Fall 2006, we launched our new school website wellscsd.com using the Content Management System Joomla as the cornerstone. I had spent the summer trudging through the ins and outs of its configuration and customization. As with any new project I was excited and energized pouring endless hours adding content once school started. I wanted to show everyone the great things that could be done through the school website hoping others would be inspired to contribute to the site.
The site was popular with the school and community and the number visits grew steadily. That inspired me to keep adding content and learn how to work multimedia into the site. I started adding video clips, slide shows, and podcasts. The hours dedicated to this work kept growing to the point that by the end of last year I was getting burned out.
I kept looking for help and got it sporadically. Unfortunately, I started to feel as welcome as a telemarketer as I hounded people–students, administrators, and faculty–to participate. The kind person that updated the lunch menu was the only exception. As a result, the multimedia diminished and articles were not as fresh often 2-3 weeks between updates with the exception of the lunch menu and automatic feeds from NOAA.
A summer vacation provided time away from school and the website (but certainly not time off). I came back with more energy, but it soon fizzled, especially as I directed my efforts toward my NYSCATE presentation on school websites. I got bored with the tedious entry of information and working with images. Even though a few individuals were submitting articles through the website, they always needed some sort of reworking. Things were really falling apart.
The day before my presentation at NYSCATE, I returned to the school website and saw that even the lunch menu items were missing. I logged in and reformatted and published a few articles in queue and decided to call the school the next morning to get the menu so I could put it in in time for the presentation. I woke up and checked in the next morning and found that the menu had been posted–a sign that things were changing.
When I got back, our superintendent called me into his office. He noticed the lack of content on the site and he understood that the burden was too much for any one person to bear. He set forth and has since implemented several proposals for keeping the site fresh. After this struggle for over 15 months to keep up the site, it took my failure due to a confluence of events to drive home the point that no one can do this alone.
Now the BOCES PR writer hired by the school has been trained to add content directly to the site. Office staff has been assigned specific roles such as entering school menu items, sports schedules, and event calendars. Time has been allocated for some staff training on our next professional development day.
This has freed me to explore some of the great ideas I found at NYSCATE. We are going to set up a parallel site wellscsd.com 2.0 dedicated to student work–writing, photography, artwork, podcasts, and video. We are also going to explore social networking platforms elgg and ning soon. In addition, we will set up wordpress mu, so that students can build their own blogs (or websites as they prefer to call them).
I wonder what I could have done differently to achieve this outcome. I still want to see more students and faculty to participate. Hopefully as we implement and demonstrate web 2.0 technologies they will see the value. I remain hopeful.
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