School Websites - what do people do?

[mikes]

Hi, at the moment I am being told we need to save money in IT which I am sure is a familiar story to most of you.

 

At the moment we pay a firm called Green Schools Online to host and build our website. We basically bought a template, and our staff log in through the webinterface and update the website that way. We haven't had any problems with them, it works well and their support has always been good and if we had no budget issues we probably wouldn't be changing.

 

My question is; what do other schools do regarding their website? in terms of designing it, hosting it etc. Do any schools host their own wordpress sites or things like that? We have our own domain name, servers, Internet link etc so we could host it in house if we wanted it to, we would just have to find someone to build us a website. I can build websites but it would be a lot of work, I wouldn't have enough time to do it being only part time.

Do people still pay for third party hosting or have times changed ?

[IrritableTech]

We had our site designed by an external company who also hosted it the first year. Sadly when the snow hit their servers couldn’t cope so we’ve ended up hosting it ourselves on a vps - we plan to host a few other of our MAT schools as well.

 

Hosting on-site was an option for us but as our website is the main form of bulk communication in the event of a major issue we decided off site is better... School is closed due to an ongoing Power cut - oh.

[3s-gtech]

Built, designed and hosted in-house for us. I know I'm about to go through the whole vagueness of "Make it better. Look at $site, it has scrolling banners!" again soon, but I have it running nicely, responsive design, up-to-date and quick for me to work on. We use Joomla for our main site, which is a bit of a beast to get into but I love it, Wordpress is excellent but I find it's less powerful and more automated. That can be a real asset though.

 

Out website survived the hammering of snow days - the VM it's on isn't amazing but it is reverse proxied which gives some caching capability.

[ADMaster]

I host our Joomla site in house. I'm working on an upgrade / redesign with a free template for next year.

 

In the past I've compared Joomla WordPress Drupal and tikiwiki

 

Tikiwiki had potential but my website editors are familiar with Joomla.

Drupal was most powerful but most complex. WordPress was most easy / user friendly but not as custmizable / powerful. Joomla is a balance.

[jthompson]

Hosting it off-site, even if you administer it all yourselves still, seems sensible. If you have a disaster affecting the school, you'll want a website that's still online and unaffected.

Personally, I'd want to pay someone to do all the work of securing it, backup and recovery, etc. There'll be plenty of firms you could approach to try and reduce your bills.

[ewanc1234]

We paid a company to build it for us, we then host it on our onsite web server.

[Meldrew]

We host ours locally using WordPress and use social media in case of disaster/power cuts, etc. Its the first place parents are going to look if the website is down...

[jmcdermott]

We hosted joomla ourselves for a few years then moved to wordpress which we designed the template ourselves. Now we have moved our wordpress to 123reg hosted platform, taking into the account bandwidth usage/powercosts for a 24/7 running machine, and reliability it just makes sense to host it else where. Backing up is a little trickier on the hosted solution.

[TwistedHelixis]

All my schools just use Google Sites, its free, has auto templates and is so easy even the staff can keep it all updated.

[mikes]

Thanks for your replies all, they are very helpful. I think I will look into both inhouse Joomla, and also Google Sites. Our School also has social media accounts so in a snow emergency we can just log in there if needs be - that is typically where school news is posted first.

 

I read recently that Microsoft are closing down their Google Sites equivalent? that is what makes me a bit nervous about going to all of the trouble of creating a Google website, only to find out that Google have "changed our priorities" and that "Google Sites no longer reflects the vision Google has going forwards" and they end up shutting it down.

[TwistedHelixis]

Google Sites is a core service and is guaranteed to stay. The G Suite version is not free for businesses but is for schools etc

 

EDIT - They could always make Sites unusable but it will always be there.

Edited July 14, 2018 by TwistedHelixis

[ITGURU]

We are moving our sites back to on site servers using wordpress like we used to. they got moved externally but with more downtime and issues than when hosted on site and company wanting 70 quid to add a new tab it's a joke. if a major disaster on site just change the dns records to point to another server elsewhere. their website couldn't cope with the adverse weather whereas onsite we were fine in previous years. Edited July 14, 2018 by ITGURU

[synaesthesia]

On site wordpress here. Used to use Joomla but it was just a ballache start to finish, however although it's kept up to date, the website is very much secondary to social media for actual outreach; its primary purpose is OFSTED box ticking and hosting of files (letters home etc)

[mavhc]

Over 30% of websites use Wordpress, or something equally crazy, so real question is: what reasons are there for not using Wordpress?

 

Random cheapish hosting will do. So many plugins, I added one to create a manifest file so my website is now an app, in my android app list and everything, another to auto rotate jpegs, one for emailing web forms, another for syncing a calendar, adding http headers for Content Security Policy, One Signal for sending out notifications.

[Sylv3r]

We previously hosted our joomla servers ourselves, but as we are quite rural we had several school closures due to no electricity during high winds etc, and we generally text the parents regarding school school closures but then provide further information on our website - as our website would therefore be down in the event of a powercut we decided to move to WIX.

[Sonic007]

There are some terrible design agencies doing sites for schools. Unfortunately our SLT team like our website even though it looks like it was designed in 1998.

 

A good customised Wordpress template and your own hosting and you will do a much better job.