St. Francis School
Url(s)
Background
I have been connected with St. Francis since my wife started teaching there in 1997. I volunteered on the school's Technology Committee from 1998 to 2008. And I was also the computer teacher for the 2001-2002 school year. Another parent volunteer was managing the web site until they left in 2002, at which point I took over. I have been the school's web master ever since.
Challenge
The school's web site was an extremely basic brochure site. Every page was rendered in pure HTML, and any changes that needed to be made required editing the source code. Updates were time consuming and required expert knowledge and direct server access (security concern). Therefore, all site updates ended up going through me, and if I was busy with my day job, I became the bottleneck.
Solution
The school hired a design company in 2004 to give the web site a complete face lift. I worked closely with the designer to implement a robust, scalable web site that was easy to maintain. I created a basic CMS to store all content in the database. Now, non-expert users can crate new pages and edit existing ones, update calendar events, and manage the school's lunch menu.
Recently I've been leery to show this site off because it's 8 years old (that's 56 in web years). But, the fact of the matter is since it's release, it's had one significant update when the hosting provider's server was migrated from PHP 4 to PHP 5. Otherwise, it's been pretty rock solid. Sure, there have been minor tweaks and bug fixes here and there, but it's usually one to two years between calls from the school for support. And frankly, that's something to be proud of.