Eight ways to clean up your school website for summer

By now the building is quiet except for the buzz of any type of cleaning and summer renovation projects happening. It’s time to clean off your desk, deep clean the school from a year of use—and from any residual senior pranks—and do a digital clean-up of your website. 

Here is an easy checklist for a quick digital clean-up at the end of the school year.

Digital Clean-up List

 CMS school website user management

Clear out names of people who have retired, or are no longer employed at the school. Has anyone been promoted, and should have more administrative CMS access? Resync your active directory or LDAP.

 Create a new term

CMS school website admins need to set up next year's term(s) so teachers can create their classes. This way families will be able to subscribe to the teacher pages and get updates on the class assignments. Remind your teachers to link their summer school Google Classroom classes if applicable.

 Update your photo albums

Still have photos from the holiday fundraiser on your page? Summer is a great time to clean out any photos that are no longer relevant to families, and your community marketing goals. Make sure to save them to your Drive for future reference if needed. 

 Set quick links for “summer info” on your homepage

Creating a summer hub for families that includes summer school information, summer childcare enrollment information, where to pick up transcripts, report cards, and diplomas, summer office hours for the building, etc. Once this page is created with a link from the homepage, you can easily unpublish it for the fall and republish it again next year!

Set a quick link for “back to school info” on your homepage

Create a quick link to your back to school info page or “returning students” page to feature on your homepage. This is where families can find registration forms, bell schedules, locker assignments, etc. Also this is a great place to remind families to “subscribe” to their teacher pages once teachers are assigned for next year so they can receive class updates. Note: families will not be receiving an email from every teacher individually, but a daily digest email of updates to all the pages they are subscribed to. One email a day from the school about class updates—families love this!

 School calendar updates

The most important resource to families is the school calendar. It dictates when they take time off from work or when they need to plan for additional child care—it tells them when their children will be in school. If you’re adding a new calendar for a new group such as PTA meetings, or school or building calendars, be sure to connect it in the backend; also, if you deleted a calendar be sure to disconnect it on the backend of your CMS. 

 Archive old news items

Just as you update old photos, be sure to disable old news stories. We recommend disabling anything past one month on the backend. Remember when something is disabled, it’s not gone forever, it’s just not publicly displayed. That way if you have a repeat news story such as Homecoming, or a snow day announcement, you can always edit and enable them later if those events are happening again. Then you aren’t reinventing the wheel each time. 

 
 Supply lists

It’s never too early to start uploading your supply lists for the upcoming school year to your website so families can get a head start on planning. Also, school supplies add up, therefore, having a head’s up of what’s needed to purchase for the next year is never a bad idea. Edlio is able to digitize your supply lists and families can choose their vendor of where to shop. They can simply select all and add to cart! It looks like this:

One last tip, and we know time is so scarce! Schedule out your first three news stories for fall on your homepage if your CMS for schools allows you too. If you are a district you are able to post those on all your school sites as well. They can be for:

• • Week before school starts: reminder of first day of school with supply list links
  • ‘Meet the Teacher’ night
  • Freshman orientation
  • Fall Sports Pep Rally

You have all the tools for successful family engagement!