Can a website reduce stress while inspiring parents, students, and teachers?

The Placer County Office of Education (PCOE) has a big job. They are responsible for assuring the implementation and delivery of California’s evolving spectrum of public education and support programs for students, parents, and educators in Placer County.

Totaling hundreds of programs, this includes the regular curriculum, special education programs, behavioral programs, early development programs and a full spectrum of credentialed programs for career for educators.

The PCOE website has a big job too, with an average of 15,000 Placer County students, parents and educators visiting the site each month to learn the latest about these programs.

But this website faces a unique challenge.   When new programs are announced, students want to see the descriptions, parents look for available locations and educators want to sign up for the classes required to teach it. 

In order to provide visitors with the proper information, the site needs to take into account who is doing the search (students, parents, or educators) and then organize the results accordingly. Unfortunately, PCOE’s website was not up to the task.

Unfortunately, PCOE’s Website was not up to the Task.

A recent survey of their website users, both employees and the general public, revealed that almost everyone found their site to be very difficult to navigate and not very helpful at providing the information they were looking for.

Parents couldn’t find:
- What District they were in
- Which Schools applied to them
- What Special Programs and Services were available

Educators couldn’t find:
- Career development information
- Credential programs class schedules
- Coaching and Grant opportunities

Community Leaders, Committee Members and Sponsors couldn’t find:- - Meeting agendas and minutes
- Agency initiatives
- Events and news

And no one could find a directory that would give them the right person to contact when they gave up looking. With thousands of website visitors encountering this situation monthly, PCOE management launched a project to quickly replace their site and began a search for a qualified agency.

Early Concerns about SharePoint
PCOE had been using Microsoft SharePoint for their public facing site. They were concerned about the difficulty of updating their SharePoint pages and the trouble they had with making it look appealing.

Enter Jack Frost Design
Having impressed PCOE with the capabilities of SharePoint as a website platform, and our ability to create great-looking pages that were dramatically easier to update, Jack Frost Design was awarded the contract to build the new site.

Upon blueprinting the initial environment, we found much to our surprise that there was no shortage of information contained within it. There were literally hundreds of pages detailing all of the classes, programs, services, and information that parents, educators and community leaders were looking for.  

Unfortunately, most of it was not connected to the sites navigation system!

Working with the sponsors and the steering committee we quickly developed and refined a blueprint for arranging the pages into “chapters” that would group pages with related content. Since these pages were in a SharePoint document library, we were also able to add metadata that would allow us to target individual pages to specific audiences (parents, teachers, students, sponsors).

Having the pages “tagged” this way allowed us to implement a “Mega Menu” navigation system that could offer the pages based on the visitors “audience” or the structure of the organization or both, at the same time, automatically.  Also, as new pages were added they would automatically be available to the correct audiences in the correct chapters by simply adding a few tags.

Migration
Fortunately, because the existing webpages were in an earlier version of SharePoint, they were able to be migrated into SharePoint 2019 easily. While this provided us the content that we needed for the various programs and services, we needed a way to dramatically improve the visual appeal of the page while simplifying the process of updating it.

Extra Credit – Records Management

With all of the sites content pages being served up from a SharePoint document library and all of the content on those pages being contained within content editor web parts, we were also able to achieve the oftentimes elusive goal of “records management”.

Every edit of any page (regardless of where on the page it occurs) causes the page to be saved as a new “major version”. This means PCOE will have a record of each version of each page that appears on their public facing website on a going forward basis.

Staff Directory

We also implemented an automated connection from the SharePoint environment to Active Directory which, with some updating, allowed us to create a searchable page that would find the right contact for every person or program within the organization.

The search function provides visitors with the ability to search by an individual’s name, department or subject matter criteria.

Reaching the appropriate staff member directly is important to all Office of Education organizations. Providing access to the information needed by teachers, parents and students is a vital service provided by PCOE. So, JFD implemented a Staff Directory that reduced the number of calls having hop from the receptionist to a team member, while preventing unsolicited email solicitations and Robo Calls.

By adding the advanced Reveal feature, for each individual’s email and phone number, JFD took the appropriate steps to protect email accounts and phone numbers from website bot harvesting.

The Crowning Glory, Adding the Site’s Message