Schools

Redesign of School District's Homepage is Now Live

The first part of a sweeping new redesign of the district website will feature lots of photos, stories and cleaner navigation to information.

Update: The school district's new and improved homepage went live on Monday, Sept. 26. You can see it now by clicking this link. Coming next, the BOE page and the individual school pages.

The following story about the new design first appeared on Sept. 8's Holmdel Patch:

Navigating the schools websites will be easier with a cleaner, brighter design currently in the works. The design was presented to the Board of Education meeting Wednesday night.

Find out what's happening in Holmdel-Hazletwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Anthony Gattini, the school district's director of technology presented a mock-up of the board of education's new homepage, which features three rotating "stories" as the main image, a downloadable Google calendar of events, four large image links to school websites, and text links for parents, employees and school board news. 

Some of the design elements were inspired by corporate websites for Cisco and IBM. 

Find out what's happening in Holmdel-Hazletwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

"We're trying to add a little more in the way of photographs and color," he told the board members. "Even though it's more of a corporate structure, it really comes to life." 

Board members made suggestions on color choices and complimented the progress. "I think its a great improvement," said member Dennis Pavlik. "It's very lively." 

The re-design is being done completely in-house and does not cost any additional money, said Board President Barbara Garrity. The four district schools will contribute stories and photos, and school secretaries will be able to post directly into the calendar, said Gattini.

"We hope to have at least the homepage done in the next couple of weeks," said Gattini. "Then we'll transition the other school sites to have a similar look and feel." 

The board of education's current website provides lots of public information, but it has a dated design and has grown somewhat unruly. 

"It's been like that since I first saw it when I moved here 11 years ago, said Garrity. "It was time to freshen it up." 


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