August 2006 — Features

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Content Management: If You Build It Right, They Will Come

by Neal Starkman

Parma City School District’s database administrator, Robert Gulick, uses CommonSpot in the 21-school district, south of Cleveland. Gulick’s website life before discovering content management systems was bleak: “It was really a mess in terms of where to find information,” he says. Parma City was using a typical standalone program, and it was hard for one person to be the gatekeeper because an increasing amount of information had to be regularly added. Also, there was no accountability, and high school students made some rather adventurous choices about what to put up on the site. The district wanted one site, one umbrella. During his search for a solution, Gulick cited four criteria:

  • Users had to be able to work with the website through the website; it couldn’t be software-based.
  • The site had to have a consistent look and feel; there had to be “template enforcement.”
  • The site had to have a flexible approval process, because different people in the district would have different rights and responsibilities.
  • The URL had to be concise. CommonSpot met all the criteria, and Gulick rolled out the new system in July 2003. With the help of capable customer support, the training took about three hours. The impact has been nothing short of transforming:
  • Parma City’s website used to average about 3,000 visits and 30,000 hits a month. Now it gets about 15,000 visits and more than 2 million hits a month.
  • The site has about 75 authors—students, teachers, principals, secretaries, coaches, and parents.
  • Teachers use the site to display homework assignments, which take a mere five minutes to post. Parent Margaret Murphy, who has three children in the school system, loves this feature. The way she describes it, “I can go down the list and say, ‘Did you do this? Did you do this? Did you do this?’”
  • On snowy days, Gulick puts any relevant announcements up on the site from his home office.
  • The district uses the site to promote a summer reading program, and 75 users a day are looking at it.
  • The site currently consists of about 2,500 pages. As Scafati and Cellucci point out, you want something that looks like it belongs to a school district. That’s what Parma City School District now has—a consistent, professionallooking site that provides vital information in a timely manner, and is easy to manage.

More Uses

Content management is not just about organizing information on a website anymore; it goes on in the classroom, too. For example, software called MindManager, developed by Mindjet, lets students organize information in a “Mind Map”: Students visually map out ideas, assignments, and class notes, then attach hyperlinks to online information as well as to any electronic object they can get to from their computers. Then they can turn all that information into a fully functioning website and create their own easily updated content management system. Programs such as Digital Locker Suite from Xythos and the Blackboard Content System help students and staff store and share knowledge in a variety of formats.

Most of our clients don’t believe us when we say, 'We’re going to train you in an hour, and you’ll probably never need us again.'
Matt Nathan, ePageCity

If you are looking to improve your school’s website, you can find scores of content management systems in the marketplace. How do you choose one? Determine what you need. Determine how often you’ll be changing the content on your site. Determine how many people will be using the site and what your needs are for accountability. Then figure out what your budget will allow—not only for the short term but for years to come. After all, your website is the face of your school; it’s got to do more than let people know when the clown will show up.

::webextra:: For more on this topic, visit www.thejournal.com. In the Browse by Topic menu, click on Data Management.

Neal Starkman is a freelance writer based in Seattle.

Cite this Site

Neal Starkman, "Content Management: If You Build It Right, They Will Come," T.H.E. Journal, 8/1/2006, http://www.thejournal.com/articles/18998

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