Partner Profile

University Academy is a K-12 college preparatory charter public school located in Kansas City, Missouri. The school was founded in 2000 to provide the students living in Kansas City, Missouri the opportunity to have a college preparatory education. The founders' vision was to establish a school that emphasizes college preparation, career development, community service and leadership.

Challenge

Redesign of District website and implementation of Content Management system including:

• Extensive redesign of district website into an effective communication portal 
• Template driven content for a cohesive look across the entire site 
• Redesigned navigation structures
• Automated generation of navigation structures, site maps and searches 
• Help with conversion of content for the district site
• A user-friendly way to manage content that could be managed by non-technical users

Solution

ContentM is a powerful, scalable and customizable web content management solution, designed to help school districts to manage comprehensive district websites. Originally designed for large-scale corporation and government sites consisting of thousands of pages, ContentM has now been customized specifically for K-12 school districts.

While ContentM is very rich in terms of features and functionality, it has been built for userfriendliness. This allows districts to distribute the responsibility of content management across the entire district while ensuring that administrators retain the necessary control through various security features. With their ability to maintain various templates, administrators can feel confident that each individual school can be represented while achieving the same consistency as the district site. Administrators can control the look and feel of the site while empowering non-technical users to manage their own website content. This spreading of responsibility ensures a more vibrant site with current and dynamic content.

Content editors can navigate to any page on the site and simply edit its content, as well as other aspects of the page, simply by clicking an “Edit Page” button. This gives them access to ContentM’s WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) rich text editor. The intuitiveness of the system ensures that most users can start in the system with little or no training. ContentM allows for the integration and management of:

• Templates
• Menu Structures 
• WYSIWYG Rich Text Editor 
• Web Based Content 
• On-Line Images 
• On-Line Documents 
• Work flows 
• Web Pages and Sites 
• Intranets and Extranets 
• Applications

Implementation

The goal of implementing ContentM is to:

• Create a unique image for the School District as a forward thinking school district dedicated to learning
• Define an efficient and user-friendly interface design, site navigation and information accessibility 
• Create an easily updateable site menu structure that allows users to quickly locate information in 2-3 clicks 
• Implement a robust search engine and search boxes, site map link, contact link, and other quick links that appear on every page 
• Provide a consistent look across the entire site

Effects

University Academy chose to implement AllofE’s ContentM management system for the redesign and management of their district website. After researching other web content management systems, University Academy decided on ContentM because of its ability to be customized, the comprehensive functionality, and its ease of usability.

The adaptable, web based system provides the University Academy with the ability to easily manage and update website content. The new design offers customized content portals for district, parents, students and community. University Academy’s ContentM system generates news and announcements on the home page, manages menu structures and content, and automatically creates site maps and site searches.

AllofE's ContentM solution helps the University Academy meet the burden of web content upkeep by providing easy to use functionality that manages its district website. It includes tools for users with no technical knowledge or experience to manage stylesheets, define multiple templates for a site, and update the look and feel of the entire site. The scalability of the system allows its website to grow with the University Academy’s content needs.