The COVID-19 pandemic showed the world of K-12 educators and administrators the importance of clear communication for everyone, whether at school or in remote settings. Districts with lightweight systems benefited as they could rapidly update their websites and keep their school community connected.
Districts identified the need for their websites to serve current information in ways social media sites like Facebook and Twitter already do. Necessary information included remote learning resources, school lunch schedules, and new routines for students.
Many schools use their website, web pages, and display pages of links as a way for their users to access school resources often referred to as a traditional “portal.” However, with so many options available on a single page, website visitors can easily lose their way as many link names are not intuitively labeled. Clicking on various links can make it difficult for anyone to locate the information they are looking for quickly.
Another type of design sacrifices attention on the site in a different way. When the website has large graphics depicting students or staff engaged in activities or pictures of the school grounds, those images tend to occupy too much of the website's real estate. Again, this practice effectively hurts the user experience because specific resource discovery takes frustratingly longer than it needs to.
A lightweight, search-first service-discovery portal like OneCampus dramatically decreases the user clicks required to access district and school resources. Want to hear what our customers have to say about it? Watch the on-demand webinar about how Windsor Southeast could reduce the impact of website updates for their IT department while improving access to district resources for students and families using OneCampus.
Both Blocking and Banner Alerts have their place with website design. They allow schools and districts total control over what visitors to their sites can access. When it comes to catching visitors' attention with an urgent message, that is a positive change. However, Blocking Alerts can annoy users as the prompts that pop up tend to dominate the real estate on a webpage or frustrate users by adding unnecessary clicks to their search. They can feel like an intrusion by forcing the visitor to acknowledge them, and those feelings of intrusion are enhanced when they appear automatically a certain number of times.
A practical solution is to employ banner alerts instead. Banner alerts can still stand out visually but do so in a way that makes them available to all visitors. They can be strategically fixed at the top of the page, always conveying important information while not overwhelming the browser window.
Increased access to district resources is achieved through a single, familiar, search-first interface in a mobile-friendly environment. Creating a single access point for all resources simplifies the user experience. It reduces the required IT maintenance and upkeep compared to managing internally created resources with heavy infrastructure or multiple websites simultaneously. OneCampus offers flexible options for alerts and the ability to customize homepages for students, families, and staff making it an easy choice for districts.
Request a demonstration to see live how OneCampus makes it easy for students, faculty, and staff to find the campus information they need—all in one place and accessible from any mobile device.