule available or make parent consent forms available or make a gallery of photos of Friday night’s football game available.  Several technologies are required to do these things. 

There are typically three choices:  1) everyone can learn the various needed technologies, 2) all the info can be sent to the (often overworked) Webmaster to be entered and deleted when he or she has time or 3) these folks can learn to simply live without:  don’t post assignments and handouts online, don’t put SAT testing schedules on the website, don’t use the website for consent forms, don’t bother to try to put photos of the daily school experience out for others to enjoy.  That is how so many school websites fall short of the information hub goal.  Difficulties wear us down.  Difficulties induce us to accept less than what we hoped the website would deliver.

Can’t we do better?  Yes.

School Site Manager makes it easy.

School Site Manager is the system we developed for Highland Park High School’s Webmaster and it’s now available to all schools.  School Site Manager is designed to make school websites into the information hubs that they should be.  It makes it easy for teachers to post assignments, handouts and links to enrichment materials.  It makes it easy for teachers to make detailed class calendars.  It makes it easy for coaches or fans to post information about any team or club in the school along with photo galleries of past events, lists of past awards or accomplishments and rosters of players.  It makes it easy for anyone to create events for the school calendar.  It makes it easy for anyone to create announcements or to create photo and story profiles of the hero of Friday’s game or the success of the debate team or a story of community service.  School Site Manager makes it easy for anyone to create photo galleries of anything to post on the site.  In short, it makes it easy for your Webmaster or designated representatives to maintain your site by delegating or by simply approving submissions from anyone with the click of a mouse.

The submission-and-approval model of site development leads to a new way of thinking about the website:  teachers, students and volunteers can play a much larger role.  Fans can be recruited to take pictures of and write descriptions about sporting events.  Students can be recruited to write profiles periodically, learning journalistic skills while practicing contribution and collaboration.  Parent volunteers can make contributions to the site from home about organizing the cheerleaders’ car wash or the progress of the PTA fund drive.  These contributions increase the utility of the site for all, yet leave the Webmaster and administration in control.

At last, a school website that offers more information but requires less work.

By empowering people all over the school and in the community to post information to the website, the people who are closest to the information are the ones who can post and maintain it.  For posting most information, the Webmaster needn’t be involved.  He or she can focus on the more challenging and unusual requests that come his way. The straightforward requests are taken care of automatically.  If a teacher wants a handout online today, he can put it online himself.  Done.  No middleman involved.  If a coach wants to put a description of the game out, he does it.  No technical knowledge required.  Click.  It’s done.

Isn’t it dangerous?

If we make it so easy for anyone to post anything, anything and everything will get posted, right?  No.  Control is just as important as easy access.  School Site Manager is as much about control as about ease of use.

School Site Manager holds many types of permission that may be granted to users.  Teachers are typically granted permission to make any changes they wish to their course information and to their personal profiles.  Coaches, team assistants or club sponsors are given permission to modify the information about their extracurricular activity.  The bulk of the timely information on the site, the information hub, is handled in this way.  Authority and responsibility is delegated by the Webmaster and administration and is enforced by the software.

What about announcements, calendar events, student profiles or photo galleries?  If anyone can create them, how do we control them?  School Site Manager allows anyone to create these things because we want to empower the people with the information to enter it. Wherever possible, we want to eliminate bottlenecks in the flow of information.  But these things will appear on the site only after they have been approved.  When a new item needing approval is created, an announcement or photo gallery for example, an email is sent to the Webmaster indicating that her attention is required. She views the new item in a password-protected portion of the site.  If it’s okay, a click indicates her approval and the item automatically and immediately appears on the site.  If not, she can delete it.

So it is.  Authorize teachers, coaches, administrative assistants and others to modify site content without further review.  Enable others to enter information, which is then reviewed and accepted or rejected with a simple mouse click.  School Site Manager makes it easy to put information on the site yet leaves the Webmaster and administration in control.

Make your website easier and more effective.

Contact us today.