August 2006 — Features
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Content Management: If You Build It Right, They Will Come
In the old days, says Shamblin, schools did the best they could with websites and tried to solve problems internally. “That was fine at the outset because the expectations weren’t that great.” Now, however, “people’s expectations of what your site should be are based on what they’re receiving on their favorite website.” So the ante has been upped and the demands are greater. Yet, ironically, with companies such as Finalsite specializing in educational websites, schools have less work to do to manage their content management systems. “If you’re striving for any kind of sophistication,” Shamblin says, “it doesn’t make sense to do it internally because someone else figured it out already.”
KEYWORD: NAVIGATION
If visitors aren’t able to move easily around your site, they won’t come back.
To borrow from the old real estate axiom, the three rules of website design are navigation, navigation, navigation. Nothing discourages return visits as much as bad navigational tools, so the need for an easily negotiable site makes the home page crucial. Users may be looking for information on several different screens, and you don’t want them to take a detour, get lost, and give up. The trick is to put up the right buttons to take people to the places they want to go. Giving good descriptors, and placing them where they are easy to find, is essential. You want the website to be friendly and convenient so that it becomes a preferred first line of communication for many situations.
A good example of an easily navigable website belongs to Worcester Academy (MA), a private prep school for grades 6-12. The Worcester site makes good use of powerful photography and a simple four-panel grid that allows visitors to drill down to more detail on specific topics. “We used a flash montage of students and teachers to attract attention and give a preview of the school,” says Travis Warren, president of the website’s designer, WhippleHill Communications in Bedford, NH. “Site visitors can access information through dropdown menus along the top, or they can click on topics inside the grid for a more interactive experience.” —Dan Page
Shamblin says that he doesn’t have to worry about Newport’s tech department figuring out the latest advances in content management, or about the bandwidth of the server. “All I need to do is provide the content to the parents,” he says, adding that he’d have to hire two or three full-time programmers to do what the content management system does. To explain to Newport’s board why he didn’t want to build the website in-house, and why spending money to have it done out-of-house was a good investment, Shamblin told board members that, based on the amount of state funding per student, if the website brought in only three new kids, it would pay for itself.
