People are often surprised to learn we are not exclusive with our website software preferences. Just like speaking other languages lets us better understand our multicultural world, speaking more than one web language helps us better create websites in our digital world.
Joe Spinazola, the technology director at RSU 25, only had two requirements for the new website. The first was the website had to run on Joomla. The second was it had to incorporate purple and gold, the school colors, into the design. Yeah, we could work with that!
The header image, welcome message, and sidebar content display different items for different schools. The overall design is carried forth between all the schools in the district.
To give the website a unified feel, the same top navigation, gold and purple color scheme, and general layout were used on all the pages. The top menu would allow website visitors to get back and forth from the different school pages easily. The familiar layout also signaled that whether they were looking at the elementary lunch menu, the high school sports scores, or the school board minutes from last month that they were on the same unified website.
Allowing for different header images and different sidebar content let the individual schools stand out. For example, when looking at the middle school page, the header displays middle school students and activities; the welcome message below the thumbnails can display a custom message; and the side bar shows information like the ‘BMS Breakfast Menu’ and ‘BMS Photo Gallery’.
Like any project of this size, some general housecleaning was required. While the new site has over 400 pages of content, this reorganization allowed the school district to get rid of old files they no longer needed to access and organize the most important items so they could be easily found and viewed by website visitors.
Bucksport Schools had a variety of content to display including pdf files, photo galleries, and a Google Calendar of events. Modules and short code within the content allowed this most important information for each school in the district to be displayed on the school’s main page.
RSU 25 is fortunate that Joe’s technology team handles the website maintenance and content posting. That said, the school district needed a simple way to be able to add events to different calendars that teachers could use. Since many school districts are using Google Apps in Education, Google Calendars were used to solve this. Teachers and others who don’t regularly post to the website can still add events that will display on the website.
Congratulations to RSU 25 on their new site!
Breaking Even would like to thank Olseman Development and Svaha LLC who partnered with us on this massive project.