Soon, students will have to say goodbye to the familiar blue and grey boxes of the current high school website.  The District 95 Technology staff is working on moving the high school site, the last site that is not District-consistent, over to the new design.

The LZHS site, which should change by Spring Break, requires more effort for the District to construct because it has to cover more features and pages than the middle and elementary school sites.

“One of the big differences is department level information,” Jean Malek, Director of Communications, who is responsible for rewriting all the district websites, said.  “[The high school] has more information it needs to communicate at the department level.”

The Technology staff has to take a number of steps to ensure the site has all the necessary features while remaining visually similar to the other schools’ sites.

“The process involves analyzing all the information currently [on the site], and making sure the design is consistent with the other buildings’ sites,” Malek said.

The process also involves creating a prototype and meeting with high school faculty and staff to make sure the prototype site will fit all their needs.

The main benefit of making the sites uniform is that they will all have the Content Management System (CMS) that came with the new District website.  The CMS manages pages and documents on the website, moving and deleting them when they become irrelevant.

“The CMS is huge for us,” Malek said.  “It makes for a more manageable way to store and deliver information.  With the CMS I can [put out a message] from any location.  Right now we can deliver messages to all the school sites at once, except for the high school’s.”

The consistent websites also eliminate repeated information on multiple schools’ sites and make it easier to locate that information, as the top menu bar remains the same for every school.

Once they complete the high school website, the District will go back and enhance the other websites, adding pages and information for activities and other programs that they did not include the first time around, according to Malek.