Website maintenance across a MAT

[pete]

For those of you responsible for websites across multi-academy trusts, how do you handle branding, design, accessibility and maintenance across multiple websites?

 

I've just been through seven sites, reviewing both the content and the technology and I'm now in a position to make some recommendations. Some of those will be related to ensuring content is updated in a timely manner, others will be about the backend, layout and branding.

 

I'd like the same CMS across all the sites provided. In terms of style, layout and branding I want the schools to retain their character/identity but have rules around menu depth (for example), accessibility and "things X.Y & Z must be present in a predictable location".

 

What did you do?

[DGardiner]

For those of you responsible for websites across multi-academy trusts, how do you handle branding, design, accessibility and maintenance across multiple websites?

 

I've just been through seven sites, reviewing both the content and the technology and I'm now in a position to make some recommendations. Some of those will be related to ensuring content is updated in a timely manner, others will be about the backend, layout and branding.

 

I'd like the same CMS across all the sites provided. In terms of style, layout and branding I want the schools to retain their character/identity but have rules around menu depth (for example), accessibility and "things X.Y & Z must be present in a predictable location".

 

What did you do?

 

This is a constant battle for us.

 

We have moved all our schools to wordpress and ProTheme and standardised the layout down to 2 pages of statutory info and then told the schools anything more than that is on their head to maintain and we are only responsible for statutory stuff.

 

Our policies are all embeded from google drive and managed centrally so they dont need to be messed about with

[dhicks]

What did you do?

 

Outside of schools-related work (for the moment), I also look after a website for a small rail industry site. They required a site with a consistent template that was easy to edit, so I've set them up a Jekyll site, using Google Drive as the backed storage / CMS. All their content is now in a set of Word / Excel files, editable either in Google Docs / Sheets or in Word / Excel via Google Drive desktop sync. User management is simply handled by Google Drive, so if you want to allow a particular set of users edit a section you simply give them write access to to appropriate Google Drive folder.

 

I'm not any kind of front-end expert, so for a page template I've wound up using GOV.UK's Design System - a pre-defined set of Javascript / CSS / etc, with most of the formatting and design decisions done for you, and should handle things like compatibility with multiple screen sizes and accessibility guidlines. That might well be appropriate for a set of schools (especially state schools), or other Jekyll templates are available.

 

Jekyll is a static site generator, so all the server-side work is done as a batch job, for the world-facing website you just need a basic web server / CDN. I have a basic Apache configuration which pretty much just serves files, with SSL provided by an automatically-renewed Let's Encrypt certificate.

[hardtailstar]

Our School had a MAT designed site by the central IT team. it was a pain to update or change stuff.

 

Our school now has an IT teacher managing the design and content through GreenHouse CMS. Other staff are supposed to update too but dont!

[pete]

@DGardiner

Currently the MAT-wide policies are on http://www.matsite.whatever/privacypolicy.pdf with the idea being that policies only need to be linked once and will always be the current version.

 

Schools manage their own uniform/admissions etc policies, so there'll always be a mix of MAT/School on each "policies" page.

 

Regarding Wordpress,

 

What made you pick Protheme? At the moment we have 5 Wordpress sites, a Joomla and a 3rd-party commercial CMS.

Who manages the Wordpress installs in each school? And how technical are they? I assume you're the point of escalation if it goes pear-shaped?

 

@dhicks

I've used Jekyll (well, Octopress) for personal sites in the past. Are you parsing the spreadsheet/word documents and pulling that into the generated pages or are they serving up word document/spreadsheets via links?

 

@hardtailstar

I need to move from our current situation to one that's easier to update content on a regular basis. If the backend's a pain to use it won't even be considered.

[dhicks]

Are you parsing the spreadsheet/word documents and pulling that into the generated pages or are they serving up word document/spreadsheets via links?

 

The exact need depends on the page / section of the website - yes, for the main site structure I'm parsing Word / Excel documents (using Pandoc) into Markdown, then processing those into HTML pages. Some sections of the site require an indexed table of documents, with links to Word / PDF documents, so in some cases I'm using Jekyll's embedded Liquid processing language to generate those indexes, with links to the original documents. I have Google Drive mounted as a folder in the file system using rclone, then I have a Python script that coordinates the conversion of those files with Pandoc before being processed with Jekyll.

 

I'm finding Liquid to not be the best-performing of tools for what I'm trying to do with it, so I think I'm probably going to get my Python script to do the indexing of files bit (producing CSV files in Jekyll's _data folder).

[DGardiner]

@DGardiner

Currently the MAT-wide policies are on www.matsite.whatever/privacypolicy.pdf with the idea being that policies only need to be linked once and will always be the current version.

 

Schools manage their own uniform/admissions etc policies, so there'll always be a mix of MAT/School on each "policies" page.

 

Regarding Wordpress,

 

What made you pick Protheme? At the moment we have 5 Wordpress sites, a Joomla and a 3rd-party commercial CMS.

Who manages the Wordpress installs in each school? And how technical are they? I assume you're the point of escalation if it goes pear-shaped?

We used google because it allows the central person in the governance department to just chop and change docs in her drive and they are instantly live on all of our mat sites as prior to this it was done at the school level and wasnt reliably completed.

 

Yeah theres a mix but its largely the same info with some personalised bits here and there.

 

Protheme was chosen because the drag and drop editor makes it simple enough to give to anyone for the most part to maintain it. its not publisher simple but it isn't complicated to get neat and uniform looking pages. you can also export pages/sections to template and import them on other sites. this makes the inevitable i saw what you did on that site can i have that! alot easier to do

 

Wordpress is managed by a wide range of people to be honest, some schools the office staff maintain and in others it co-ordinators maintain and one head runs her little news letter! but yeah im the point of contact if things go pearshaped though wordpress's versioning system should allow most things to be rolled back.

 

if you would like to have a poke about on a devsite at the editor and get a feel for it let me know, i can chuck you some examples of our stuff