5 Reasons to Use a Content Management System for Your School District Website
1. Enhance Teacher Productivity
Empower your teachers by allowing them to communicate on the school’s website with their students and parents. This increases productivity by letting parents log in to see what homework and projects are due so they can help their child stay on top of their studies. This keeps the teacher from having to make as many phone calls during their conference period and thus allows them to concentrate on improving their classroom.
2. Reduce Operating Costs
By empowering your teachers and administrators to help manage content on the website, it frees up valuable IT staff to work on technology issues instead of website issues.
3. Improve Scalability
One of our school districts went from a 20 page website to a 900+ page website in under a year. A content managment system deployed in your school district will allow for the maximum scalability as pages can be quickly moved and organized and added.
4. No Technical Knowledge Needed
Content management systems are usually easy to use. They come equiped with a WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editor which allows you to edit a web page without having to know HTML. This in turn reduces the knowledge needed and increases buy-in from your teachers and staff.
5. Update Content Anytime, Anywhere
Best of all, content management systems are web-based which allows you, your teachers and your staff to log in via the Internet and update content on the website anywhere as long as you have a web browser and an Internet connection.
Summary – Content Management is the Way to go for School Districts!
So have I convinced you yet? Content management systems make life easy for School districts!
For more information on how to proceed and find the right content managment system for your school district, click here.
Great post! It makes me wonder what other benefits there are for using content management systems?
That’s a great question Matt. Yes there are literally thousands of benefits for using content management systems. I just highlighted the top five for ease of writing actually. (I tend to be lazy on that part)
The top one on my head is that it takes the load off of one person managing all of the websites within the school district.
You don’t know how many technology coordinators I’ve talked with that manage all of their school’s websites. This definitely ensures that that person has a job for life, but it takes away from the more important things that they should be taking care of such as technical issues, managing servers and computers and generally ensuring everything is flowing correctly within the school district. Most times I see that the tech coordinator IS taking care of the critical things within the district, but is neglecting their website. In fact I’ve come across some that haven’t even been updated in years.
This to me is unacceptable. A website really should be a living document that is ALWAYS being updated. If a website goes stagnant, then the people on the other end aren’t getting the vital information within the school district in a timely fashion. Prime examples are athletic events, school plays and even cafeteria menus. Parents, students and teachers alike love to see what’s going on. If you keep it up-to-date, it then replaces all of the paper you have to send out via snail-mail and saves so much time, energy and money in the long run.
This sounds great! I’m going to call the computer guys at my kids’ school district and tell them that we need a CMS.
Does anyone recommend an specific K12 content management system?
Ross,
Yes of course I have to recommend SmartISD – K12 Content Management System for School Districts!
I reviewed the Smart ISD website, and it looks like you have made a wise recommendation. With all of those features, how could it be any better. Im going to talk to my principal about a cms for our district!
You mentioned one school district website with over 900 pages. That seems like a lot of information to look through. Does the CMS you recommend have a way to search for specific pages?
Jim,
That’s a great question. A search function is definitely needed with any amount of data that you have in a database. So to answer your question, yes SmartISD definitely does have a search function built into it.
This is exactly what I expected to find out after reading the title s Website. Thanks for informative article