The Regional School Choice Office, along with its partner, Hartford Public Schools (HPS), provides families with the opportunity to choose the theme-based neighborhood school that best meets the needs and interests of their children.  Since August 2012, MRW Connected has worked closely with HPS to redesign the Choice marketing and recruitment materials and media campaign to better reach Greater Hartford and suburban families, raising awareness and, ultimately, Choice applications.  As a result, the program achieved its application goals for 2013.

With the launch of the NSO Lottery and MRW’s ongoing print, web, and media campaign, more and more parents throughout Greater Hartford and its suburbs are discovering the unique and innovative array of award-winning, tuition-free Pre-K through Grade 12 educational opportunities at Hartford Public Schools.  The schools included in the New School and Opportunities (NSO) Lottery campaign are Betances Early Reading Lab School, Betances Stem Magnet School, Breakthrough II Magnet School, Montessori Magnet School, Hartford PreKindergarten Magnet School, and Hartford Journalism and Media Magnet School.

“We’re very excited about the inclusion of additional magnet school opportunities and look forward to getting the word out to Greater Hartford and suburban families,” said Tom Willits, MRW President.  “The opportunities continue to grow for students to challenge themselves in core subjects while also exploring their individual talents and abilities.  It’s what makes Greater Hartford such a special school district.”

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About MRW Connected

MRW Connected, Inc. is a marketing and communications firm offering an array of services including website development, print marketing, content creation, media campaigns, and branding.  Located in Easthampton, MA, the company works with educators, non-profits, social entrepreneurs, and anyone else working to make the world a better place.   For more information, contact MRW Connected at 413.282.1000 or visit http://mrwconnected.com

Who Is Your Audience?

A clear understanding of a website’s intended users is critical, as it informs just about every decision you’ll make with regard to the site’s design and functionality. For the purposes of this article, let’s imagine that you’re getting ready to build a new website for an elementary, middle, or high school.

Begin by brainstorming a list of the different user categories. For example, parents might be one category, while students might be another. Who are your website’s intended users?

What Are Your Priorities?

Once you’ve generated your list of users, rank them in order of importance. This is a tough exercise, and it shouldn’t suggest that your website can’t accommodate multiple groups of people. That said, prioritizing the site’s users can be very helpful in making decisions about how the site is presented. For instance, a school website that prioritizes parent users might feature announcements and forms more prominently than a website that prioritizes student users. Again, your website will likely serve a diverse set of users, so try not to think of this exercise as limiting.

What Does Your Audience Want?

Now that you have an idea of who will be using your website, think about how you can serve those users. Getting back to brainstorming (a recurring practice in web development), make a list of the different features that your site’s intended users might want access to. It’s just a brainstorm, so don’t be afraid to dream big at this point. For example, if I’m devising a school website that I want students to use regularly, I might include a feature that allows teachers to post assignments on dedicated pages for their classes. For parents, I might want a calendar page with weekly lunch menus, bus schedules, and the academic calendar for the year.

Since we’re still in the preliminary stages of planning, make the list as long as you want. There will be multiple opportunities to pare it down before any of the actual design and development begins.

Who’s Going To Manage The Website?

There are a variety of excellent platforms for running and maintaining a website without the need for coding knowledge or technical expertise. Adding and editing content is in many ways no more difficult than making changes to a text document. That said, somebody has to do the work. If you’re planning for a school website, can you identify one or more people in your school who will be responsible for tasks such as adding news, posting photos, and updating calendars?

If the answer is no, well, it may be that developing a website for your school doesn’t make as much sense as creating a Facebook page and sticking a phone number on it.

But if you are able to identify one or more website administrators, it’s important to identify how often they will be available to update the website and how much time they will be able to commit. This will help you start to hone your list of site features and design considerations. For instance, if your website administrator can commit 30 minutes every two months to updating the site, it might not make a lot of sense to prominently display timely information, such as school news, on the homepage.

Ask For Help

There are aspects of developing a website that you can probably do on your own, and others that you probably can’t without some assistance. A good web developer can work with you from the start of the exploratory process or jump in when you’re ready to pursue the technology choices that will make your vision become reality.

• Affordable – The software license is free, allowing the efficient use of project resources to create the best design and install the best tools.
• No Vendor Lock-In – Open source software is owned by the community, and there are millions of developers around the world who can help you modify and grow your site as your needs change.
• Support Materials – Just about anyone can perform updates, create content, and perform administrative tasks, but when you need a little help, a quick internet search or trip to the local bookstore can provide all the answers you need.
• Extremely Flexible – There are literally thousands of quality modules and extensions you can select to build out the functionality of your site to suit your needs.  Most of these also carry free or inexpensive licenses.
• Very Secure – Another benefit of open source technology’s popularity is the extensive community of programmers who are constantly working to improve and maintain the security and functionality of the platforms.

Choosing proprietary software often means being at the mercy of its limitations and the select few who will charge you to support it.  This is why Open Source Content Management Systems are the preferred platforms for large and small organizations, colleges and universities, municipalities, and just about anyone else with a web presence.

An Open Source CMS such as Drupal, Joomla, or WordPress can be a strong solution for a project of any size.  Take a look below for some examples.

The White House uses Drupal.

Duke University also uses Drupal.

Harvard University uses Joomla

BBC America uses WordPress.