Ideas please peeps!

[Halfmad]

I've finally been given some times to develop a proper external website for the school. It'll essentially just be used for giving informations to parents, school rules, policies etc and a little detail about the school itself.

I've to make it from scratch, however rather annoyingly I can't use CGI/PHP or ASP due to our servers that the council use purely serving pages and not supporting these (I can't believe they don't!!!).

Any suggestions for good, clear and easily read layouts or templates?

Take alook at:

http://www.styleshout.com

http://www.freecsstemplates.org/css-templates

http://www.opensourcetemplates.org

http://www.oswd.org/

[GrumbleDook]

I've heard the Frontpage 2000 is good for doing sites like this ...

If you have to work with behind the times servers then use behind the times software

[Halfmad]

Last couple of sites I did were with CMS like Postnuke etc. Seems daft not to offer schools decent web servers with at least PHP support.

Frontpage! I'll struggle along with Dreamweaver for now

Cheers Sysman_MK

[webman]

Add www.openwebdesign.org to the list from SYSMAN_MK.

I'd recommend not using something like Frontpage as it produces hideous, non-standard code that only works properly in one version of IE.

[plexer]

Buy some decent hosting and move the domain name?

Ben

[Halfmad]

Ben - I'd love to but management have said a flat NO to that. I've explained the benefits of it but at the moment it's probably the bottom of their list of priorities. They just want something simple, clear and easy to navigate - which lets face it we don't need scripts to do.

I could just do so much more if I could..

[tosca925]

I've to make it from scratch, however rather annoyingly I can't use CGI/PHP or ASP due to our servers that the council use purely serving pages and not supporting these (I can't believe they don't!!!).

Exact same problem in our LEA,

I used dreamweaver to do ours but since the Joomla edu pack was released i am serously thing of buying hosting. But was quoted £50 for having the DNS changed by the LEA :twisted:

[Halfmad]

Our LEA don't even control any of our I.T. it's all done centrally by a central team, which means frankly that they don't always understand the problems we fact and tackle everything from a very "corporate" viewpoint.

I'd love to put some sort of interaction on the schools new website but doubt there will be any way of doing so thanks to the lack of server side support for PHP/ASP.

[Lee_K_81]

I've to make it from scratch, however rather annoyingly I can't use CGI/PHP or ASP due to our servers that the council use purely serving pages and not supporting these (I can't believe they don't!!!).

Exact same problem in our LEA,

I used dreamweaver to do ours but since the Joomla edu pack was released i am serously thing of buying hosting. But was quoted £50 for having the DNS changed by the LEA :twisted:

Get your own server and ask them to forward web.schoolname.city.sch.uk to your internal server. Then you can control exactly what technologies you want.

[ZeroHour]

Exact same problem in our LEA,

I used dreamweaver to do ours but since the Joomla edu pack was released i am serously thing of buying hosting. But was quoted £50 for having the DNS changed by the LEA :twisted:

Yeh use dreamweaver to create the templates and it will generate html from content you enter. You can change a template and it will update all the pages at once with the new layout. All the output is standard html and its easy enough in the later versions.

[bionic_goldfish]

LEA here did a DNS change and some forwarding and we use an internal server - it's a lot easier when you have control of what web technologies you install. Zend, PHP and MySQL here!

[MicrodigitUK]

Don’t tell the schools management team, they never understand the technologies any way! :twisted:

That’s what I did in my school. I just submitted a change request to the LEAs ISP which is part of RM and got my own server set up in the school asking them to forward the schools domain name to its IP address.

Had a copy of the same web sit setup on the old ISP server and bobs your uncial 6 weeks later when the change request was complete at RMs end it ran from my server. Best thing is the management didn’t even notice.

Now I can use all the cool stuff I set up on my school web server like ASP.NET, PHP and MySQL! I even set it up on the site so that students can access there school home drives from home using a bit of ASP code and management loved it.

[SimpleSi]

Before discovering I could deploy simple CMS sites on our county servers, I just used to make up simple 2-frame (menu and content) sites for most of my schools.

IF you make most of the content into pdfs using a free pdf printer (newsletters, policies,holiday lists), then these display quite well in a frame.

I used Frontpage one but the learning curve vs results wasn't really worth it for a small school with limited information on the website.

I had a look at Dreamweaver and I think I'd used that instead if I'd seen it before Frontpage.

regards

Simon

[logonui]

If you want interaction Flash is another alternative most computers have flash on them now, just dont use the latest flash player build because it will limit your audience