JonTorbitt

I'd think about making the slideshow clickable with some sort of strap line to explain each image - always helps to cover all bases. The videos hosted on YouTube are a good idea - we do something similar with ManyBadgers.com (in dire need of an update i admit!) but YouTube is blocked for pupils in our school and many in other schools in the East of England via E2BN and has been for a long time - maybe consider co-hosting on Vimeo? Gets through most filters or you can put an local exception in if you use net filtering? THe site is nice and clean and it's a good idea to update it in small steps. Am helping to review ours at the minute and it takes a long time to get some things approved and the inevitable extra responsibility and approval chain for teaching staff to write effective web content (a huge generalisation i know). You could use e-commerce plugins for wordpress on a subdomain to run the school shop perhaps? THe human process of managing orders and payments behind it needs to be pretty tight though! I like the snow plugin - had same idea myself and is relatively easily done too with a simply on/off setting - always useful!

You might find that school filtering systems (such as those provided by LAs or E2BN) block all calls to the Twitter site / API from both PCs and mobile devices regardless of whether it's from the browser or a dedicated app. i have been looking into this and you would need to put an exception rule in place to allow all calls to the twitter domain to force it to work. Just a thought...?

Hi there, There are plenty of options out there, particularly reasonably secure open source options with SSL as an option. I have built Opencart sites before and they quite straightforward (once you read about it a bit) to create. If you would like to chat about it more give me a PM/reply, no pressure! Jon I forgot to say that Opencart has functionality for SSL but you will need to purchase/register a SSL certificate in the name of the site owner (unless it has changed since I last did an open cart site) as they are obviously not included in the free OC open source code d/l