Best way of creating a new school library website

[Anne Robinson]

I am moving to a new school in September after 9 years at this one. It is so hard to disengage myself from all of the tech stuff that I have done over the past few years - wikis, websites, blogs, del.icio.us etc.

My present website - LRC Online - was written with Dreamweaver and laboriously uploaded at home as our school firewall blocked all ftp. As I wrote it mainly at school, it belongs to the school, although a new librarian will have to move to another host if he/she wants to continue with it as it is all in my name.

So, what I am asking is - what is the best way to build a new site? I want to be able to edit it in a easy and quick way as I will be the sole worker in the library. I have thought of wikis and blogs - but I would rather have something hosted safely. Free things are OK for something that you don't mind losing if the company closes. I have also thought about using a free CMS that I could pay to have hosted.

What are your thoughts? What would you use if you were starting completely from scratch? Where are the best school library sites with the most innovative ideas? I really want to "wow" my new school as I will be the first ever "real" librarian in post, the resources are really poor and most of my impact will have to be via the web at the beginning.

Many thanks
Anne

[Julianne Kaye]

I am also new to the webmaster world but this summer I spent looking at the award winning websites from other schools in our district and gathering idea. We use front page and I ftp from home using the school's computer. I am in Greenville,S.C. with 52 elementary schools alone. If you check out the district webpage, it shows the schools that won web awards. Good luck!

[Pam Burke]

After years of building sites with Dreamweaver, I have happily given it all up to Wordpress. If you can scale it to your needs, using blog software on a remotely hosted server is a great way to minimize labor. Many hosts will let you install Wordpress, or might already have it available on their servers (I like site5). I have a tiny school and run the whole website from home on my own time - you can check it out at:
http://marlboroschool.net/

In my college librarian days I was paid to maintain the site, but now I've got much more on my plate with teaching. I love my site, especially how dynamic it is & easy to update (of course, there's still much more I want to do with it). It was so easy to show the teachers how to post their own materials, plus I get to use all sorts of widgets for flickr & del.icio.us which makes it even more fun!

One thing that has worked wonders for me is embedding my delicious tags into classroom pages for whatever subjects are being taught at the moment (since it's summer, you won't see much on there right now). Having the librarian in charge of the entire school site certainly has its advantages as far as getting kids to use good resources.

I should note that since my community is so small, I don't use the site for much library outreach, but rather just as a communication tool between school & home, so my needs a slightly different.

Good luck with your new site!

[Anne Robinson]

Thanks for the ideas. Julianne, I am not new to this world as I have been writing sites using Dreamweaver and Frontpage for many years. What I am trying to think through is what would be the best way of creating a modern, exciting dynamic site, which would be easier to maintain and keep fresh. I will be the sole Librarian in the school and working without any clerical assistance. So I will need to be able to work fast. My previous site, LRC Online, looked good, but took ages to develop in Dreamweaver.

I am currently looking at Wordpress, but I am not entirely sure that I want a blog look to the site. Pam, yours looks great and has made me think that I could go this way myself. However, LRC Online had 100s of pages and I am not sure that a blog is appropriate for this. Equally, although I am interested in going down the CMS route, such as Drupal or Joomla!, I am not sure that I am technically capable of using these. Have any of you tried them?

[Pam Burke]

I have used Droople and wouldn't recommend it for a site unless you were looking for an online teaching environment (I find it ugly & clunky, though many would disagree with me). I've heard from people who are completely in love with Joomla, maybe it's worth a look? Also, wiki software (I really like mediawiki) could certainly handle the load but I'm not sure if you could make it as pretty as you'd want it. Maybe a combination is the way to go? You could have a blog front-end and the third-level pages could be wiki pages. You could bring some design elements through to give it a more cohesive look.

Before you recreate everything, I'd also give some thought to why the site is so big. If there are many pages of pathfinders, links etc. I'd say throw it all to delicious and simply put your tag list on you site, you could arrange it any way you want, even using tag clouds. What I love a;(bout that is every time I find a site to link to, I just hit my delicious/firefox plugin and voila! it appears on my web page - like magic. You gotta love that. I used to spend so much time on pages of how-tos & tutorials (that admittedly not many looked at) now I link to sites other people have developed. Staff directories could be exported from databases. Whatever you can make dynamically generated, go for it. I feel like I've already saved years of work just by using delicious, if they go under some day (I do shudder at the thought) at least I've got my backups and can go back to Dreamweaver.

