How to prepare your school website

A Website means visibility!
A Website takes time to build and to maintain.
A Website fosters transparency.

If you decide: do it!

• Build a team:
  Students, teachers, parents, boards members, professional friends: A team needs to fulfil two tasks: integrate all stakeholders AND CREATE a good website.
• Make the team work:
  When do you want to be ready? Why? What should the website look like (see handout: The ABC of a School Website). It might be advisable to coordinate the launching moment of the website with a special moment in the school year.
• Let the team make the technical decisions. Here is the main hint: Choose WordPress.

1. WordPress is totally free, with many layouts/themes to choose from. WordPress doesn’t cost anything to download or install, and there’s a huge community who has already designed templates, thus making it easy to start fast.
2. WordPress is beginner-friendly. If you know how to use Microsoft Word, you already know how to add your own content. WordPress can be expanded with free plugins to handle just about any site you can imagine. With “plugins” you will be able to add contact forms, subscription forms, image galleries, etc. for your website.
3. Your site will be ‘responsive’, which means it will work on mobiles & tablets, too. The website you build will instantly be responsive and look great on every mobile device, smartphone and tablet. There is no need to hire a web developer for that.
4. There is a good support and developer community available to help. With so many people using the platform, it’s easy to find quick help when you need it. In addition, WordPress has lots of free resources both available on Youtube and their support forum