August 2006 — Features
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Content Management: If You Build It Right, They Will Come
Shamblin says the results have been “spectacular,” including being named District Website of the Month by the Kentucky School Board Association in October 2005. Traffic to the site has more than quadrupled. Attendance at events is higher. The district’s superintendent is interviewed periodically by students, and the interviews are broadcast on the site; more than 500 people have watched him speak about the district’s strategic plan. A hulking lineman on the high school football team has an interest in culinary arts, and his show, “Cooking with Glen,” airs regularly on the site. Some of the district’s students were recently honored at the Newport Aquarium for their induction into the National Junior Honor Society, and the entire ceremony was put online, publicizing not only the students’ achievement but the aquarium as well. The site has helped create a buzz about the district. Parents call Shamblin, interested in enrolling their students in one of Newport’s schools. And in the past six months, the district has received 200 applications for teacher positions, a hitherto unheard-of number.
JUST THE FACTS Content is king,
according
to website developer ePageCity.
When Shamblin talks to parents, the first thing he does is show them the website as evidence that the district is serious about communicating with them. “People who use the website are blown away by its ease of use,” he says. “They can do 10 times the work in one-tenth the time.”
Farther north—north and east, to be precise—lies Half Hollow Hills School District in Dix Hills, NY, where Ellen Robertson is the coordinator of instructional computing. The Long Island district—11 schools, 12,000 students, 800 faculty— has been using the Finalsite content management system since 2004. Robertson marvels at the user friendliness of the system: “The content management system solution enables us to collectively—at present we have 68 ‘curators’ with their own subsites—provide up-to-date information on our schools, programs, activities, and initiatives, and permits us to offer the community the opportunity to provide feedback to the district. All this and more without programming knowledge, without a webmaster, without constraints of posting from only specific locations, without expensive software licensing fees, without more than an hour’s training for any individual given rights to post. And the cost has been less than hiring a part-time clerk.”
At first, says Robertson, Half Hollow Hills had several thousand pages on its site, and she was merely a volunteer who didn’t really know what she was doing. At a computer conference in 2003, she saw Finalsite, was duly impressed, and persuaded the district to get the system. Over several months, the company helped the district design new navigation paths, then gradually demonstrated how to do text editing, page design, hyperlinks, and tables. Robertson started training the curators, some of whom are students, to manage the pages. Now, she says, “I have a life again.”
