Wherefore a School Website?

The 1997 article on school websites by Jamie McKenzie brought back memories of designing my first website. I did this in 2000, only 3 years after this article was written, but a lifetime in the tech world. It was all new to me and I can remember asking myself many of the same basic questions that McKenzie suggests. I visited many websites looking for ideas for my photography website just as he suggests for schools, just substitute ‘photographer’ for ‘school’ and his words still hold true, “Those schools just now venturing into site design would be well advised to begin their invention process by visiting several hundred school sites, building a list of features and elements which work and those which do not”,  and I frequently found the same thing he did, “Many of these early efforts were a bit like Hollywood movie sets . . . with large graphics but not much solid content.” 

I was determined to have a lot of content on my site, and found that creating content was extremely time consuming. In retrospect the site was butt ugly, but it was quickly followed by a better site (not hard), which itself was later followed by what I felt was a still better site.

Most websites these days are a lot more sophisticated and contain a lot more information. People just have a better idea what can be included and how to get it onto the Web. However, many still suffer from bad/confusing/inconsistent design. I have a pet peeve about websites with spelling errors, but it is poor navigation which will most often send me running to a different site. I believe a website is all about communication, and that the writing and the design communicate just as much as words and pictures.


I’m in a program that leads to teaching in the Newark Public Schools (NPS), and I like to take advantage of any assignment that lets me explore the resources in this district. Newark’s is both the largest and one of the poorest school districts in the State. As an Abbott district, it receives large amounts of state aid, however, it is still severely limited in its resources. It also has to be careful about the image it projects: competent, but not too free with its money. I think this is reflected in the NPS district website.

It’s not the prettiest or most elegant of sites, but it does contain a great deal of useful information. It is probably easy to do these days, but I was still impressed with the ability to translate the site into a wide range of languages. Unfortunately, this feature also brakes the slide show on the translated pages. I assume there are ways to fix this in the coding if the website programmer knows what they are doing. Speaking of bad coding, on some pages the font size changes with rollovers which causes the entire page to resize. There are also some coding glitches that cause the page to ‘flutter’ when mousing through rollovers. Now it’s possible that these are OS platform related issues. I use a Mac, and it’s possible to code a site that works better on a Windows machine than on a Mac. However, if a site appears wonky I’ll look at it in a different browser (such as Safari vs Firefox). When the glitches are identical with both browsers (as was the case here) I have generally found they appear on Windows machines as well.

However, ignoring the glitches, the site is rich in content. For example, it has a lot of information that would be useful for parents, including a separate section for “Parental Involvement.”

I was less impressed with the site navigation. It was both ugly, which is forgivable, and sometimes confusing, which is not. It was generally better to stick with the main navigation

and ignore the sitemap information, as in this screenshot where the navigation Home>District Information>District Information gives no clue as to why the same heading is used twice.

Finally, as a former professional photographer, I don’t feel the superintendent’s portrait shows him at his best and hence doesn’t instill the kind of confidence in his professionalism that I believe a portrait like this should convey. 

Overall I’d give the site a C+.

I was anxious to visit the website for the Newark school where I observed last semester: University High School. I had visited the school's website some months back and my memory was of a fairly amateurish site which was a bit long in the tooth. It is one of the smaller Newark schools with only about 400 students in the 7^th through 12^th grades. The school has some great students and faculty, but its emphasis is not technology and my impression was that there is not a large pool of tech-savvy students to work on it.

However, I was pleasantly surprised when I revisited the site and found it has undergone what a redesign. I find the new site pleasant to look at and easy to navigate.

Unfortunately, there are a number of pages still “under construction”. There is a section for teacher websites, however, it appears that only a two teachers have begun playing with it, and that neither of them is actively using it. It may be that some teachers have older websites that are not linked.

One feature I really liked are the Contact pages where Teachers, Administrators, Guidance and Support Staff are all listed with pictures, phone numbers, and email links. Here too, the site appears under construction, as not all staff have pictures. They get trippy spinning question marks instead.

Overall, I think the site has great potential, and I look forward to checking back to see what is done to finish the site and add the content that is promised by all the “Under Construction” signs.