Website Habits for the New Year
Happy New Year! Get started with some good website habits for 2024 (and beyond!) to keep your school/district website looking fresh all year long. Use the ideas here to quickly tidy your website on a regular basis.
Weekly
- Add a News post on your homepage! If you have a pinned news post, ensure it's still relevant
- Ensure your calendar has the upcoming events for next week
Not sure what to share? Ask your teachers if they have anything fun happening in class. Different student projects, guest speakers, or science experiments make for awesome feel-good news posts that help to show parents your school culture.
Quarterly
- Check the large "Enticer" buttons on your homepage to ensure they're still linking to the most important pages on your website
- Review pages that contain seasonal information, such as Back to School, Exam schedules, Open House.
- Check that the information on the page is still accurate
- If a page isn't needed, set it to Draft mode in Rally. This will hide the page and simplify your menu while keeping the content handy for next year.
- Review your Draft pages and see if any need to be set to Published so parents can access the content on them.
- If you republish a Draft page, check it over to ensure it's still accurate, there are no broken links, and any dates are correct.
- Take a look at your Quick Links. Can anything be added or removed?
Use Rally's comprehensive Quarterly Checklist if you're wanting to take your website to the next level! Subscribe to our email list for more resources, including seasonal Back to School and End of Year Website Checklists!
Annually
- Check your website's documents.
- If documents are out of date, delete them. Use Rally's built-in link checker to ensure you won't create any broken links on your website!
- Use the Bulk delete function to remove old documents, like out of date newsletters
- Confirm that there's only one version of important forms and documents on your website.
- Update your Staff Directory
- Remove staff who aren't there any more
- Add new staff members
- Change job titles for any staff who have moved into a new role
- Review every page on your website and update any time sensitive information
- Ensure your website contact form is sending inquiries to the correct contact
Remember to add your district's PD Days, School Closure Days, and any other important dates to your website's calendar when they're available!