New School Website

[school]

Hi Guy's,

I am wanting to build a new website for the school that I work in. Now currently they have a very basic HTML website that has been made within sharepoint.

We want to re-vamp that and make it a really nice looking and updated website. Something that is child friendly.

I have had a play with joomla using the freee 30 day try with the cloud access but it seems very difficult if I am completely honest!

Does anyone know of any other programs that I could look at or where I could find a template for free that I could use?

Thanks in advance!

[sparkeh]

Have you had a look at the Edugeek Joomla Package?

[speckytecky]

I'd highly recommend EduGeek Joomla as well - it has the added beauty that there are many experts on EduGeek who are fantastic when it comes to helping folk out.

Certainly without that help I'd have never got my site up - for ever grateful.

[SimpleSi]

A lot of here are using joomla as it easier to maintain and update it once you''ve got it going.

But there is a learning path between ftping up some html files and setting Joomla up.

But there a LOT of people here to help out.

You need to find out if you LEA/ISP provides access to an SQL database (and supports PHP but most do that).

If no facilities exist than you need to find a new host with those facilities (and there are people around here who will help out with that - some for free )

As I say, once you learnt Joomla, then it gets easier later on to keep it updated but with a traditional one, you basically have to keep up a large amount of effort or it becomes stagnant.

The look of your site s independant of what you use - you can produce nice looking sites either way
regards

Simon

[school]

Thanks for the help guy's...

I will take another look at joomla...it just seemed a bit complicated at getting new pages up and then putting info on them and getting the pages to look how they should.

Who do you recommend for hosting? DOes anyone know of any free hosting sites for now so that I could have a play?

[apoth0r]

You local authority should already be providing web based hosting for your internet site as they have the .sch.uk domain name.
I have used Joomla for a variety of schools and it has worked out wonderfully. It does take time to get to grips with but once you do it is one of the easiest solutions to use, by far.

[school]

hmm the website that we use at the minute is through the learning platform that is provided from the LA. We don't have an sch.uk address...sorry!

[apoth0r]

You should have one even if it hasn't been realised yet, especially in the EMBC area, where abouts are you located?

[school]

Where in the North East

[webman]

school: Every school should have been assigned their own .sch.uk address - even if you've never used it. Nominet should be able to tell you what yours is. In theory, you should then be able to buy hosting, then ask Nominet to change the IPS tag for the domain to your hosting provider's.

I say in theory, because years ago I tried to resolve the issue for our .sch.uk domain with Nominet but the process failed completely and at the time the support wasn't much help. In the end we just bought our own .net domain and hosted it ourselves.

[school]

ok thanks, i will look into that.

who do you recommend for web hosting and domain names also? we would probably also look to buy a .co.uk domain name.

[webman]

I and others on here highly recommend CS New Media.

[ict_support]

CMS Made Simple - Open Source Content Management System is a fairly nice contetn managment system might be worth comparing with joomla

[Hightower]

I use Ariotek for personal hosting. Great price, service, support - everything. Never had a problem with them.

For the school website I think my colleague uses his reseller account (?) on CS New Media - but I would host internally if I had my way. Everything else is internal (email, moodle, insight etc), and it seems silly for us to have a website hosted externally. Oh well, that's my gripe - not much use here, sorry haha

[webman]

I'd agree with ict_support - CMS Made Simple is another good contender. I'm currently in the process of setting up a basic site for a personal client using CMS Made Simple and it's rather good so far.