Your own website making machine Powerful and simple cutting edge networks of websites for schools HomeHome pageThe front page, the diary, the jumping off point for everything StoriesMain list of pages All our main pages, jump into who, what and why DiscussJoin our discussion group Come on in and start communicating those ideas, just join up or log in MembersA list of all our site members If you want to be anonymous with-hold your name, use something like Mickey Mouse, or Anonymous Coward Email usNeed to tell the webmaster... Get in touch straight away! If we need to we'll pass on your comments to the right person About usEverything about us Read more about who we are, and why we're doing this
We build and run sites for schools. Killer, kicking sites. Sites you'll love.
Site structure
Home
Create About
How much? What users say Legal Legals 4 kids More Stats Educational uses of blogs Bloom's taxonomy & blogs Case Studies Supporting the curriculum Lesson Plans Schools' banner ads Curriculum Online FAQs Thumbnail interface Group brains
Don't do this on your website
News Departments
Members
About us
We want to and will make it easy for schools to keep their staff, pupils, parents, partners, other stake-holders and wider community informed, updated and engaged.
Now, by merely typing in the text you can do it too!
It's so easy even 7 year old children can do it. If you are able to move a mouse, click a few buttons and string a few sentences together you can maintain a cutting edge site.
We'll give you all the training you'll need, support you on the phone or with email, all to make sure you get the best out of your investment.
Our killer features are:
Superb content management and blog software. Excellent Google optimisation.
An email to weblog interface, making updating your school blog a doddle.
Top draw support and feedback.
Try a demo or build your
Now, by merely typing in the text you can do it too!
It's so easy even 7 year old children can do it. If you are able to move a mouse, click a few buttons and string a few sentences together you can maintain a cutting edge site.
We'll give you all the training you'll need, support you on the phone or with email, all to make sure you get the best out of your investment.
Our killer features are:
Superb content management and blog software. Excellent Google optimisation.
An email to weblog interface, making updating your school blog a doddle.
Top draw support and feedback.
Try a demo or build your
30 day free trial
school website yourself. What will you write today's school news to be?Archive page for Tuesday, 22 May 2007
Tu, May 22, 2007Northern Ireland in Prague
Our intrepid Head of Donemana Primary of Northern Ireland is in Prague! And posting an excellent travel log. He says more tomorrow, so keep an eye on this school weblog! (See Google Maps.)
;newWindow.focus())
One of my pet hates
Too many school websites add their news letters home as a Word document. Not everybody has Word. It's expensive! It's an extra step to have to download and open. It's against accessibility rules. Only the truly dedicated will read your letters. Even PDFs suffer the same fate.
Personally, I use the free Open Office, it's not a bloated as Word but it does for my needs. And it's free.
Personally, I use the free Open Office, it's not a bloated as Word but it does for my needs. And it's free.
Dumping your weekly news letter onto your website is a good idea, certainly. In fact add as many letters home as you can! But please, the best way is as plain text in a HTML web page. If you have a search engine, you weekly newsletter will be indexed too. Word docs are bad, bad, bad.
Here's one typical example: newsletters: "Every Friday a weekly newsletter is sent home so that parents know what is happening in school. To view the newsletter you'd like to see click on the appropriate date."
Watching you, watching me
;newWindow.focus())
One of the stats pages that come with these sites are the referers page (it's spelled wrongly for historical reasons). I find it useful to see where traffic comes from. 99% comes from Google, and I can see which search strings people used to find me. They're usually single hits.Sometimes, I receive a huge number of hits from one source, when another high trafficked blog links to me. It's also useful to see old links, links in blogs from years ago still sending traffic.
Today I'm watching the results of my spam campaign. Seeing which schools click through to the site. Not that I can always tell which school it is, sometimes I can only tell which LEA, or which email system they're using. I don't always register a referer if the email they click through from is in an email application, like Outlook, or Thunderbird.
One thing though, one very bad thing, is that with some systems, I'm also given the user name to the email account! RM and Digital Brain are the largest offenders here. From there, were I a villain and so disposed, it's trivial to do a guess, dictionary or at worst a brute force attack.
Of course, you don't have the crown jewels in your email account. But still, it's just sloppy for these systems to send your user name in a referer.
