Features

Some of these features are standard for all our newly made sites, others are available on request at special rates.

Click to get to the feature you want to see.

 

Title page: columns (newspaper style)

Example:

Title page: Enter here [Standard]

Examples:

Map: standard

Example: Griffin Park Primary School, Blackburn <go to top>

Handcrafted map

All inessential details have been omitted, landmarks stand out more clearly, site is easier to find

Examples:

Standard map for the same location (for comparison)

Note: 59 London Road (the business location) is very difficult to show and find on a standard map. <go to top>

Comparison of standard map and handcrafted map for the same location: to be inserted here <go to top>

Menu: vertical expanding menu [standard]

Examples:

Menu: fly-out menu, vertical

Examples:

Menu: fly-out menu (drop-down), horizontal

Examples:

Press Cuttings

Examples:

Don't put your light under a bushel. Don't hide your efforts and your achievements. Let the local paper know about everything you do. Tell visitors to your website what the paper has written about you. Encourage pupils, parents and friends of the school by letting them enjoy the publicity of being 'in the papers' and on your web site. <go to top>

Classes pages: flickable [standard]

We now make all our classes pages 'flickable', i.e. you can get at each class not only from the menu, but you can also 'flick' the pages from class to class by clicking on the previous/next bar.

We now have a similar policy whenever there are several pages of the same group (e.g. clubs pages, press pages, gallery pages, etc).

This is convenient for all visitors to your site. It will also help when you want to show your work systematically to Ofsted inspectors. All your work is quickly accessible, nothing can be forgotten, the amount of clicking and distraction is reduced to a minimum.

Our general aim is to make sure visitors can find quickly what they are looking, the don't miss any of the information on your site, the have to do as little clicking as possible, in brief 'Efficient Navigation'.

Examples: Flickable classes pages:

Clubs pages: flickable [standard]

Same principle as "Classes pages: flickable", above. We apply this technique wherever it is helpful.

Example:

Children's work

The website is used to display children's work. This

  • motivates and rewards the children,
  • pleases the parents,
  • shows the school's achievements to the public and next year's intake,
  • shows Ofsted inspectors at the touch of a button the best that has been achieved in all classes; nothing that you want to show can be forgotten.

Examples:

Enrichment information on Classes pages

Classes pages can also be used to provide enrichment (expansion) information (images, texts, links) on a subject that has been treated in class. In these cases your website works as an additional teaching tool.

Examples:

Prospectus: flickable

We now divide long prospectuses into several shorter pages. This makes them download more quickly. We make these pages flickable, so that you can easily move from one page to the next. On top of each page we provide a full table of contents (with jump links) so that you can instantly move to any section of the prospectus required, regardless of the page it is on.

Example: Woodbank Primary School, Bury <go to top>

Sound effects

You can also have sound effects on your website.

Examples:

  • Roe Lee Park Primary School, Blackburn, has many children from ethnic minority backgrounds, some of whose parents do not speak English well. They have started to provide spoken translations for certain paragraphs on their website in Gujarati, Urdu and Punjabi. You could do the same for the languages important for your school. Click here to go to Roe Lee Park, then click on the loudspeaker icons all over that page. Sometimes the same icon links to different languages, depending on whether you click top, right, bottom or left of the icon.
  • Brookfield Park Primary School, Skelmersdale, tells the story of the weeping willows and sad songs about the Israelites held captive in Babylon, and lets the children to music about their plight. Click here to go to Brookfield Park. Then find the music links near the bottom of the page. <go to top>
Guestbook

We are at present creating a guestbook for Brookfield Park Primary School. This is a complex and time-consuming task (involving a fair amount of programming and design work) and is therefore not cheap. The Brookfield guestbook is still being tested but you can see now how it develops. It does not yet look pretty. We deal with its appearance only when the mechanics have been fully tested. <go to top>

How does the guestbook work?

The visitor to the site has two options:

  • Send message
  • Read messages

If the visitor wants to send a message,

she has to enter her name, e-mail address, subject and the message text. The e-mail address will not be published but will be stored by the Administrator (school). It will enable the Administrator to contact the sender if this seems necessary.

When the visitor has dispatched the message by pressing the 'Submit' button, the message does not become immediately visible to the general public but is sent to a holding area (quarantine) until the Administrator has approved of its publication or otherwise.

At the same time the Administrator receives an automatic e-mail telling her that a message has arrived and is waiting for approval at xxx link address.

The Administrator clicks on the link and its taken to a password page, where she has to give his ID and his password.

