Creating professional looking sites

 Over the past couple of weeks, I have been updating/tweaking the format and content of the professional learning site I created for staff at the beginning of the year.  Some of the changes have been to make the ‘window’ into the site more visually appealing but the majority of the work so far has been to increase accessibility and efficiency.  I have been able to condense content by using buttons with direct links to resources or other sites, therefore, reducing the need to continuously scroll to find what you might be looking for.  I am hoping these changes will encourage staff to use the site more.

The challenge with tweaking/updating is that it can seem like work is being created unnecessarily especially when the changes involve the visual appeal of the site.   I was tempted to leave the site as it was and wait until 2021 to create a new one from scratch.  However one of the positive outcomes of the lockdown, and remote learning time, was that staff have become much more familiar with sites and it feels as though I would be doing them a disservice to leave a cumbersome site untouched.  As we only set up sites intermittently it was a good opportunity to practice, and hopefully, retain the knowledge of how to do things differently.  Having made the changes now, no doubt that will jog my memory when it is time to set up next year’s site. Possibly, there will be even newer ideas on how to construct one by then.   When I first starting setting up sites a few years ago it was not as easy as it is now.   The new Google format is so intuitive that it is far less time consuming and there are many more features.   There seem to be more developments popping up regularly and it's amazing how professional a site can look in a very short time.  

The themes are a little limiting unless you have time to custom headers for the pages.   I haven’t spent any time trying to do this as that does seem unnecessary at this stage.   I am, however, thinking about what I might need to collect as the year goes on eg. photos so that I have what I need for the beginning of the year.

We currently use a shared drive where a wide range of resources are collated, particularly procedures, templates, planning overviews, and other information that needs to be accessed.   I’m wondering how we could best combine both a site and the drive for a one-stop-shop.   For new staff, the drive may be a little messy to find what you are looking for.   For 2021 I think it would be  good to collaborate with staff who have responsibility for various resources on the shared drive  to see if we can improve our systems and make things more efficient for staff, either through links, or creating a table of contents on the site to aid navigation.  

The professional learning site is really purposeful, so for me that has been the motivation to keep working on it.  Other tools have been interesting to learn about, and to log away for future reference for when I have a real need.