SteveHooker

Brilliant or hideous? Genius or fool? Ouch! Cluttered or packed? One of the best things to on your website is to send visitors away. The fundamental law of the Internet is: "The more you send them away, the more they come back." http://www.scripting.com/2005/12/12.html#howToMakeMoneyOnTheInternetVersion3 This is one of the best unintended benefits of good blogging. The more links you provide, off to other sites (and your own pages) the better it is. Surfers aren't looking for details about uniforms, school philosophies... They're looking for more linkage. Surfers like to surf. Or is cluttered merely a visual punch in the face? Two people saying the designs are cluttered has made me sit up. Could you elaborate?

I'm honoured. I'll be cross posting there from my other blogs. I got too many blogs.

Do you mean http://www.schoolcomms.com/ ? Looks good value. How is adoption of this with parents? Are you getting their mobile numbers, or are they holding back?

Parent events! Damn, that's so obvious, and powerful! Nice one TechMonkey! I can see it now... "And here's a page that your daughter wrote, and her illustration. Of course, you can log in and post comments on this. I'm sure she'd really appreciate that."

Anyway.... Back to my original question. How do you promote your school's site? Do you at all, or is it a case of, 'if we build it, they will come?' If they do come, do they stay? Do they come back? What's there to draw the crowds, to get repeat visits, to engage? Have you feedback loops, surveys, newsletters?

Beeswax... I guess then I've been lucky. All the schools I've created sites for have had a prospectus or old website from which I've converted to editable webpages. Once these are up, and editable, the Head or someone sees it and edits it to bring it up to date. These pages then grow dusty as they're dull. Uniforms, rules, classes, staff lists, times, etc. these types pages that don't draw the crowds. It's the pictorial blog postings that get co-workers, kids, parents ooohing and ahhing. And they're the easiest and most forthcoming of content pages.

I did say IF they could send an email :-( It isn't funny. From there to VLE? Phoot! Again I feel for you—two people turning up. Pearls to swine.

Teacher training restrictions? Could you elaborate? In my experience training to post a blog item is trivial. If they can send an email, they can post an item. One of the sly sales tricks I use to to appeal to the narcissistic side. The desire for fame, all be it a small fish in a small pool, but most proud Heads should see the benefits, straight off. Though I've spoken to a few failing schools and they've got nowt to be proud of, so I'm told. I feel for you webman, a year to wrest content out of the stones! Ouch!

Cool, it's in the eye of the beholder :-) Getting news off teachers is tricky. But, in my experience with a blog front end, the glory of having someone comment on a news posting brings excited shivers to teacher. This makes them feel important, and makes them want to post more. Blogging, as evidenced by the massive numbers (20-40 million now?) is addictive. I find it cathartic and better than shouting at the telly. Have you thought about a blog? There's plenty of scripts and platforms to choose from. I know that some schools are scared of real people telling real stories, some comments maybe negative, but as we live in a world where the http://www.cluetrain.com is a reality, I see all comments as welcome (though some would be deleted, obviously). People of earth...

Gak! My bad. I thought Faceman had misspelled it. My apologies. I've not heard of Fronter before. I am a Frontier developer. An object oriented scripting environment that is 18 years old. http://www.scripting.com/2006/04/01.html#anniversaries

Webman, you are right, they are packed with information. As they're blogs, the information continually changes. Most places can be reached directly from the front page. May I say that your site looks plain and lightweight, lacks an interesting real voice, and that providing news in pdf form goes against accessibility requirements. Your most recent news letter, September 2005, makes your site look abandoned. My opinion.

I should disclose that my Photoshop design structure is based on http://www.iskcon.net.au/food/ and http://www.iskcon.net.au/ One of my clients. Which was in turn based on an intranet for the Gov Office of the West Midlands, which I can't point to. Getting a CSS to work across browsers is a PITA. I keep the structure, but make it look as different as possible within Photoshop and within budget. It's not a matter of being uncreative.

To the schools they don't look the same. They're in the school colours, and with their own logo/badge. Some have their own art work or school in the background. I use a Photoshop template to make the CSS templates which make the HTML templates. With Photoshop CS and Imageready it's a painless five minute process. Obviously, with Photoshop I can do what I want. Just haven't had the inclination nor budget to design each site as a individual one-off design. Beeswax is right http://blackwhitetwo.educatr.com/ is a different, plainer look, based on an idea that 'the kids' would use it as a base for a project to design their own look, which I would then 'knock up' into a finished professional design. I offer to the schools the Photoshop template, in the hope that someone will want to customise their look themselves. Change the typeface, colours backgrounds, styles of buttons... To me it's really easy, to a teach, it's rocket science (thus far). As Manila is a templated CMS, or themes, it's easy to add snow, or Summer, or Autumnal Photoshop effects, and switch for the season or holiday. I hope to build up more themes for each school then if they do look similar, at least some will look like they're celebrating St Davids Day or Eid. http://www.walsallschools.org/create/themes

Oh, and I totaly forgot the best part. Its RSS capabilities. Podcasting, multiple feeds from departments, and discussion group. RSS was born here. As was podcasting. There's even a WAP feed—god knows why ;-) And an inbuilt RSS aggregator, in the original 'river of news' style. Then there's the Manila API. If you thought Blogger API was basic, but useful, and metaWeblog API reasonable. Manila's API would knock you out! Oh, and I rave about the email-to-blog thumbnails. Great way to tell a pictorial story. http://www.blogfootball.com/service/2006/03/22/Lifes-a-beach http://craigydon.educatr.com/2006/03/28/Making-snowmen

