About fourteen years ago, my eighth grade class and I created the first Catholic school website in our diocese. It was 1996, and I paid $50 for a web page editor and spent hours trying to make menu frames work while my students wrote content. We were very proud of that site, and of the fact that we were the first school with a web page. Never mind that it was hosted for free on a domain that had nothing to do with our school’s name, or that we didn’t know the first thing about web design; like so many other Catholic school endeavors, we worked with our limited resources to create the best product we could. That particular web site lasted for several years, until our development director took the burden of maintaining the site off of my shoulders.
Today, web sites are too important to schools to be designed by a geeky teacher and his students. Catholic schools hire professional web designers or rely on parent volunteers with web design experience. Enter Lance Johnson and Adam Fairholm, the creative minds behind Catholic School Web Design, a web site dedicated to bringing useful web design information to Catholic schools. Though it’s only been around for three months, CSWD has already produced over a dozen helpful articles for Catholic school webmasters, including the following:
- Tips on Using Facebook for Catholic Schools
- Creating a Great Donate Page
- Subdomain Use in Catholic School Web Design
If you’re a Catholic school administrator, development director or web designer, pay CSWD a visit and subscribe to the RSS feed. You can also follow them on Twitter, too.
I just discovered CSWD myself. It is a great service addressing a huge area of need! Thanks!
You’re welcome! Yes, I’m surprised at how many Catholic school websites still look like they were designed ten years ago, before social networks, YouTube, and smart phones.
Thanks for the support! We’ve been working hard on our content so it is great to see it being noted!
I think one of the biggest problems is even the schools that have great sites in comparison to most are still behind the curve of what are modern web design standards and trends. Catholic schools that are able to embrace new developments in technology correctly stand a lot to gain.