The Melrose Schools website will be upgraded with a more attractive design, greater flexibility, and an up-to-date platform that will streamline the site for both users and administrators. The greatest bonus for users will be more up-to-date information in an easy-to-use format that will be searchable and easy to navigate.
This new design will allow us to be more flexible, not just right now but going forward. This will give us the potential to do things three years from now that we haven’t even thought of yet.
“This is more than just a new design,” said Superintendent of Schools Cyndy Taymore. “We are rethinking the way we administer it and streamlining the workflow so we will be able to keep it updated efficiently and maintain consistency throughout the district.”
The website is being redesigned by Joe Silva of Full Circle Design as a multisite using the open source WordPress platform, one of the largest growing platforms in the world. The new infrastructure will allow the sites to “talk” to one another, so that when a calendar listing is added or updated on one site, it will synchronize with all the other calendars on the site.
All the sites–the district site and the sites for the individual schools–will have a common look and feel, and will work the same way from the user’s point of view, but principals can customize them with artwork so that the sites will each have a distinct personality.
The calendar system will be similar to that used on the Mass in Motion website. It will offer several different display options, and events will be grouped into categories, so that users can select one type of category, such as sports events, or look at all the entries.
Behind the scenes, the calendars for the different schools are linked, so users can view the calendar for the whole district on the home site or see just the events for a particular school at that school’s site. Users can click on event to find more information or to share it via Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. Similarly, the staff directory will be set up so that the full directory is available on the district’s home site and each school site will have that school’s directory.
In addition, the website will bring all the principals’ blogs together on the same platform, with a uniform look. “When your child moves from the middle school to the high school, the blog should look the same,” said Dolan. “This way, nobody has to re-learn how to use it.”
Another improvement: Announcements, alerts, and other information will be entered as web pages, not as PDFs, because web pages are searchable.
The site will be live before the start of school in September. “We will have a group of parent volunteers test the site as it is being developed,” Silva said. Many of the new features are in response to suggestions made during the Our City surveys.
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