WEBMASTER SKILLS
Quick reference to creating and managing a great website
by Ruth Buchanan
Copyright 1998, all rights reserved
A great website may be hundreds of pages - eg. the Australian Legal Information Institute. It may be fewer pages - the Tomb of the Chihuahua Pharoahs combines humour and information. It may be a single page - the 164 Currency Converter is an elegant and simple use of the www. So size is irrelevant, and greatness is not an absolute quality. Check the listings at the Useless Pages to see what can be done, and often shouldn't, in web page design. So far it doesn't have a category for school web pages.
All around Australia, schools are putting web sites online, or planning to do this, or thinking it should be done, or wondering how it might be done. Chris O'Hanlon of the Spike group of online companies regularly reviews school websites in Hyper High, a column in the Icon IT supplement in the Saturday Sydney Morning Herald. In a recent review, he commented:
My main criticism of this site is the same that I level at nearly every school site I have visited. It is too orderly; to predictable. There is not enough of the creative anarchy that one expects (and wants) from students". (Icon p. 12, SMH 4.4.98)
His interpretation of greatness expects creativity and student involvement: his evaluation also indicates a preference for clear layout, easy navigation, unbroken and current links, good quality information, the effective use of colour.
A great website may be large or small, aimed at a tight audience of school and community or aimed at connecting a school community to the wider world. One always hopes, with every website, that it will be 'great', but how to evaluate this? In terms of the purpose of the site, its aims. The creation of any website is a process: you will need skills and time - a lot of time - and access to technology, hardware and software.
The information process outlined in the NSW Department of Education document, Information Skills in the School, involves six steps, and these are as relevant to website creation as they are to other research assignments:
A webmaster needs to consider:
Forget the technology, to begin with you need pen and paper. The entrancing world of cyberspace has a hypnotic quality that traps the unwary - it's easier to start your fingers dancing on the keyboard than stop and think with pen and paper. The defining step is crucial to website creation. Otherwise someone will say, "Just a simple web page," and it's only after you embark that you realise it's a long voyage, and Ulysses would never have traded places with you.
"Just a simple web page". Why? Who's it for? What's it for? Why is it necessary? Are these goals achievable within available resources of time, skills, technology, money? What resources are available?
My own experience with the first web page I made for my school mirrors, I have learned, the experience of other people and other schools. Another teacher and I were sent on a course to learn HTML. The pages I built as a result of that course were handbuilt, every <A HREF> <H1> etc typed in character by character. Images - jpegs and gifs - were mostly nicked from other websites, once we'd been shown how easy this is to do. The design was plain but clear. The front page had a picture of the school, the vision statement, an email link, a counter and links to pages about the staff, student achievements, school facilities, the library and, a few weeks later, an Aboriginal Studies page composed with the teacher and class. The site was located with a local ISP with whom the school had an account. All the coding and work associated with the site was done out of school hours, over many afternoons.
What was the purpose of the site? Being there. School publicity material could now include a URL. What had I learned? Enough HTML to be able to tinker, which is useful; how to work an ftp program; the importance of interlinking web pages so they work successfully together. And I'd learned that a program which could shortcut the laborious shiftupshiftdown typing of handbuilt HTML would be a very good thing. I tried a test copy of HotDog, but the program I have used most is Claris HomePage, because that program came with the NSW Department of School Education's internet computer, which is located in the school library.
Apart from the Aboriginal Studies page, the rest of the site was an online brochure. With the Aboriginal Studies page, I tried to do more. Its content was decided with the teacher and class. It attempted to generate interaction - as well as giving a brief outline of the course content, it provided useful links the class had used and some questions the students hoped to have answered by visitors to the page. I emailed for permission to use the images on the page. It was trying to be more than a brochure; it would have worked better if we'd been proactive in making contact with other classes and schools, instead of waiting for them to find the page.
That site no longer exists: it breached copyright and breached the DSE regulations concerning school websites which arrived some months after it first went online. The computer with all the information for connecting to that ISP had a major breakdown, so updating was problematic, and finding time was a challenge, too. The current school website is smaller - a home page and another page with school information. Its design is clean, employing anchors and tables, and it was made using Claris HomePage. It serves as an online brochure. The next version will be more complex and ambitious: but this story of beginning is the story of beginning for many schools. One or two people, working outside school hours, learning as they go. Don't feel that you have to begin with Ben Hur: but how might you begin?
Consider the purpose of your site. Here, in no particular order, are some purposes a school website might serve:
There are many stakeholders in that list, and many agendas.
