Framingham Public Schools: A New Website

Overview
The Framingham Public Schools website is the foundation for all information shared with stakeholders including staff, parents, students, and community members. The website includes 16 different site templates - a district homepage with department-related content in subpages, as well as a unique website for each of the 15 school buildings where each of those contain their own subpages.

The Need
The pre-existing template launched in 2016 was a product of Schoolwires, acquired by Blackboard and most recently by Finalsite. To simplify the need, see the 3 bullets below:

• The 2016 version of the site was a huge upgrade from the past, but no longer received back-end support and therefore the mobile versions, site translation, and general visual appeal were no longer serving stakeholders effectively.

• When the site was launched, the requirements pre-dated the current districtwide online learning management system, and all teachers were given teacher pages and login accounts. These were not maintained or mandated, and resulted in thousands of unused or underused pages without content or inaccurate information.

• The overall look and feel of the website was outdated and utilized colors found in a modified town seal. Framingham became a city in 2018 and with that, a new city seal was established. All references and use of the old city seal were to be phased out.

District Branding
In order to effectively update the website, we first needed to upgrade the district branding. This included logos, color palette, and fonts. Between June and August of 2021, I supported this huge undertaking from start to finish. You can read more about this here: A New Brand for FPS. You can also review the documentation: FPS Logo and Branding Project - Community Input

The Upgrade
All sites were upgraded on a rolling basis in the first-half of the 2022 - 2023 school year. This began with the district template and department subpages in August 2022. Following the Superintendent’s Residency initiative where we collectively spent one week in each school, we gathered photos and videos then met with Site/School stakeholders before upgrading each school website. The flip was complete mid-January 2023. Key strategic updates include:

• Unique highlight reels for each school and one compilation for the district website

• Persistent global icons for top 8 site destinations - helpful for families whose language isn’t English and also remain on all pages in both the desktop and mobile experiences

• Reduction of thousands of empty teacher pages

• Addition of staff directories at each school including photos and currently filling in short biographies

• Consistent experience across sites (site design and weekly Principal news)

• Offer regular training and development to 24 webmasters focusing on ADA Accessibility (Alt-Text, color contrast, PDF accessibility, ambiguous/paragraph links, etc) and image size and dimensions.

My Role: I laid out the entire site launch plan, worked with the vendor (then Blackboard, now Finalsite) to establish global settings. I technically flipped 16 different sites from the old template to the new one, moved and reformatted hundreds of pages and apps, and support 24 webmasters across schools and departments to maintain the sites after launch.

Collaboration: I did not create the individual highlight reels for each school, but I did capture a large majority of the raw video footage. The highlight reels were created by my teammate, Mariah Linnett. In order to capture this footage appropriately in schools, we also follow a process I defined that tracks students’ photo permission.

What’s Next? Now that the sites are cleaned up on the front end, we will continue to eliminate outdated pages and back-end files. As we reduce the scannable pages and files, we will pursue a 3rd party platform to help ensure accessibility, fix any broken links, do sitewide spellchecks, and more.