By David Dore
Millbury-Sutton Chronicle
SUTTON — The Sutton Public Schools’ home on the World Wide Web has not just gotten a fresh coat of paint.
It is a completely different system that plays well with cell phones.
The district’s new website on the Apptegy platform (www.suttonschools.net) went online last week.
“The goal that we had in changing platforms was to be able to provide people with a user-friendly, mobile-friendly access point,” Superintendent of Schools Kimberly Roberts-Morandi said in a Jan. 19 interviews. “The prior platform we were using was not mobile friendly.”
Accessing the previous website through a mobile device meant interactive features did not always work, she said, and the quality of images was impacted.
“We knew right from the start we could be more thorough with what we provided the users going to the website and addressing what their needs were,” said Roberts-Morandi.
The new website allows visitors to “drill down more quickly and filter out what they don’t want to see,” she explained, noting that people who want to see events from just one school or across the district are able to do both.
In addition, she said, the new website means the district has its own iPhone and Android apps. The applications open up to the main feed for the school district, she said, and they can be personalized based on a user’s needs.
Roberts-Morandi said it is “going to take us another couple of weeks” to migrate materials from the old website to the new one, and after that there will be tweaks made to the new site.
“We’re working … and we’re continuing to work on what the website can provide,” she said. “We’re getting input from families.”
Discussions about changing the website and its provider began over the summer, shortly after Roberts-Morandi started as Sutton’s superintendent. Money had been appropriated in the district’s budget, she said, and there was a “desire to move something forward that was more user-friendly” and offered more flexibility on how and when to post items on both the website and social media.
“It is a digital world,” she said, “and we need to be up not only with the times, but [also] representing what we’re teaching to students.”
Roberts-Morandi said the website is “about 70% of where I’d like it to be,” with the remaining 30% including building and extending pages, getting the word out about the site and its mobile components, and “sharing more about all of the amazing things that are happening inside these walls” by “having it front and center.”
Training sessions for the new website will be offered Feb. 1 for staff and at a later date for families.
The superintendent encouraged people to visit the website and provide feedback through her office at (508) 581-1600 such as events that could be posted or pages or links that could be added.
“I’m proud of where it’s headed,” Roberts-Morandi said. “It’s going to be something we’re working on in the weeks to come, and also the months to come.”