link

actually upon actually clicking through on your links I think the situation is worse than described on that link; those aren't actually designed or developed by anyone who seriously does that professionally. They explicitly have tags in that show they're generated by Frontpage, iWeb, etc. So forget any serious user interaction design if they won't even pay for the web designer

I doubt that too many schools have a budget for actually hiring a designer/web developer. They just have a secretary or CS teacher throw up the quickest thing that they can using whatever tools they already have a license for.

You're probably right, octothorpe. You'd think there would be some kind of simple-but-informative cheap or free website template out there somewhere. If I could code I'd do one myself.

obligatory.

Despite being ugly, the Thomas Dale HS website actually has a useful academic calendar in the left column. It's amazing how difficult that can be to find on major university websites.

The funny thing is their best resource for web design and implementation is probably their own students, even at elementary school level.

If you have any web skills at all, you can get a better paying job than at a public school. I work at a vocationa high school and our website was designed by an IT company several years ago and no one's been back to revisit it since. I can go in via some sort of HTML editing thing and change dates but that's about it. People don't really know what good design even looks like, in many cases, they just know that it's either functioning [YAY] or it's not [BOO]. I feel your pain, I feel the same way about the web sites of many public libraries.

I have had to troll school websites to compile entire states' worth of data, and if the sample size is bigger, you still don't see any change in the badness.

I think that part of this is that schools were actually among the earliest institutions to even get websites, because they are so useful for school communications (like, Snow Day! Lunch menu! etc). But far too many are sticking with the same site format they developed around 2000 - probably because the person tasked with updating doesn't have time to figure out a new platform, or doesn't want to learn.

School librarians really could lead the charge to improve this. Most come out of their training these days with excellent web skills and are employed specifically as "information specialists" in addition to their more tradtional library duties. And the teacher corps within most districts, overall, is young enough to contain some people who can hack this. So the skills exist within the schools. I think another major part of the problem, though, is that people in schools, due to the sometimes exploitive nature of the job system, tend to be very unwilling to take on duties outside the assignments they were hired for. So when I think of my friend Kathy, the school librarian who could indeed handle rebuilding a website, I can easily picture her BWAHAHAHA response if the head office asked her to take on a site redesign in addition to everything else she's tasked with.

These sites are also spitting out static HTML which don't really lend themselves to being regularly updated like that. So besides the lack of motivation or authority by in-house talents to redesign the site they'd also need more resources, a server that can spit out dynamic webpages with a database backed environment, and so on..

You'd think there would be some kind of simple-but-informative cheap or free website template out there somewhere.

That's not really the solution again because of the 'living' nature of working websites that need customization for their needs. What they really need is a medium sized service provider to step who will host the sites and so on for like $20/month and they just login, make updates to the news, calendar, etc. and log out. Someone could make a killing stepping up to the plate there but again, just convincing the school to budget a trivial amount would take an effort both by the external service provider and internal agents who'd like that service.

As a web developer these untapped niches of small or medium sized organizations that need web applications and you can actually collect money from is an idea that sorta excites me these days. I saw this startup called Styleseat the other day which provides software for beauty salons and so forth--how brilliant is that?

Sometime around 2001, I randomly hit my high school's website. What I found shocked even me, a confirmed cynic.

My school's website was a complete and total ripoff of wired.com (as it was then). It wasn't "inspired by," it wasn't an homage to... it was a ripoff, complete with stolen design elements and layout. Total plagiarism, something which I'm sure my high school still frowns on, at least officially.

So I dropped an email note to the president of the Board of Education, with a link to wired.com. I never received a response, but the school's website was taken down within a few days. I can't imagine what the school's art department (the "developer" of the school site) was thinking, and I really hope no students were involved in the project. Even now, ten years later, the school's site is lackluster.

School librarians really could lead the charge to improve this.

My experience here has been that they could not. I sort of feel that we're at the stage where school librarians could, in many cases improve on a terrible website, but really schools need to get a little bit more serious about their website being a primary means of communication with students and teachers and parents and hire a professional web designer to do this sort of thing, or make it a [paying] part of someone's job.

The other problem that we have locally is that the district is the overarching governing body that oversees this sort of thing, so that schools aren't really even deputized to do this work themselves. What goes on the web site is determined by committee and making changes happens over weeks, not days or hours. This is one of the reasons I think twitter and facebook have become so popular. You can get a widget going and then update the website immediately, not by making a request to some central office someplace.

Most of the librarians/media specialists in the school district my children attend are about 10 years to 20 years older than I; some more proficient at computers and web pages than others.

However, they generally aren't the people responsible or able to maintain or edit the school's website.

It's been my experience that it is managed, as it were, from the school district, and the principal, when they have the funding, can sometimes have a computer professional* put together the site.

The district's idea of a professional might not quite be the same as in the "real world". A professional might be a database programmer and unix admin - HTML might not be on their top things to learn or implement, never mind images or site design. Keeping the learning computers, or the attendance computers, or payroll computers for 3-4 schools might take priority.

Additionally, many schools are restricted in where/how their sites are hosted. The sites often have to fit into not only the District's information systems schema, servers, et al, but it may be handled through a highly restrictive infrastructure tied to other computer contracts for the school/district/state. Multi-year contracts do end, but if there is no other competitor queuing up to make the low bid on taking over someone else's mess?

I'd be happy to go in and learn edline to improve my school's website. But I am not a qualified vetted professional, and cannot even do so on a voluntary basis. The websites are often also portals to internal systems and have security access restrictions that I will not be able to meet as a volunteer.

What you need to be looking for are PTA's websites. Those are taking off and over a lot of the "official" information about school.

Tilde's remarks exactly describe my local school district. I actually approached my son's school hoping to improve their site as a volunteer but was unable to do so due to the district's limitations/requirements. Additionally, I've learned that the district requires their schools to use the official district portal: none of the school administration or faculty are allowed to put up their own school-related sites which killed my next idea.