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Fairfield school board to launch new website features
Andy Hallman
Oct. 19, 2021 10:48 am
FAIRFIELD — The Fairfield Community School District Board of Directors approved hiring a vendor to create a new website with a host of new features during its board meeting Monday night.
The vendor is a company called Apptegy, and district officials said the company will not only give the district a fresh website, but also offer new features to make it easier for the school to share announcements. For instance, under the current configuration, when the district needs to announce something, an employee must log into not just the school’s website but also the school’s app, Facebook page, campus messenger, Twitter and Instagram, and post the message in all these places.
With the help of Apptegy, a person would need to post the announcement only once and the program will share it to all these platforms at the same time.
Purchasing Apptegy will cost the district $4,280 up front and then an annual fee of $10,600. This will be about $2,500 more per year than what the district was paying for its website and school app.
School board member Frank Broz said one thing he wants to see in a new website is to eliminate the old posts so that only the most recent information is shown. He said the current site is more like a blog that shows a history of posts going back a few years. He said there’s no reason to keep an archive of old posts on the site, since this can be confusing to users.
“If you’re searching on the website for a list of class materials, the valuable information is for the current school year,” he said. “You don’t need to see the material list from three years ago.”
Broz said he believes that the new vendor will keep the website as up-to-date as possible.
Another feature the board discussed was that Apptegy stresses compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act so everyone can experience the website. For instance, this means that a blind person who has enabled the text-to-speech feature can hear not just what’s written on the website but also hear a description of images posted on it, too.
The district hopes to launch the new website later this school year.
“Having this service will be better for our community, for parents and for everyone,” said school board president Christi Welsh.
This is the homepage of the Fairfield Community School District. Its board of directors voted Monday to hire the company Apptegy to design a new website with new features.