Oh - just one last thought (and then I'll stop - too much coffee!). Using a CMS isn't entirely trouble-free. The upgrades come fast & furious and you need to keep up with them (experience speaking). A command-line pro (which I am not) can upgrade Wordpress in 10 minutes or less, but then there are the updates to your theme, widgets, etc. it's something to keep in mind. Good luck Anne!

[Anne Robinson]

Dear Pam,
That is all really helpful. Yes, I had already started to move links over to del.icio.us and was not building any more complicated weblinks pages on the site. So many of the help pages were unnecessary, which is why I am looking forward to creating an new site.

You have given me a lot more to think about - thanks!
Anne

[Dion]

Hi everyone,
I truly found this discussion interesting. You see I have to create a website for my school library as well. I do not have experience in this field. The library is quite small. What do you suggest?

D

[Brenda Branson]

I've been using My Teacher Pages for the last three years and I love it. It basically has everything set up and you just pick the features you want and customize. Super simple and I don't have to think too hard about using a "webpage software"

[Kay Lera]

I agree with the others web-based is an efficient way to go for a busy educator. I love the delicious bookmarking idea and will be creating a second delicious account for my students to view. My current delicious bookmarks are at http://del.icio.us/klera. If you have a free web-based tool use it and archive the website to a local disk. That way you will have the site backed up locally. This frees you up to work virtually from any Internet linked computer.
I am a new librarian and will be updating our current library website (http://waynesboro.va.schoolwebpages.com/library) which I create for the librarians about 2 years ago. They have not updated it since its creation (as was planned). So I have my work cut out for me. However, our school system uses School Center a paid web-based WYSIWYG editing tool. It is not quite as robust as Dreamweaver. However, it is adding web 2.0 type tools every month. I can log in from any computer and work.
Have you looked at Google Sites (formerly Pages) yet? see https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?continue=http%3A%2F%2F... It is basic but will probably become a robust web-based editing tool.

If you are totally against the web based tools, I'd go with the Adobe Creative Suite web editing package. It has the new Dreamweaver and much more. You will need a powerful OS as this program takes a lot of GHz and memory to run.
I hope this helps. Let me know what you choose!

[Anne Robinson]

Well, I tried out a free WordPress blog. Then I decided, after looking around the web, that I preferred a non-blog look whilst still using WordPress - because I already have a blog on Edublogs so it is all reasonably familiar. So, I bought a domain and then a free trial of a hosted WordPress site. Now I have really run into trouble. I have managed to find a nice theme for the time being, set out some Web2.0 widgets etc. But, I cannot upload images and have found that this is an issue all over the web! I tried various work arounds that I found, but first of all lost the whole site, then messed it up again, then got it back.

But I still cannot upload pictures - I am trying out WordPress 2.6. It works fine in the free version, but not on the paid. Does anyone have any ideas?

[Pam Burke]

Are you trying to insert images into a post or into the theme? Have you tried to ftp them into the correct directory? Inserting into a post or page w/ the new Wordpress is kind of clunky, at what stage are you running into trouble? Free or paid, it's the same software unless the site you're using is behind in their updates and they're using an earlier version.

[Anne Robinson]

I have managed to upload a theme successfully, but I cannot upload an image into a post. I have used ftp to make sure that the images are in the correct folder and I have tried through the insert media button to upload from my PC when editing the post. I have also tried both the flash uploader and the browser uploader and I get the following:

The uploaded file could not be moved to /home/httpd/vhosts/library-online.org.uk/httpdocs/wp-content/uploads/2008/07.

OR

HTTP Error

I have upgraded the software on my paid site to the latest version, but it still does not work. I have also looked all around the internet and found loads of comments about this. I have tried just about everything that I dare, but although I can do some technical stuff, I managed to lose the site on several occasions and only just managed to work out ways to get it back. I dare not try any of the more drastic "solutions". I cannot believe that WordPress can put out software that has this problem. I suppose that we do not pay for it, therefore, why should they make sure that it works for everyone!

The support at the webhosts have tried resetting the permissions on my folders, but with no luck.

I am getting so frustrated and fed up that I will probably have to go back to the free site. But I really wanted the security, my own domain and also the greater freedom to use themes that the paid for site was giving me.

Any help would be very gratefully received!

[Pam Burke]

Oy! What a drag. That's why for some projects I have gone with Educause like you, because then I don't have to be the one who worries about all the glitches. But then - of course you can't edit all the files you want to edit!
I'm assuming you saw this post:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/164999
If that doesn't help, I'd recommend keep trying the Wordpress forums, I'm sure your solution will pop up there some time soon, they always do. (You just want to pull your hair out in the meantime.) Good luck!