New Website Launches for Medfield Public Schools

The Medfield Public Schools' website finally has a new look.

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Those improvements were recently finalized and can now be seen on the district's new webiste, which launched on Oct. 17.

Bob Maguire, Medfield Superintendent of Public Schools, said during the May 2 School Committee meeting the website was in dire need of an upgrade.

"[The website] hasn't had a major facelift in some time," Maguire said.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Eoin O'Corcora, Debby Fromen and Pam Shufro, the website received the "major facelift" Maguire was looking for and the results are impressive.

The first thing users will notice when visiting the new site, www.medfield.net, is its visual appeal. Gone is the text-heavy to a white background look of the old site. Replacing the html and coding domain is a clean, well-organized, cohesive and user-friendly site.

The homepage, Medfield Public Schools, offers easy navigation through links and headers in addition to providing useful information about the district – phone numbers, calendar and upcoming events – in a convenient, easy-to-find location.

If you are interested in gathering information about a particular school in the district, you can easily navigate to that school by highlighting the “our schools” menu at the top of the page and clicking on the school of interest.

Each school page offers the school’s mission statement, important phone numbers, the school calendar and upcoming events – all the information is quick to find and easy to access.

Other pages on the site include: “About Our Schools,” “General Information,” “School Committee,” “Parent Links,” “Community Education,” "Medfield Links" and “Staff Links.”

The goal of the website, according to a statement by Medfield Public Schools, is to continue to “improve the level of communication among school, home and community. The website features easier navigation and a new visual layout and will provide accurate and timely information to support our students, parents, faculty and staff.”

In order to assure the “accurate and timely information” is published on the site, O’Corcora said he and his team opted for a content management system that enables faculty and staff to easily update and upload content.

“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,” O’Corcora said. “We’ve kept the same concept of five school buildings and the district page, which could be managed at the local level."

Fromen said the concept her and her team based the website’s improvements on was ensuring the new format put all the content and information “closer to [the user’s] fingertips without having to navigate through so many steps to get to where [the user] wanted.”

After more than 18 months and countless hours of hard work and attention to detail, that mission has been accomplished.