School Website Design

There are a lot of things to consider when approaching a website design for a school. The site needs to represent your school's brand (color, logo, etc.) and it needs to provide a welcoming and navigateable enviornment for both newcomers and consistent users (parents, staff, and students). A custom website design and a theme website design would both provide valuable opportunities to achieve these goals. The route that you choose depends greatly on your functionality goals and your budget/timeline.

Custom website design.  If you're budget allows for it, a custom website design is definitely the way to go. It will give you the most flexiblity with custom graphics, textures, and layout; as well as set your school website apart from others in your area. In some cases, the functionality you desire in your website forces our hand in choosing the custom design route. Custom can just do more to support development needs than theme designs. A custom design will perfectly fit your functionality requirements; while when implementing a theme website, you need to build the functionality to fit the template.

Theme website design.  We understand that schools do not always have the budget that allows us to build a custom website. However, we still want to work with you to enhance your online presence. In these instances, we can pull in a theme website design, or predesigned site. You can still achieve a lot of the branding requirements that all school websites need (logo and color scheme), but themes do limit you in some cases. A theme may also be a suitable option if you do not need a lot of custom functionality; or if your custom functionality can fit within a theme we can save cost by skipping the custom graphic design.

Responsive web design.  People are searching for your school online, but not just from a desktop or laptop computer. These days, more than likely people are searching for your school via a tablet or smartphone. Your website needs to be optmized for these various devices, and a repsonsive web design will accomplish just that. A responsive design gives your website the ability to adapt, or respond, to any device's screen size, which eliminates the need for users to zoom in and scroll side to side just to read your content. Both custom and theme website designs can be made responsive.

The majority of school websites are in need of some custom website development. It really depends on each school's specific situation and current needs. The beauty of your site being built on the Site Management Console (SMC) is that our team of web developers can build custom apps and plug-ins very efficiently, now and down the road as your technology needs progress.

Our team can build just about anything that you feel is needed for your site to improve functionality and efficiency. If you bring us an idea we can make it a reality, and if you bring us a frustration we can help you discover a solution.

All websites are not created equal. Each of our clients has different needs and different budgets, so we work to create effective solutions that fit within budget restraints. Some of school website development items we have implemented in the past include:

• Google Calendar Integration
• School Board Agenda App
• Blog/Newsfeed
• Classroom and Teacher Pages
• Image Gallery and Video Integration

Classroom Pages

Streamline teacher to parent and teacher to student communication with Five Technology's custom classroom pages, or teacher pages. Teachers are able to manage a specific page for each class they teach, where they can add homework assignments, upload videos and photo albums, provide important documents to parents, upload monthly newsletters, and much more.

There is no limit on the functionality of this app, it all depends on what your teachers need to better communicate with students and parents. Maybe they want to host online disucssions about a specific reading, or turn it into an area where students can login and submit homework assignments. The sky is the limit with Five's classroom pages.

Google Apps Integration

We can integrate Google Apps into your webiste that will provide high level functionality at a substantially lower cost than if we were to build these apps from the ground up. Google Apps are cloud-based productivity applications that will help parents, students, and staff connect and collaborate from anywhere on any device.

• Google Calendar.  Easily create, manage, and schedule event times for everyone. You can easily manage different calendar types from one calendar and have all events automatically update to the school website. Create calendars for academic, athletic, and any other type of school related event. Parents can even sync these calendars with theirs to have instant access to any event updates.
• Gmail.  Email powered by Google that provides your staff and students with 30 GB of storage, offline support, custom email addresses (name@yourschool.edu), and much more.
• Drive.  Create, share, and collaborate on documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and even custom web forms that are stored in the cloud. Share them and have access to them from anywhere (great for student's group projects.)

School Board Agenda App

Creating, printing, and distributing school board meeting agendas can be a real pain. Five Technology's custom school board agenda app can help ease the pain by eliminating a lot of the hassle. Choose from a variety of agenda templates based on the different types of meetings. Add items, sub-items, and even sub-items to those sub-items to create a full agenda in just a few clicks of the mouse.

