Introduction

Webmasters: Once your principal or administrator submits a webmaster account form naming you as a webmaster for your school or office's web site, you will receive a document that outlines the appropriate use of the MCPS Web as a webmaster. This page contains similar information to that e-mail.

Web Regulation

First of all, as a webmaster you should read our Web Regulation FAQ and review the Web Regulation (Regulation KBA-RB, Educational Purposes and Administration of the MCPS Web) (126K PDF).

Webmaster Responsibilties

As a webmaster, your responsibilities include:

• Security: Keep your account information confidential and do not share with others. If other staff need access to the server, we can supply more accounts upon request. A security breach can compromise the entire site.

• Content Integrity: Publish only information which you have permission to publish. This protects others' copyright and artistic integrity.

• Content Professionalism: Ensure that editorial content is spelled correctly and is up to date. Always delete out of date or irrelevant content. Your web site reflects our professionalism as communicators.

• Site Credibility: Be sure that links on your site work, that images appear (are not broken), that applications or databases function as expected, that experiments with more advanced technologies (Flash, multimedia) will not overwhelm the typical user's computer. If elements of your site do not function, visitors won't take it seriously.

• Ownership: Clearly identify yourself as the site's webmaster on your site's home page. Include your contact information and always respond to email queries from users. Always date your home page with the date of the last update.

• Site Scrubbing: Survey your site at the beginning and end of each school year or each quarter to delete old content and prepare for new content. Old content is a serious problem on the MCPS web due to webmaster turnover, the site's age (born 1995), and the enormous number of files.

• Succession: If you expect to leave your webmaster position at the end of this year, please talk to your supervisor before the end of the school year about having someone take your place next year. This is a serious problem due to webmaster turnover.

Always keep in mind that the most important person in web publishing is the site visitor and that the webmaster's job is to make his or her quest for information as efficient, useful and enjoyable as possible.

Guidelines and Assistance

The Web Services Site includes training information, help documents, tools, guidelines and more. Be sure to visit the Webmaster Conference in Outlook to learn from and talk to colleagues.