DESIGNED BY STUDENTS

Each year one school district website is chosen for a redesign. In 2008-2009 the students designed a new look for the School District main website. Each student on the team created at least three concept sketches . The team then got together and voted on the designs to get them down to three designs to develop and present to administration. Those three designs were presented at a meeting of the Admin Web Committee, which included the Superintendent, the Director of Technology and several other administrators and stakeholders. The Committee made suggestions and signed off on one of the designs with a few modifications.

BUILT BY STUDENTS

Once the overall design of the site was agreed upon by the Admin Web Committee, the Senior Webmaster got to work. Meaghan Charlton created the base template pages that the webmasters would use to create each page of the new site. It is important to get all the technical and design issues ironed out at this stage, to save time later. This site is coded in XHTML 1.0 and uses a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to control the look and feel of the entire site with a single document. The site also uses PHP to maintain consistent branding and navigation and to rotate the images on the home page. There are several student built databases involved in the site and PHP and SQL is used to deliver appropriate data sets to the pages.

MAINTAINED BY STUDENTS

The School District of Springfield Township has four major websites to be maintained. Maintenance of each building website and the District site is handled by the junior webmasters. Keeping each site up to date is a big job, and the webmasters rely on each buildings' administration and support staff to provide them with timely content. When a parent or community member sends an email to webmaster at sdst dot org, a junior webmaster receives it and acts on it.

The sites are all hosted on a Linux server with Apache, MySQL, and PHP. This server is maintained by Tim Coughlin, a graduate and employee of the district.