Medfield Public Schools' Website Getting a New Look

The Medfield Public Schools’ website is in the process of a much needed facelift and once completed will present information in a clear and modern way, providing users with easier navigation throughout the five schools in town.

“I have some people working on updates for our website, which hasn’t had a major facelift in some time,” said Bob Maguire, Medfield Superintendent of Schools.

Those people are: Pam Shufro, Eoin O’Corcora and Debby Fromen.

O’Corcora, director of technology for the town of Medfield and Fromen, staff member of the library media center at Dale Street School, presented what has been about 18 months of work on the public schools’ website to the Medfield School Committee at its May 2 meeting.

“What makes this site different from the previous website is that the previous website is predominantly based on html and coding, which if you don’t know anything about it, makes life very difficult updating content and the feel of the site,” said O’Corcora. “So what we have done in this case is we’ve designed a system that virtually anybody with a little bit of training could update and manage the site. We’ve kept the same concept of five school buildings and the district page, which could be managed at the local level."

O’Corcora, Fromen and Shufro have worked diligently to build a site that is both “clear and cohesive,” according to O’Corcora.

Aside from revamping the look and feel of the website, O’Corcora said the team’s focus was on “building a structure in which would be versatile enough to move as the department grows and he district grows.”

In order to achieve this goal, the website development team chose a content management system to assure updating the site is simple and manageable for those tasked with that responsibility. O’Corcora also has experience with the platform.

“The primary reason we chose this is that it was based on Joomla! [which is an open-source website development system] so I knew it and understood what was going to be involved in doing that,” O’Corcora said.

 Fromen highlighted several new features to the website, including its overall look and user-friendly navigation as well as an interactive calendar on each school’s web page.

“We have an interactive calendar [on each school’s page] so people would be able to see what’s happening and what is coming up,” said Fromen. “I could see the monthly calendar [for that school] and I could see that there’s an early dismissal on Friday and see here that there’s a holiday and no school. Different schools could have different events, like block rotation calendar, CSA meeting and various other items.”

O’Corcora added there will also be a calendar of interest for outside businesses and organizations wanting to use school facilities.

“If outside entities want to book a room, auditorium, sports utility, they can go the a calendar and see if it is available before they contact our office and they can apply online for that as well,” he said.

Fromen explained each of the town’s five schools has its own web page that was “fairly well built out” for the presentation so members of the school committee could visually understand what the redesign will look like and notice the “good, consistent look and feel” to the new format.

“The goal was to have everything closer to your fingertips without having to navigate through so many steps to get to where you wanted,” she said.

For those who are interested in finding teacher contact information, the new-look site will feature a “contact us” section of each school’s web page that will provide teacher name, position, e-mail, phone number and if they have a web page, will have that linked to the site as well.

Another major change was to the notification system for school closings and other emergencies.

“On the old site page there was a notice area,” O’Corcora said. “So, if you had school closings or any other major emergencies, we would post it there but because it was [a different type of] site, we couldn’t get that to rollover to the individual schools [for the new site]. We understand now that a lot of parents will just put in their favorites Dale Street School or the middle school because they are not too interested in the district’s page but more of what their child is doing. So what the way we’ve designed this now is that the primary page will feed the other school pages in terms of that emergency notification. So if there is a school closing it will be broadcasted across all five sites.”

Fromen added those notices will automatically expire on the site after a designated time to avoid “old announcements” staying on too long.

Maguire and the School Committee were pleased with the overall presentation of the website redesign.

“[The website team] presented this to the administrative team about two weeks ago and the administrative team really seemed impressed by it,” Maguire said.

O’Corcora said there is no set date on when the site will launch, primarily because they are still presenting it throughout the town but said the goal is to have the site launched and running live by the end of the school year.

“We actually haven’t picked a time of when we are going to launch because we want to make sure all the key people are onboard first of all before we roll it out,” O’Corcora said. “We will be able to make changes live, once we are up and running and there are tweaks needed here and there, we will absolutely be able to do that.”