It doesn’t matter the size of a school, there is always something going on.  Whether it’s a school play, a teacher winning an award or the results of a science fair, it’s information that you want to share.

There are many ways to decimate that information (and I’ll go into most of them individually later on), but your website is the place to start. Think of it this way, your website is the capitol of your information network. All things come and go through it. Every communication should always lead readers back to your website.

As I talked about last week, our website is built on a WordPress platform, which makes it easy to update our content.  We have a lot of activity for a school system of roughly 140 students. There are events, school board meetings and parents’ events that we wish to push out to our community.

The list category feature allows us to differentiate what will be posted on the front page and if it will be posted on any other pages. For example, around the 15^th of every month, we publish the school lunch menu and order form. When the post is created, I label it as a “News” item and a “lunch” item. Once it is published, it will be the first thing on our news feed and the top post on the Lunch page. Suppose that a few weeks later, a parent wants to know what will be on the menu for a particular day. Instead of searching through all of the news items (which the lunch menu wouldn’t be on the front page anymore), that parent could just go to the lunch page. In a traditional webpage setting, this post would have been created twice. With WordPress, all it takes is one click of a mouse to make the lunch menu appear twice.

Our website is basically our newspaper. We have had as many as 15 items posted in a week’s time. Our hope is that the website will not only inform our families about the latest happenings at Lionsgate, we hope to build a sense of community and openness.