Content Management System
Keeping your website up to date is important to you and the people who rely on the site for information. The e4eCMS click-to-edit interface represents a breakthrough in usability and accessibility, offering schools and colleges unrivalled ease of use. The e4eCMS enables teachers, students and parents to become involved in the management of the website in a safe and secure way, reducing the burden on office staff and creating a genuine community of purpose around the site. The overwhelming majority of parents of school aged children are online and the e4eCMS will enable you to engage with your school community in a way that helps them and saves the school time and money. See e4eCMS promotional Video.
Pages
With the e4eCMS you can add an unlimited number of pages to your website for years to come, allowing your website to grow with your needs, and very importantly at no additional cost. It enables all members of staff, and authorised students, staff to enter content in a simple, word processing environment, with no web skills required.
Permission Levels
The website is a whole school resource – e4eCMS enables the whole school to be responsible for it. The e4eCMS gives unbelievable scope for you to get as many people involved in the updating of your website as you wish. You can create accounts for everyone and allocate specific roles to certain areas of your website.
Live Editing, Scheduling and Publishing
A thriving school website will require updating regularly, if not daily. You want this process to be as simple, and foolproof, as possible. And you want the results of your changes to be seen immediately. e4eCMS lets you edit and preview updates on a live site in real-time without affecting what the public sees until you're absolutely ready. You can do this with individual pages, entire communities, and full portals. This allows you to plan you website changes well in advance and avoid any last minute rush.
Document and Media Library
The e4eCMS allows all users to upload and store images, video and documents into a secure and controlled library. Individuals can have their own library workspace allowing them to have easy access to information for inclusion on the website.
Web Stats
How do you measure the success of your school website? Monitoring visitor numbers, how long they spend on your website and what pages are most popular will undoubtedly help. The e4eCMS comes with a built-in web stats package that provides an instant overview of the traffic to your website and a detailed traffic analysis. Over time this will allow you to identify what areas of your website are most successful and also very importantly others that may need attention. If you wish we can also add your website to Google Analytics and give you access to Google's very powerful analytics tool.
SEO
Most of the users of your site will already know where it is. But parents looking for new schools, or looking for information about school performances or, increrasingly, looking for community resources provided by schools will be using a search engine as their first step. You want your school and the services it provides to be near the top of that search. By making the addition of relevant information to each page simpler, e4eCMS improves the ability of Google and other search engines to find the information they want in your site and helps to move you pages up the search lists. Your sitemap is automatically updated when new pages are added providing another route for users to find information within your site.
News & Events Calendars
News and event calendars are the most regularly visited part of a successful school website. We conducted research of 500 schools in early 2010 and the result showed that 87% of schools felt that the news articles and calendar events are the most important part of their website. The easier that information can be found on your website, the fewer phone calls you will have to take in the office and the more efficient the school office will become. The e4eCMS allows you to publish news and events to your whole school community or allocate to specific areas of your website such as subject areas, school clubs or alumni.
Forms
Schools require significant amounts of information to be collected regularly from parents and students. By using Forms on the website schools are able to significantly reduce the amount of paper that goes home and comes back again, and reduce the amount of time taken to manage the information back at school. The e4eCMs allows you to create rich, fully integrated online forms for transactions, payments and information gathering. Used appropriately, these forms can help reduce the costs of collecting information and money.
Blogs
A Blog is an easy way to enable regular, informal communication from the school to all its stakeholders. Parents are busy but really want to be more involved in their children's education. Reading their children's teacher's blogs is one way to feel more involved. Students want to understand more about their school, a head teachers blog enables everyone to hear the view from the top - and get feedback on those views. e4eCMs allows you to create a fully functional blog for a teacher, student or parent as part of your website. Simply create a web page and invite comment. It is an incredibly powerful way of communicating with parents, students and the whole school community.
Surveys & Polls
The more information a school has about all the communities it serves, the better it is able to fulfil its role. e4eCMs allows you to create fully dynamic online surveys and polls as part of your website. They are ideal for obtaining views and opinions from your stakeholders for both external and internal use. Don’t wait for Ofsted to arrive, use your website to regularly gather information from teachers, students and parents. All data can be exported into both textual and graphical formats for reporting purposes.
Podcasts
By recording key parts of the curriculum and enabling students to access the recordings via the web (as a Podcast) many schools are improving engagement and outcomes. Schools are also increasingly using podcasts as a way of expanding their education provision into the community. They are an ideal media platform for celebrating success and enhancing communication. They allow visitors to subscribe and automatically receive updates to a media player such as iTunes.
Photo Galleries & Slide Shows
Students and teachers are rightly proud of the work they produce and the best schools celebrate this through display. e4eCMS simplifies the addition of photo galleries to showcase this work on the web. Galleries can be open to the world, or protected so they can only be seen by parents and students. Different groups can have their own separate web based document libraries and image galleries. Both are equipped with customisable folders and act as a web-based shared drive for all your team members, no matter where they are. Because content is accessible only by those authorized by the administrator, each individual file is as open or as secure as you need it to be. e4eCMS allows you to upload multiple images and galleries to your website and automatically resizes them to a usable size.