School Websites and Word Press

[AceDaz]

Hi All

 

We are looking around for various options for our school website, once of the options is to self host on Wordpress.

 

Has anyone else looked into this?

 

As there are a lot of templates for Wordpress, does anyone have any recommendations as to which ones for us to look at? Working websites would be advantageous as well

 

Many thanks

[MattDLEA]

I do web design and used wordpress for all the schools I have done... Its easy for them to then update and do what the like with.

I use Vidahost for hosting the site its not that expensive and saves all the hassle of internal hosting.

 

PM Incoming

[has]

check out themeforest. They have tons of templates for most cms and for static html.

[pcstru]

We run our website on wordpress and host internally using Ubuntu Server. It's fairly easy to set up and host on a LAMPS or WAMPS stack and seems to require very little technical/back end maintenance.

 

http://www.rockettheme.com/ might be worth a look for themes.

[VeryPC_Anthony_L]

Hi @darrenmcginnis

 

Can I ask what you mean by self host, Do you mean on site web server or just run your own site but on wordpress?

Personally I would suggest using an external hosting firm, the cost of web hosting is very cheap. Using wordpress is a great idea, there are lots of themes out there both free and paid. As someone who does web development it is very easy to look at the pre-made themes and think that looks nice. The truth is it does look nice as it has been setup with all the right content to make it look nice. If you can afford to use a designer or developer I would highly suggest using one as they will be able to build a site that has the right functions and elements and make it look right from the off.

 

Hope that helps

[MattDLEA]

As Anthony said... Great themes can get pulled to bits and look rubbish if the content is not right. Half my battle is getting content from people then you get the other argument of well the school colour is Red ( its nearly always a god awful primary colour) so the site has to be that colour.

[fiendishlyclever]

You need someone to keep an eye on your install to check for updates etc. It generally updates itself but plug-ins need a click (and these are the biggest security risk so user as few as possible). I personally love wordpress but we only use it (hosted on wordpress.com) for our news feed at work (I have my own sites)

[howartp]

We've just rewritten ours onto Wordpress, hosted internally on IIS.

 

It's not public yet, but http://vle.southcraven.org will get you there for now. Might be slightly out of date.

[SteveM555]

We also use Wordpress, I made a custom theme for it though.

 

Wordpress is easy to use, plenty of useful plugins (although be careful, some of the smaller, less updated plugins can cause security problems) - We've also found that we had to create a responsive layout as a lot of traffic was from phones and tablets.