Designing a school website

Some advice please!

[MClements]

Hi everyone,

I'm planning for one of my first projects. I'm pretty new to the game.

I'm designing and gradually developing a website for a local school.

I am likely to be going there one or two days a week to work on the site and teach a few teachers how to update it too. One teacher will work with me a lot of the time.

We have several months to get the site up and running in it's preliminary form. It will be pretty basic at first.

I'd like some advice mainly on the way to go about it.
What do you think would be the best method and tools for designing and developing the site, especially considering that the teachers wish to be involved in updating the site and they have a very basic level of knowledge and skills?

I will be working on it almost totally on site, by the way.

I have been offered £13 an hour. Being on of my first projects, it is hard for me to say exactly how long the initial design will take. Do you have any advice on contracts, what to stipulate, etc.

Thanks in advance!

MClements

[Mr_Brutal]

Hi MClements,

One of the key decisions for building a school website is whether or not to build a 'Shop Window' site or the actual 'Shop'. Sorry nothing to do with e-commerce just my comparison.

With a 'Shop Window' site you build pages that provide all the information anyone would like to find about the school and present all the good points the school has. Kinda like advertising the school. The other way to go is to provide a site that the students and teachers can use as well, this is a lot more work and harder to do. Here you can provide everything from curriculum resources to course notes and latest homework assignments. This second site needs the dedicated help of the school teaching staff cos otherwise your never gonna get up-to-date stuff for all the curriculum areas just bits and pieces from different subjects. Kinda like the main one i look after. :-(

You said a single teacher will be providing you with alot of help and this is good but due to their already heavy workload I find teachers not good at provding content or any other type of help in the long run.

So my advice would be to build a super 'Shop Window' site for the school and then if you can find the content you could start adding - curriculum mini-sites that staff can update themselves, these mini-sites can even have there own look and feel so staff who can be bothered can design them themselves. Meanwhile you ensure all the important school info remains current, term dates, trip information etc.

Hope this helps a little,

Mr_Brutal

[balinor]

If you are planning on having the teachers eventually update this site, you might want to consider using some sort of 'template' so that they can edit certain areas, but not others. Nothing is more frustrating than creating a beautiful site, just to have a client wreck it! :)Everyone has their editor preferences, but I have had good luck designing sites in Dreamweaver, and allowing my clients to edit the sites in Contribute. The bonus of working for a school is that they will be able to purchase both of these programs very inexpensively (I believe DW is in the $100 neighborhood for Academic).

This is just a suggestion, I'm sure you'll get some other ideas from the folks around here. Good luck!

[MClements]

Thanks for your advice, it is much appreciated.

We will be starting with a 'Shop Window' style website. We plan to build the site up gradually between us, especially as my knowledge, skills and experience grows.

I will be discussing options of how to update the site with them in due course. Can anyone give any extra advice in this area?

[bluelook]

Greetings,

Try to implement a blog system for each teacher. It´s what I´m planning to do for a special project I have.
PM me, so that we can exchange ideas.