Top Level Pages
Web Services is responsible for maintaining content on the home page, tab pages (For Parents, For Students, For Staff) and many navigational and index pages that funnel site visitors to the information they seek. Content on the home page and the tab pages is reviewed and updated each Friday during the school year. The team also creates and maintains pages and sites critical to system-wide communication, such as Emergency Information, Call to Action, Strategic Plan, Board of Education, etc.

School and Office Mini-Sites
School and office Webmasters are responsible for maintaining their locations' sites. Principals and office administrators are ultimately responsible for the content on their sites. To manage site content effectively, Web Services recommends that schools and offices take the following steps:

• Content Manager: Designate one of your staff your site's Content Manager, creating a two-person web team (Content Manager and Webmaster). The Content Manager would be responsible for helping the Webmaster with editorial issues and decisions, gather electronic vesions of content for the Webmaster, and review content annually to delete or update material. This frees the Webmaster, who is usually a volunteer, to handle creating and updating pages on the site.
• Annual Content Review: Review site content annually. Delete old files and update existing ones to keep them up to date. Site content often grows out of control and is not pruned from year to year. At one point, one location's content comprised 1/16 of all content on the MCPS web server hard drive. Sites that grow too large become impossible to maintain, consume finite resources and, most important, make it difficult for site visitors to find valid, helpful information. (A gentle reminder: the server is not for file storage.)
• Succession Plan: Create a succession plan. In the spring, the Webmaster and principal or administrator can discuss whether the Webmaster will return to the role in the fall. Schools and offices sometimes "lose" their Webmaster at the end of the school year and don't plan a hand-off of the site to a replacement. This creates a scramble at the beginning of the school year to find someone to maintain the Web site. The new Webmaster then comes in cold, with little background to the site's purpose, content, etc. Having a plan creates fewer problems.

Updated October 10, 2003 | Contact Webmaster