4 Ways School Districts Leverage Websites
Websites are an important tool that school districts can use to reach audiences and represent the activities of their students and staff. Having a secure website platform to publish messages and update stakeholders in an approved visual format means that school districts can be agile in their communications and better promote their initiatives to the community.
Do school districts need web developers to build websites?
Website development doesn’t have to be a complex process that requires technical resources and expertise. With Squarespace Enterprise, school districts can launch and maintain beautiful and effective websites without a developer or creative agency (saving the high prices often demanded for website builds and the impractical wait times often required for making site updates). Schools can publish landing pages quickly on their own from professional template designs or even create original templates for exclusive use within their district. With templates, school districts can ensure schools use consistent (and approved) branding and visual elements across their sites.
Having such a user-friendly and efficient way to manage online communications opens up countless opportunities for school districts to promote themselves and improve relations with families and taxpayers.
4 ways school districts can use websites to improve their community relations
1. Quickly disseminate time-sensitive updates and emergency information
Whether alerting students’ caregivers to snow delays or publishing press releases about emergencies or other newsworthy developments, school communications teams can leverage their websites to do so. While social media channels may make sense for blasting bite-sized updates, websites offer a permanent home to host lengthier communications and direct audiences to visit for more information.
2. Show real-time progress on school district projects
Proposing curriculum changes or undergoing major building renovations? School districts keep their communities informed of long-term projects and goals by showing them the overall vision and providing real-time news. Schools can readily post photos of construction blueprints and progress, publish video updates from the superintendent’s desk, and blog about challenges, so that stakeholders can better empathize and support.
3. Celebrate hard-working students and staff
Has the beloved seventh-grade social studies teacher won a national award, or has the stellar high school swim team earned a spot in the state championships? Schools no longer have to rely on email newsletters and community newspapers to profile notable accomplishments. Websites are an ideal place for schools to share proud moments, highlighting what they want, when they want.
4. Showcase special interest groups
With all that academic clubs, sports teams, and PTO volunteers strive to accomplish, don’t they deserve their own online forums? School districts can empower extracurricular groups and their faculty advisors to manage their own web pages about team events and learnings. Whether they’re standalone microsites or landing pages that link from within the main website ecosystem, schools can give special interest groups an online home for interacting with each other and publishing updates. These microsites or landing pages allow the greater community to see the passion within a school district, and they can serve as an important recruitment tool for finding new group members.
How can schools collaborate on websites securely?
Squarespace Enterprise works in conjunction with existing ClassLink technology, empowering staff to distribute updates and time-sensitive messages. Squarespace Enterprise’s ClassLink Single Sign-On integration restricts website editing access to district employees, and its team collaboration features provide school administrators a way to assign contributor role permissions and monitor updates.
With Squarespace Enterprise page drafts, school employees have a safe way to test changes to current website pages without affecting a site’s public display. Employees can create private draft versions of any webpage and share proposed edits with collaborators under password protection before publishing.
