How to run a School Council website?
We have been receiving many emails from School Councils across the country, asking us how to run a website. Here are some useful tips:
The first thing you need to consider is will you be managing an area on the school’s website, or setting up a separate website specifically for your school council?
If it’s part of the school website you need to sit down with the person who runs the school website and get them to show you what you can do and how to do it.
If you’re setting up your own website, there are various places you can do this for free and pretty easily; here are two places: wordpress.com and wix.com (this one shows ads).
The next issue to think about is what you want to put up there. We think this can be split into two main categories:
- Stuff that won’t change very often (e.g. how your school council is structured, how you get to be on it, how you contact it)
- Stuff that will be updated more frequently (e.g. questions of the week, what things Action Teams are doing)
When thinking about this, put yourself in the position of someone not on the school council. What would they want to know? How can you present this in a way that’s easy that’s easy to navigate an interesting to them? Will pictures help? What about videos? (Make sure you have permission from the school to use these).
Once you’ve got a plan for what you want to put on the website you should make a table that lists each of the pages of your website, what is on each one and how often you will update it (yearly, termly, monthly, weekly, daily?). You need to think about what you can realistically do and when it would be relevant to make each of the updates.
To make sure we remember to update each of the websites/social media,we run regularly, we add these schedules into the calendar on our phones. That way we get an alert on the first day of every month telling us to send out an e-newsletter. An outdated website is a terrible thing! The most important thing for a website is to keep things fresh.
We hope that’s useful.
Good luck!
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