So begin on paper. Talk to the stakeholders - Principal, executive, teachers, students. Having a structure in place which can accommodate a range of those possibilities - even if you don't try to do everything at the start - avoids the problem of a site growing like Topsy without a clear structure. Most school websites at present are, I tend to find, the product of the passion of one or two individuals, using their own time. If you're setting yourself up as that individual, don't make your job harder than you need to. The St Columba's Springwood school website, which is extensive and admirable, was planned out on paper for months before the actual creation and uploading of pages began and has largely been done in his own time by Tristan Forsyth.
The Sydney Morning Herald Business Section on 24 March, 1998, included a report, Builders trapped in the Web from which the following quotes come:
A crisis of confidence has engulfed the people who build Australia's web sites...Now it's being asked to show ordinary businesses how Web sites can pull in customers and raise profits. And it's not sure it has the answers....Ms Dale McCarthy of multimedia agency X/M Harrow, put it bluntly...Web developers still had "people who are technically excellent, building art on the Web that doesn't do anything for people's business"...a site must meet clearly defined goals, she says.."I think people assumed that publishing was really simple," said Mr Simon Van Wyk, of Hothouse Interactive. "I know I did." Now he has discovered that "the skills involved in publishing are complicated."
Clearly defined goals. Complicated skills. Not impossible: but without clear and realistic goals, if a commercial enterprise finds effective website construction to be a challenge, it's unlikely to be different in a school.
The purposes listed above fall into two main categories: the brochure and the curriculum page. It may well be that a brochure-type page - sporting results, for example - may be a computing or PDHPE project, so the categories are not unrelated. Think big: but begin small. Develop a website plan to guide the overall structure. A proliferation of school pages on a multiplicity of sites (ISPs, Geocities etc) is less desirable than one hybrid school site accommodating these within a clear structure, providing options.
You need someone to be in charge. It was the camel, I believe, which was designed by a committee. There is a need for a webmaster, someone with an overall view of the project and enough knowledge to avoid trouble. This teacher also needs to know the secret passwords for procedures such as ftp, uploading files: though some students have extensive knowledge I would argue against giving them control of such critical procedures. Most often, the situation appears to be at present, school websites are the product of the passion of an individual or small group, sometimes all staff, sometimes all students, sometimes both. Web sites take time - whose? when? how? Schools are tribal, especially high schools where faculties are the tribes, and a web site will involve many stakeholders and cross-faculty support. Negotiation. Compromise. Consideration. Shared ownership, various agendas. Consequent headaches and frustrations, as well as shared triumphs.
In considering the process, you need to consider the following:
Webmaster skills: a checklist. Some of these skills are vital to begin with; some are later options:
Sources of information to learn and develop these skills include professional development courses, continuing education programs, books, internet-focused periodicals, newspapers and the multiplicity of tutorials available online. The process of developing a web page and site is a learning process, and skill development is most effective at point of need.
While some schools will choose to see the website as an integral part of the curriculum, in others where the site largely functions as an online prospectus and information source to the parents and community, a choice some schools are making and continue to make is to outsource the creation and maintenance of the web site. At least one major Sydney private school is planning to employ someone part-time on a daily basis to maintain the school's website.
It is not the purpose of this paper to deal with the nuts and bolts of HTML, but here are some brief observations on the design and presentation of your product:
COPYRIGHT
Copyright is theft, and a crime: school sites using illegal material are vulnerable to prosecution. All content on a school's site - text, images, backgrounds, everything - should be checked to ensure copyright is not being breached. Some net sites offer 'copyright-free' graphics - but these may have been collected illegally or without permission. If in doubt, don't use it. Some net sites offer original graphics which may be free for nonprofit use - email. Ask for permission. Print the permission email. File it.
Students should give the same respect to the work of others as they expect for their own original work. You may wish to have written permission from students for the use of their own work, whether images or text, and it is good practice to put a copyright statement on each page to cover original work. The Australian Copyright Council has a web site you may wish to consult.
PRIVACY AND SAFETY ISSUES
The NSW Department of School Education issued a Memorandum to Principals (97/2324) regarding School Publishing on the Internet. (It is not available online as this paper is being prepared). Whether or not your school falls within the jurisdiction of the DSE, this memorandum provides a valuable guide to the consideration of privacy and safety which must accompany the creation and maintenance of a school website. (A more extensive document, Internet Publishing Guidelines for Schools, is in draft form but is not yet available).
Initial requirements outlined in this document are threefold:
Unlike a report in a local newspaper, or a school newsletter sent home to parents, a website is available to anyone online, worldwide. Students and staff have a right to privacy. The DSE memorandum requires involvement of the Principal in reviewing and approving site content, evaluating it in terms of appropriateness, quality, copyright clearance, maintenance/updating and to ensure it complies with the principles of privacy and safety.
Principles of privacy and safety which should be considered include:
Such requirements may be more severe than required or preferred by other schools/systems, but considering them alerts you to the existence of potential problems. The St Columba's website (the school is under the jurisdiction of the Parramatta Catholic Education Office) includes student pages, such as a section on spirituality with student photographs and (first) names next to their contributions.
