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St Joseph's Catholic Primary School - Nympsfield |
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St Joseph's Catholic Primary School, Nympsfield is a voluntary-aided school of average size in a rural location just outside Stroud in Gloucestershire.
St Joseph's approached dynamicsites4schools in early 2004 about undertaking a major website overhaul. |
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The old school site had effectively fallen into disuse with the most recent addition being a pdf version of the Spring newsletter available for download. However, there was a problem - it was the Spring 2003 newsletter!
The site had been initially designed and maintained by a busy parent-governor who simply didn't have the time to liaise with the head and teachers on a regular basis.
Like many schools, St Joseph's had been happy to simply have a website rather than really worry about what it was for.
Site design was very basic with a few animated gifs and 'fancy-font' headings serving as an attempt to add interest ... along with some photos. |
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The real problem with the site was that its infrastructure simply didn't account for new information to be added and there was no way that anyone could add new pages or links without ftp access to the server and some idea about how to write HTML.
Nothing about the website reflected the life and vigour of the school itself and there was no way that anyone had the time or the knowledge to improve it.
Initially, various options were considered to make some improvements to the site's appearance and to put a structure in place for staff to add content.
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St Joseph's website as it looks now
dynamicsites4schools
were able to offer just what St Joseph's were looking for - an easily updateable, database-driven website: installed, hosted and supported - with templates designed to reflect the nature of the school. |
The school had some free webspace as part of their ISDN contract with a major educational provider. Although this was a reasonable allocation of space there was a requirement to use Microsoft Frontpage as both the authoring and publishing tool for webpages.
Having looked into several options for creating Frontpage templates - and finding significant limitations with all - the decision was made to try a more radical solution.
In doing so the head realised there was a need to invest time and resources in the website and promote it as the primary means of communication between staff, parents/carers and governors - thus placing it at the heart of school life. |
St Joseph's Catholic Primary School: Nympsfield - Visit the Live Site |
The school website had become ‘tired’.
It was not current and the school had no real ownership of it.
We wanted a fully dynamic site that could be easily updated and that would represent all aspects of school life: utilising images and articles uploaded by staff and pupils.
The website now serves our school community.
- Pupils are able to submit news, write articles and upload images.
- Teaching and non-teaching staff regularly update information and communicate with their colleagues.
- Letters sent home with children appear on the website on the same day.
The training provided has been excellent.
Staff can report on children’s learning and emphasise cross-curricular themes.
They see the site as a big step forward in expanding the creative curriculum in school and meeting some of the objectives discussed in the government’s ‘Excellence and Enjoyment’ 5 –year strategy. Children’s ICT capability is improving through the use of our website.
The most exciting aspect of our new school website is that fact that it can be updated via the Internet from anywhere in the world. Recently I was able to submit news to the site from Bristol Airport in less time than it takes to write an email
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