She then sees the message that has been sent and has the following options:

  • Click 'Authorise', in which case the message will be 'published', i.e. all visitors to the site can see it
  • Click 'Delete', i.e. in case the message is inacceptably offensive
  • Edit the message, e.g. to improve grammar, spelling, or to add a comment

If the visitor wants to read messages and clicks the appropriate button, he is taken to an index page which lists date, subject, and sender of messages. If he is interested in a certain subject, he clicks on that line, and the full message will be come visible.

From here he can click forward and backward through all the messages that have been published. <go to top>

Why you might want to have a Guestbook

You are encouraging parents, children, the local community to comment on your website and on the work of the school as a whole.

If the comments are positive, the serve as a recommendation for your school.

If the comments are negative and justified, you can remedy the situation.

If the comments are negative and unjustified, you can explain the situation to the disgruntled sender.

If you have a lively guestbook, especially if it regularly contains some fun, people will keep returning to your site, if only to read the guestbook. You want changing contents on your site because you want people to keep in touch with your site and not visit it only once. So that Guestbook can be part of your public relations strategy. <go to top>

Newsletters

Your newsletters announce not only what is about to happen during the next month and what have been doing during the past month, but, over a longer period of time (several years), they can also be a useful record of your cumulative achievements and over your long-term development.

It is therefore useful to send this information not only to your current parents but also to publish it on your website. Past newsletters can go into your website archive, and still be instantly available to all visitor to your site, past, present and future parents and children, Ofsted inspectors, casual visitors.

Newsletters on the website can therefore be part of your strategy for publicising your school. They help you to ensure that your long-term achievements are not overlooked.

If you ask us to maintain your website (keep it up-to-date), you can send us your newsletters by e-mail and we will put them on your site.

Example:

Minutes

We present minutes in a way that is similar to Newsletters. These minutes are flickable. You can access them either from a Minutes Index Page or you can flick from one set of Minutes to the next, by using the previous / next bar.

Example:

Site map

A site map is an extension of the menu. It shows the visitor at a glance all the pages on your site. He does not have to guess underneath which menu button (and how many levels down) a certain page may be hidden. Most pages are only one click away from the Site Map.

Benefits of a site map:

  • Visitors see at a glance every page on your site
  • Faster access to all pages (less guesswork, less clicking)
  • If you have a Site Map, Search Engines (such as Google) find it easier to access your site and the information on you inner pages will become more accessible to people searching the Web for information.

Examples:

Easy navigation

All our recent web pages contain a down-arrow and an up-arrow , which enable the visitor to jump from top to bottom and from bottom to top of each page at one click. (standard)

Examples:

Robustness and accessibility

All our recent websites (to be gradually extended also to our older websites) are designed in such a way that they work not only with Internet Explorer and not only with most recent versions of browser but also with other and older browsers, such as Mozilla, Firefox, Netscape, Opera, etc. This increases the number of people who can view your web site without inconvenience and without hassle.

We make sure that our websites download quickly and that visitors are not delayed by distracting and frustrating gimmicks. The purpose of your website is not to show how smart we, the web designers, are, but to get the visitor as quickly as possible to the information you want him to see.

It also makes your website more accessible to search engines (e.g. Google) and therefore increases the number of people who can see what you have to say.

We also take care that our web sites can easily be accessed by speech browsers. These are programs used by visually handicapped people. They read out the texts contained on your website (computer voice) and give brief descriptions of the contents of images. We provide these in the form of 'alt-texts' for all images.

To ensure that we achieve these aims we have adopted a standard called "doctype HTML 4.01 strict" and validate our pages to meet this standard. This is now routine for all our new sites, and we are gradually upgrading older sites to this standard.

In brief:

  • Our websites work not only with the most recent browsers but also with older browsers and older computers.
  • Our websites are easily accessed by search engines.
  • Our websites are easy to use by visually handicapped people.

Examples:

To convince yourself of the quality of our work,
look at the sites we have created for other schools.
See our website: www.9999.org.uk

Double-9 double-9
Web Design

RTC Webdesign
(Salma Ahmed and Klaus Bung)
68 Brantfell Road
Blackburn BB1-8DL
England

Tel: 01254-261 009
Mob: 07729-90 60 30

E-mail and web address of RTC Webdesign, as image

  • Company Reg No: GB 167 631 8 (Recall Training Consultants Ltd)
  • VAT Reg No: 494 308 918 Link to RTC Webdesign site

 

Valid HTML 4.01!

This site has been validated and conforms to the "HTML 4.01 Strict!" standard.
(21 Jan 2008)

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