AUTHORITY
In publishing student work online, it is vital that the information be accurate and of a good standard. Publishing online for the sake of publishing online is not enough. We want the sites our students use to be reliable, so the same requirement rests on us so that others can rely on our veracity. Providing bibliographies of online and hard copy resources shows respect for the users of the information and encourages your students to develop good research habits and avoid plagiarism. The Website Directory lists the Classroom Connect page which advises on how to cite online resources.
THE FIRST PAGE
The first page of your site is crucial. It's the beginning, the welcome, the entry point: and the number of schools who assume that what visitors want most of all is to see a large image of the front of the school is very great. You can structure your site so such images are available, but consider the site from the point of view of the visitor. Why have they come? What do they want? How can they find it efficiently?
The first page can be relatively static, or it can change regularly to connect visitors and repeat visitors to new features, perhaps through a column highlighting the new. A 'new' column demands regular updating. The first page should provide clear navigation of the site and basic school contact details. It should encourage visitors to explore the site, and help them find sections they may be seeking with efficiency and simplicity. Here, the best design is more likely to be unobtrusive.
The size of the screen should be taken into account when assembling this page. Scrolling from side to side can be irritating. Draft out the page then view it in a browser to see what does fit in that first view. Text cut in half and images cut in half are irritating to the viewer.
To get ideas for your own first page, look at other school sites and see what you admire. Why do you like the ones you like? Look at some commercial sites and see what you admire. Why do you like the ones you like? How have they helped you find your way around the site? How have they used colour and design? How can you apply these principles to your school's web site?
LOCATION
You may choose to locate your site on the school's own computer, or on an ISP's computer. Locating it at an ISP means that their computer is online and available twentyfour hours a day, not the school's; and it provides an additional layer of security for the data. If your school is in a lightning strike area, it may also be preferable to have the website located offsite.
Files can be transferred online, using ftp - file transfer protocol. Depending on your ISP this can be a simple process or a complicated one; they should be able to give you relevant software and assistance. This is a strong argument for beginning with one simple page, maybe a couple of images and basic text. A page like that will require the upload of several files - the web page file plus all the image files used. When the page is uploaded, you will need to check all links online to ensure the page works. You can retrieve and replace files using ftp. The crucial point for websites remains the need to have everything, every file, in the same folder so you avoid broken images.
ISPs commonly grant users around 5 Mb of storage space and one email account; they may offer additional features such as counters. Files involving mostly text will take a long time to reach 5Mb; a few pages of the school sports carnival photographs may exhaust the available storage space more quickly. Paying more to buy more megabytes of storage is an option, which may also allow you more email addresses. The usual format for a website at an ISP is http://www.ispname.com.au/~schoolname . If your school wants to be http://www.schoolname.edu.au this involves the purchasing of a domain name. (More information on domain names: see item 1 in the Additional Wisdom section below).
CURRICULUM RELEVANCE
How can your school's website belong within the school's educational program, in its making and in its operation as a link to and with the world?
The answers to this are as varied as your staff, your students and the availability of necessary technology and software. Options include:
INTERACTION
If you build it, he will come (from the film, Field of Dreams)
It's not good enough to just set up a web site, because there is no guarantee people will go there. That's just like putting an elaborate video display out there in the Simpson Desert - the creative and technology can be great, but nobody will go there. (Cameron Wall, Web site production co-ordinator, quoted in Stephens, Craig, "Web developers - beware of cowboys", Australian netguide, March 1988, pp. 50-52)
So how do you get the visitors? Go back to your purpose - for the site, for individual pages. What are you offering? School publicity, advertisements, flyers, newsletters and other such avenues may alert your local community to the existence of your school's website, but to get revisits from your school community, and visits from an audience beyond this, you'll have to make yourself known and offer something they want.
Most people set a page on their browser to be the start page, and the page they return to as Home. For many, this is a search engine, or a compilation page with most of their favourite sites. Could your school site offer a start page of particular usefulness to your students - not necessarily the first page, but another one with search engine links and other useful information (the planning and construction of which could be a valuable student exercise)? This sort of option targets your main audience as your school's community. Is that the audience you mainly want? Is that why the website exists? - for your students, or for the world? Or both?
For your own students, let alone the rest of the world, the site has to be able to be located. There are a number of options available to publicise your site on the www. Getting listed in major search engines such as Yahoo!, AltaVista, Lycos, Infoseek, Anzwers, WebWombat and Excite undoubtedly helps you to be found. Australian netguide has two tutorials canvassing this option - see the Website Directory for the URLs. If the search engine allows a brief description - as, for example, Yahoo! does, then take advantage of this, but do not write something which will date too quickly. Remember that you can list individual pages as well as the main index page, so if your students have made a fine page on the Eureka Stockade or the Wreck of the Batavia, then consider listing this separately. You can also use meta tag and keyword options on your pages as a guide to content.
