How to Manage Hundreds of Pages Without Making a School or College Website Slow and Confusing

We are tasked with managing a large number of websites for schools and colleges and most of them contain hundreds of pages and thousands of documents including results, admissions, circulars, photos, videos, events and more. And each site caters to a variety of stakeholders including students, teachers, parents, alumni etc. Making sure that the entire setup works well, loads fast and caters to each stakeholder efficiently is no easy task.

The common issues that large education websites run into include:

• Confusing menu structure that worsens over time
• Increasing number of broken links
• Outdated content that is incorrectly or not at all archived.
• Unable to meet changing stakeholder needs.
• Inadequate resource allocation in terms of hosting and bandwidth

It’s very easy to get it wrong with a large education website so it requires careful planning, constant maintenance and clear communication between the school or college and the agency maintaining the site.

Education sites tend to be large sites, so planning is critical

Due to the different stakeholders and events that a typical school or college website caters to, they tend to be large, document heavy and varied in type of content. So it's very important to plan properly right from the ground up i.e. the sitemap. Get the sitemap right and the management gets easier. Making sure that the site navigation flows as per the needs of the stakeholders and is logical and scalable is the most important job.

A frank discussion with the school or college management about what the site will do and won’t do can help avoid trouble later on. Sometimes we need to convince the management not to put everything and the kitchen sink into the site. Sometimes we win this battle and sometimes we have to bite the bullet and load up everything they ask for.

A strong CMS system is mandatory

Our MiracleworX CMS system has been developed over many years to be scalable, fast and secure which allows our support team to easily manage the education websites under our care. Not only that, due to the simplicity of the CMS design, it's easy for the school or college teams to update the site at their end as well.

Since the size of most educational sites is large, robustness of the CMS is critical. This includes:

• Simple to use by all stakeholders without getting very technical
• Able to scale up without the site slowing down or crashing
• Secure role based access for various stakeholders to update the site and good quality security.
• Easy to upgrade the underlying technology and update with changing browser or server versions.
• Easy to recover from an emergency such as a server crash or a malware attack. Backups are critical.

Since the CMS is the engine that drives the site, a good robust CMS can make or break the site over time.

Document management is key

An education website tends to collect hundreds and even thousands of documents over the years. These can range from exam results, admission notices, event photos, videos etc. If not organized precisely and correctly it will tend to make the site bloated and slow.

It also leads to tons of broken links as documents are shuffled at the backend without correcting the underlying links in the front end. Un-optimized documents that are very heavy can also lead to poor site performance. The web design agency needs to set standards and protocols for what type of documents can be uploaded to the site.

Controlled access is critical to avoid a mess

We have come across many cases where access to the school or college is a free-for-all. Access is given to multiple people and sometimes even students. No one is in charge and no one controls quality.

The first thing we do when we design or take over a school or college website is to narrow down and shortlist the team that will have access to the site. Ideally a small team from our agency and a small team from the institute’s side work together with clearly identified roles and responsibility. We frown on giving access to students as it can create a security risk and also they are temporary anyways and will soon graduate out.

A clear roles based access and responsibility structure goes a long way to avoid a mess.

Regular pruning and archiving of old website content is important

School or college websites tend to collect information and documents across dozens of years. It’s a good practice to do a period pruning and archiving of the old content can significantly ease the management of the site.

We tend to maintain a cutoff period for the site’s content, Eg. Only content and documents from the last five years - rest is archived or removed.

A regular session when the institute management sits with us to review the site and prune it makes a huge difference. It also has the added benefit of getting everyone on the same page as to the site’s current status. By the way, opportunities to add new sections and content can also be identified at such a time.

In Conclusion

Successfully maintaining and growing a school or college site involves

• Creating a planned site structure.
• A robust CMS engine to run the site that is secure, fast and easy to use.
• Role based restricted access to only need to have people
• A clear policy to document management and storage.
• Regular review and pruning to remove obsolete information

This involves planning from the very start, good communication and best practises to run a fast and efficient school or college website.