Features
Our website package includes a range of great features as standard – these are designed not only to make your website useful to visitors, but enables you to save time and money.
By providing many useful services it will reduce the workload on your office, improving efficiency and removing the usual start and end of day crowding at the office window!
Content is king!
Content Management System
A Leverstock website is built using an easy-to-use content management system (CMS) – which makes adding and updating content extremely simple. The page-editor is laid out in exactly the same way as Microsoft Word.
It also allows us to gives you a feature-rich website where you have complete control over who can see what, but also who can edit what:
- No more need for just one “website expert” to make every single update to your site
- Show information about a school trip only to those parents who have booked places
- Allow pupils access to add content with one of our training packages
- Admin, SLT or Subject Co-ordinators can manage their own information
Keeping in touch
Newsfeed
Keep your visitors up to date by posting latest news onto your front page (or a “News” page) to make it easy for everyone to find out what’s been happening at your school.
Visitors who use RSS Feeds to keep track of updates to their favourite websites can subscribe to your news and have it delivered straight to their inbox as soon as it’s posted.
UserM@ail
A two-way internal messaging system allows parents and teachers to communicate securely, with all messages stored in the website for monitoring purposes. Parents are notified by email when a new message is received, whilst teachers can send and receive messages from their email client.
UserM@ail simplifies parent-teacher communication and allows the school to monitor messages sent and received.
This feature requires a username/password, click here to request a demo
SMS Messaging
A simple to use SMS facility allows you to send text messages to individual users, or by groups (such as year groups, after-school clubs etc). A great way to transmit urgent messages to pupils, parents or even staff – school closures due to snow can now be notified direct in a matter of seconds.
Automated billing ensures you’ll never run out of credits at a critical moment.
This feature requires a username/password, click here to request a demo
Publish Homework
Ensure pupils and parents have instant access to all current homework by publishing online. This feature makes it easy to add homework to the website and ensures it is displayed in a consistent way – including attaching PDF files.
Publish Homework allows absent pupils to access homework from home and parents to ensure homework has been set.
eNewsletter
Allow parents and pupils (past and present), as well as members of the community to keep in touch via an eNewsletter which follows the design of your website
- Schedule a mailing to automatically send the latest news items each week (round-up of news)
- Mailing List Manager removes addresses which bounce back three times to avoid lots of error messages
- Track how many people have opened your email and which links they click on
Links to social network sites
Pushing your news items to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter is a great way to increase traffic to your site – many parents and pupils may not remember to visit the site regularly, but this will put your news right in front of them.
Adding news items to social network feeds can be automated so there’s no extra effort involved.
Save time – let them do it online!
Allowing parents to interact with you online will save your staff time answering the phone or tackling administrative tasks.
Surveys
An ideal way to see the views of parents and/or pupils – the questions can be in any format, with the results exported to Microsoft Excel for analysis – saving your staff time entering responses onto a computer.
Contact form(s)
Setting up a contact form allows parents to email the school – you can even allow them to select an individual/departmental recipient – no need for receptionists to spend time forwarding emails.
Why not also reduce phone calls to the office by allowing parents to report absences online.
See an example (absence report)
Online Shop
Reduce footfall in reception at peak times by allowing parents to order uniform and other goods online and sending them home via the pupil.
Behind the easy-to-use shop-front (which allows you to accept credit /debit cards and Paypal), is an order management system allowing to notify the parent when their order has been given to the child.
Online diary – including calendar synchronisation
Using Google Calendar you can list all your events – this allows parents who operate online diaries to synchronise with your calendar and never miss a Summer Fair or Christmas Play again!
Event Registration
Accept bookings (and payment where necessary) for anything from school trips and theatre production to parenting course, with a range of features to make managing your event very straightforward:
- The number of participants can be restricted,
- various pricing tiers set,
- customised email confirmation (including directions etc) are sent.
- Recurring events (e.g. weekly clubs) can be set up as a block
- the member of staff organising the trip can receive an email notification upon each booking and has the ability to download an attendee list
- Custom questions (such as dietary requirements) can also be added to events which require them
Book appointments
Ideal for parents evenings, pastoral staff, senior management and open days – this allows staff to indicate their availability for meetings with parents (in pre-determined timeslots) and facilitates online booking. Bookings are confirmed by email and automatically added to the appropriate electronic calendars.
No more scheduling to accommodate popular time-slots at parent evenings as this feature marks the slot as unavailable as soon as someone has booked it.
Useful functionality
Staff Directory
Publish the details of your staff – you can choose to include information such as: name, department/year group/class, biography, email address and picture.
By categorising the staff, you can have all staff shown on one page, and departmental staff lists on another without having to edit different pages.
Downloads
Add downloads to your site and monitor how many times each file is downloaded.
Photo Gallery
Keep your photos online – organised into albums to show off the best of your school. You can also rotate images on the sidebar of the front page to draw attention to your albums!
Safe and sound
As well as restricting the absence report form, password-protected user areas are useful for managing after-school club documents, school trip information or documentation accessible only to staff or Governors.
Each user can be given access to view and/or edit pages on a page-by-page basis (or with group permissions)