Ensuring the school's listing in printed state or national schools directories includes the URL is another option, and there are online directories of school sites such as the Web 66 International Directory of Schools. More locally, is there a site in your area which will include a listing? Links pages can be useful for exchanging the favour - you list me, I'll list you - but schools also need to consider the implications of this form of advertising and publicity exchange with commercial sites. The NSW Department of School Education has a policy statement and guidelines which should be considered in this context, Sponsorship of School and Departmental Activities (1991).
The internet undoubtedly offers faster, easy connection and communication, but it is worth considering to which extent your webmaster, or whoever checks the email, wishes to field worldwide email. If one class develops a fine site for tourists, who deals with the email which may come? will you have an email management strategy and plan in place - or do you put links on the page to sites which can field such requests?
Email is one form of interaction. To generate further interaction there are other options available. Forms can be used to collect data - but you need to consider why a visitor would wish to fill in a form -what does it offer for visitors? Postcards are another strategy option for generating repeat business; the Interflora.com.au site is a superb example of the use of a postcard-style option (in their case, e-flowers) to generate repeat visits. Some postcard software is available online to nonprofit organisations at minimal cost (eg. Personal Postcards). Student work could provide the images; and in sending a postcard, the visitor provides an email address, so this can be a way of monitoring site traffic.
EVALUATION
How do you evaluate the success of a web page or site? You can look at other school sites and see what they offer, what they do, but don't necessarily do a straight comparison between their site and yours. Go back to your purpose - does it do the job it was aiming to do? - serve as a prospectus, communicate to the school community, link your students to relevant resources? Success is not measured in counter-hits alone, seductive as they can be. Greatness is a relative quality. Apparently the most visited sites on the web are the ones we would not wish our students to be visiting....
Evaluation is an ongoing process. Set up an evaluation and maintenance schedule within your planning of the process of website creation.
Evaluation and maintenance may include questions such as:
Visit other schools' websites and learn from their successes and problems to improve your school's web page.
Creating and maintaining a great website will take more time than you may believe possible. It also offers many options to your students and you. With clear and thoughtful planning, the availability of time and technology, patience in page and site preparation and ongoing evaluation and maintenance, a school website can be an undoubted asset to the school community. For now, we are just beginning to discern the possibilities. I wish you well.
This paper is copyright Ruth Buchanan 1998, all rights reserved
- a list of ideas from fellow teachers, suggested by subscribers to OZTL_NET (this list does not pretend to be exhaustive and is in alphabetical order; if you would like to suggest other sites, please do.)
I would like to acknowledge all the members of the OZTL_NET listserv who contributed ideas and showed their interest in this paper.
Horey, Jeremy, "Net shape: Web may be wider than we realised " Australian, Living IT section, 14 April, 1998 - article on the effectiveness of search engines and the scale of the internet. ("The search engines are the most popular sites on the World Wide Web. They are also the best supported by advertising. But are they as good as they claim to be?" )
Information skills in the school, Sydney: NSW Department of School Education, 198?
Walker, David, “Builders trapped in the Web”, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 March, 1998 p. 24
“School publishing on the internet”, Memorandum to Principals 97/234, NSW Department of School Education, August 1997
Stephens, Craig, “Web Developers - beware of cowboys”, Australian Netguide, March 1988, pp50-52 (at the time of writing I have not been able to locate this online)
An excellent online glossary is:
Glossary of PC and Internet Technology http://homepages.enterprise.net/jenko/Glossary/G.htm
The following list is far briefer.
This paper is copyright Ruth Buchanan 1998, all rights reserved
This section is for you, the reader. What can you contribute? What is the most useful advice you've received about web page creation and maintenance? Is there another great school web site you'd like people to find? The best html site you know? Email your ideas and I'll add them here.
At the conference, a delegate indicated that a domain name with .edu has to include your state (eg. Jamison's would be www.jamison.nsw.edu.au). Advice from an ISP is that such a domain name for an educational institution "is only free in that there are no registration fees imposed by third parties for you to obtain the domain name. Penrith Netcom will however still charge you $150. The PNC fee covers the setup and establishment of a Primary and Secondary Domain name servers, which is required and a prerequisite to being allocated a domain name by the governing body AUNIC. There is also an ongoing monthly fee of $30 for the Virtual Web server that will be required to serve you new domain and web pages to the world. This Virtual Web Server is a completely different setup to the ~jamison server you are currently using."
Email from Luke McKinnon, Penrith Netcom, 28 May 1998.
Click here to return to the section of this paper discussing domain names.
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