Publish the finished agenda to the website where school board members and meeting attendees can download it, or email it directly to the necessary people.

Use the agenda app to easily add ammendments, notes, comments, and more during the meeting. Then publish these to create the minutes and records of the meeting. You can then publish these to the school website. It even has functionality to add a video if you record your meetings.

The school board agenda app is a great tool to enhance the school's transparency to the community. It also will save you time, money, and paper!

If your school staff desires the ability to control your school website design with an easy to use, flexible and scalable content management system, then the Site Management Console (SMC) is the solution for you.

Our web based school CMS solution powers your school website with a variety of powerful functionalities wrapped in an easy to use interface. All of your school website management will be done through this content management system. The SMC also is used to manage documents and any custom web application, or plug-ins that are built into the website.

Your staff clan easily be trained to manage and edit your school website through this content management system. No programming experience is needed to make content changes. Five's plug-ins make adding content, images, video, and more simple and easy.

The SMC adds dynamic, interactive and advanced functionality to your school website. It also puts your star in control of it. Just some of the SMC functions our clients leverage on their school website through this CMS include:

• Basic content and image management
• Contact forms, information collection forms, and surveys
• Document management and downloads
• School board agenda creation & distribution (Agenda App)
• Image galleries and slideshows
• Easy to embed YouTube/Vimeo videos
• eCommerce capabilities (tuition, lunch money, donations, etc.)
• Calendar integration
• Account management with usernames & passwords
• Advanced search features and filters 

Having a person on staff build your website can save you money, but sometimes it can only get you so far. In most cases these days, school website needs go above and beyond what your average IT person can accomplish on their own. When high standard becomes the reality for your school's site, you need to partner with a website design company that can get bring the website to the next level.

Choosing to put a new website into play for a school can be a big committment. You want to make sure that you are choosing someone that you can trust to get the job done and to be with you for the long haul. Five Technology has been around since the early stages of the Internet, and to be blunt, we aren't going anywhere. We will not only build you an amazing school website, we'll be around for a long time to help you support it.

Let's get the conversation rolling!

The Challenge

When Five Technology first approached Delano Public Schools for a school web design, its website and content managemetn system (CMS) had minimal functionality, and its layout was mediocre at best. According to Traci Lawman, the Delano School District Communications Coordinator, "Our old school website was not interactive and was cumbersome to work with." Its past school website did not provide the best means of communication between teachers and parents/students. Also, it did not portray the school district and the community as well as it could have.

Delano Public Schools was in ineed of a major website redesign that would enhance the image of its schools, community, and culture, as well as serve as an effective communication tool. Delano wanted a custom website design along with some neat custom web development features to give the school website the functionality it needed to link the community together.

The Solution

We set out to accomplish many things in this web project, mainly we wanted to enhance the overall web presence of Delano Public Schools. We would do this by implementing the following elements into a the new school website:

• Custom website design.  Give the school website a unique look and feel, as well as a layout design that would be easy to navigate, but powerful enough to support a lot of content.
• Custom website development.  Build the functionality the school needed to turn its website from a static piece of content to a robust communication tool.
• Content management.  Build the school website on a platform that would put the power in the hands of the site admins--easy to use, but flexible enough to support the site's unique features.

The Results

We built a great school website, that surpassed Delano's expectations. We created a unique design that represented the Delano Public Schools culture and community. We also provided a easy-to-navigate layout and mega-navigation functionality to make any page accessible in three clicks or less. Our team of web developers built some powerful functionality into the backbone of the site, which made it easier for faculty and staff to update classroom pages, manage content, and even create/distribute/share school board meeting agendas.

When the school website design launched, Delano noticed many great results. The school administration received several comments from parents and students about how easy the site was to use. Paul Ludwig, Technology Specialist at Delano Public Schools, mentioned, "We have had many comments from our community about the ease of use and theyr eally have enjoyed the new look and feel...Our staff also enjoys the ease of the content management for classroom pages, which has enhanced communication between teachers and families." When a tool is made to be user-friendly and easy on the eyes, site usage typically goes up.