Nov. 2024

Priming Your Site for School Selection

School selection is a great time to look at your website as a user, not an editor. Ask yourself these questions, or have a friend or colleague open your website and ask them for feedback:

• What catches your attention first?
• Have you learned what makes the school unique among our community?
• Does what you see inspire you to learn more?
• Do you come away from your visit to the site feeling positive, neutral or unsure about the school?

Easy Updates for a Great First Impression

• Refresh your homepage images to show student faces and day-to-day experiences in your school.
• Use the homepage image editor to crop and size your photos correctly.
• Remove photos that:
• Don’t include people
• Are blurry or distorted
• Include text
• Are out of date
• Add events to your calendar including (but not limited to):
• Kindergarten Roundup
• PTA meetings
• Fundraiser nights
• Family events
• Note: Middle and high school open houses have been added to the district level calendar and shared down to relevant school calendars.
• Update your Announcements with current school-wide information and activities.
• Highlight your school’s special programs on your programs page or section under Academics.
• Review the Oct. 2024 newsletter if you haven’t made the recommended updates to your About Us channel yet.

Departments:

• Review and update your pages with any school selection-related content.
• Make sure documents and links on your pages are current and functional.
• Remove outdated content. If new content is pending to replace outdated information, include a note on the page to inform users when updated details will be available.

District Communications Support and School Website Reviews

• High schools received site reviews last week. Don’t forget to reach out and schedule in-person or Teams meetings to go over the recommendations.
• Layne Gabriel will be out Nov. 8-27. Please reach out to District Communications at (531) 299-0221 or Finalsite (wcmsupport@finalsite.com) for your support needs during that time.
• Middle schools will begin to receive reviews in December.

Questions? Want feedback? Reach out to Layne Gabriel at elaine.gabriel@ops.org.