Multi Academy Schools - multiple website management

Solving the problem of repetitive and laborious website management

We recently developed the system for a Multi Academy Trust , that has five different websites to manage. There was no real consistency across the sites; each with different systems, styles and branding, and no controlled way of working. Tasks were repetitive and laborious and didn’t make efficient use of resources.

Working closely with our strategic partners at the Agency for Education, that specialise in branding and marketing for schools, we were able to design a system that is tailor-made to the requirements of an academy trust.

Existing multi-site managers

While there are existing systems available that can manage multiple websites, they often only work well to a point. If you need more functionality than is available with the ‘off-the-shelf’ solution, you will typically be reliant on finding third-party plug-ins to adapt to your requirements.

Once you start looking at adding more interactivity and more functions in this way, there’s an increased danger of things going wrong. Relying on plug-ins to provide the functions you need also puts you at the mercy of the plug-in developer, who could change it, or scrap it at any time. When you come to upgrade, you could lose functionality and possibly be left with costly problems to fix.

Making square pegs fit round holes in this way can be time-consuming and expensive.

Multi-site management solution

Our new CMS system is designed specifically for you. It doesn’t rely on third-party plug-ins; whatever functionality you need can be built in quickly and easily at any time.

Easily control and manage multiple websites from one place. So, if an academy has five or 50 schools, each site can be set up using a template, with very little effort. Changes can be applied across all websites from a central place in one go, while tools and functions can also be deployed to individual sites where needed.

Other benefits of the solution for this Multi Academy School website include:

• Complies with Ofsted’s recommendations for websites
• Ability to manage one or more sites
• The Academy or school has complete control over the templates available and these can be set up to match school branding and colour themes
• Ability to add document downloads and assign them to any page within the system (PDF, Word and Excel)
• Future proofed to ensure development is easy to manage
• Course builder
• Linked to Office 365 calendars to automatically publicise key dates and events
• Attractive, easy to use gallery feature
• Multi user access
• Different sites can run on multiple domain names to maintain independence

For more information about multi website management, contact the Cocoonfxmedia team and one of our experts will be able to talk you through your options.