I'm a Frontier developer. Since 1997. Manila through and through since 1999. It's a well matured technology, with active development. It's damned fine, when you can throw it about, as I do here. Out of the box, it's a bit plain, but the web wizard set up can be quite quick. Within a few minutes you could have it installed on a local server and created your first blog. There's a good user manual. Educational server at discounted $499 http://manila.userland.com/academicPurchase I've customised my installs. Added thumbs and a range of extras. As a VLE, it would stack up nicely, with CMS features like memberships, and chorts. Its easy WYSIWYG editor and powerful templating are reasons many US schools use the server version. (And price.) It hasn't got the marking and other customised VLE widgets, yet. But as a pure writing to the web tool, it was the first--a few months after blogger which had none of the CMS benefits. As a school blogging and content management system, it's mightily fine. There are several other hosting providers about. You can export your entire site and move elsewhere. Or host it yourself.

Ric, I ain't sure your meaning re "The kids where I work..." Let the teachers decide what? Got to tell them what is possible. Been thinking about this. Don't know about etiquette here, about posting self links, but I just blogged about it. http://www.walsallschools.org/2006/04/04/phonetoblogpodcasttoiPod Essentially, the good example uses I can think about are: Mp3 for The Great Fire of London. A well thought out lesson. Mp3 live football match report. Yelling crowds and all. Video of KS2 'Number Lines.' For parents. As I ain't a teacher, these may seem twee. But I believe I've seen some stuff, Mp3 of the main, from US university lecturers. I'm just wondering out loud if this is a great way to get masses of primary (and secondary) school learning objects out there in the wild. By which I mean enclosures in RSS feeds, podcasts and vPodcasts. What a great way to get [micro] famous ;-)

Blog solutions? Do they use an API? Blogger or metaWeblog? I presume they post to blogger. I haven't thought of doing this way before... Know any links to mobile-to-blog services? It's only a cursory interest, don't thinkk I want to do it myself, I'll ask some of my bloggers... Why did you do it? Know a business case, rather a learning ROI :-0 What possible use is phone-to-blog+podcast-to-iPod? What's the kid to teacher benefit? Off doing a bit of Googling ;-)

One thing I'm working on is my beloved Nokia N70 mobile phone. It can create sound recordings, though they're in a strange format .amr - sound and .3gp - video and limited to one minute length. Nokia does provide a batch converter though. It would be kind-a cool to be able to podcast directly from my mobile phone. Record a muttering or two, and email it directly to my blog for others to sub to my feed. Not all kids have such a wonderful mobile. Maybe a teacher has. Once the pain is out of the way for creating these podcasts, I'm sure the teachers here would be able to think of plenty of ways such technology could be used to learn. English as a foreign language is a perfect area IMHO. But better IMHO again, is the option to podcast remotely. moPodcasting or moVidBlogging :-) http://www.blogfootball.com/service/2006/02/13/Symbian-60-to-blog Imagine the reportage and buzz covering a football match, or sending sounds of animals from a school trip... 10 minutes later it's on the school blog, and parents are listening to it on their iPods... Well, one day soon, huh!

You mean podcasts? I'm sure you do. Podcasting is a way of attaching a file, be it mpg, mp3, an excel file—anything. Though predominantly it is an mp3. It's attached to a blog posting, usually shows in the meta data below the post (who posted it, when, what department/category). So casual web surfers can download it too. The main benefit and feature, is that it is also attached to the RSS feed of the blog. The RSS feed is the nasty looking XML that mirrors a site's postings. Some times called a web feed, or really simple syndication. When people subscribe to your blog's feed they can read your updates without going to the site. This has several advantages, mainly there's no need for the to physically visit your site to see if it's updated, new updates stream to them. This way people can subscribe to literally 1,000s of feeds and such news junkies merely visit their aggregated 'river of news' and see all the updates. Where as visiting 1,000s of website merely to see if they've updated is a huge waste of resources. Podcasting in this context means that your mp3 file is also downloaded to their aggregator. And if they've set things up properly, this mp3 (along with others) is placed directly in their iTunes application, or even directly on their iPod. This, then, is a user-friendly way of creating your own radio station. People subscribe to your feed, download (perhaps daily) doses of your mutterings directly on to their iPod for listening to on the bus. I don't know what blog platform you've tried, but mine (based on Manila) does this automatically. Merely create to post, add the mp3 file and you're done. The easiest, free-est and perhaps most powerful software for creating the mp3 is Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ There is a list of podcatchers which download and save the podcasts for you, their specialist aggregators, I guess. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Podcatchers HTH

I supply school Weblogs. Based on Userland's Manila, heavily customised by myself. I'd like any thoughts as to how I can make them better. Here are a few examples: http://craigydon.educatr.com/ http://www.croft.walsall.sch.uk/ http://walsallwood.walsallschools.org/ http://www.salisbury.walsall.sch.uk/ http://www.kings-hill.walsall.sch.uk/ My object is not VLE, it's getting the school's local community engaged. Friday luchtime blog clubs and school news is getting kids posting and commenting evenings/weekends/holidays, but I want more parents. Thoughts include: 'News letters home' based on the blog's posted news items, but with links (the post's metadata) below each news item. This replaces current photocopied newsletters, same format, but with that metadata. Leaflets, or other coloured promotional handouts posted through neighbours' doors, and sent home. Local newspaper/magazine PR items. Other ideas include more local news (gossip :-)) and perhaps contentious political discussion. How do you promote your school website to your parents? How do you get them to come and post, comment, discuss?