Just in time for a new school year, Glynn County Schools recently launched its redesigned website.
The new website features numerous changes meant to help students, parents and school staff easily navigate district resources and news.
Accurate, transparent and timely information from the school system is especially critical right now, as schools return to in-person instruction during a pandemic and many students participate in virtual learning.
The school system intended for its website redesign to ensure that the district and school websites were compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act and were user-friendly and easily retrofitted to all devices.
“While our previous site had some of the same functionalities, it was increasingly apparent that our sites were unresponsive, cumbersome and lacked the accessibility that our families and stakeholders deserved,” said Brittany Tate, public relations specialist for Glynn County Schools. “In addition, we needed a website that could bypass bandwidth issues should our servers go down for a weather-related event.”
The school system began its search for a new website vendor in March 2018 and began working more extensively on the project in April 2019.
“Thanks to the help of our Website Redesign Committee, which consisted of teachers, school and district administrators, and IT/technology staff members, we narrowed our search to three vendors, ultimately selecting Edlio as our website host in November 2019,” Tate said.
The new site offers intuitive navigation for users regardless of what device they use, integrates social media and provides cloud-based, fully-supervised and secure website hosting.
“We also wanted our sites to look modern, so we made sure our website host had photo and video capabilities to help us tell our story and paint a vivid visual representation of what our families and stakeholders can expect from Glynn County Schools,” Tate said.
The new website has a responsive design that also caters to non-tech savvy users and includes numerous features meant to benefit school communities.
Parents and guardians can subscribe to a teacher’s website and calendar for updates on class happenings. They can also access their child’s assignments and daily lessons on Google Classroom from the teacher’s page on the website.
“This way they aren’t having to go back and forth from one platform to the other to find their child’s coursework,” Tate said.
A “Glynn County Schools at a Glance” feature on the website provides a kind of report card for families and stakeholders.
“It includes our graduation rate, CCRPI score, system enrollment and climate rating,” Tate said. “You may also notice that our website puts a heavy emphasis on photos and videos, which to me reflects our proud heritage and bright future while supporting our mission of staying connected and building relationships with our community.”
The website redesign also allows school staff to post information simultaneously on school and district sites, as well as social media.
Tate said easily accessible and clear information is critically important, especially now.
“In order to tackle the new challenges this school year will present, it is our responsibility to make sure that our families and stakeholders can access the information that they need when they need it,” she said. “This revamped site removes barriers for our families to access a wealth of information about our schools/district and makes the user experience as seamless as possible.”
To check out the newly designed website, please visit glynn.k12.ga.us.