Saturday, October 1, 2016

Why CFBISD Redesigned Our Website from Scratch and How it Became a Powerful Marketing Tool

We are very excited to announce the launch of our newly designed website at www.cfbisd.edu.  The site’s homepage features bright colors, strong visuals, and an easy to navigate, uncluttered design. We wanted to make the new website faster, easier to navigate, and more user-friendly. Instead of studying other school district sites, we wanted to borrow ideas from innovative companies and organizations.


The newly designed front page was created to make navigation on our website quick and simple. Instead of endless rows of menus and text-heavy pages, we have chunked our content into hubs, using strong visual graphics and icons, so our community can find what they are looking for as quickly as possible.

Some of the highlights of the main homepage include:

Easy to Navigate Column Menus


We designed our menus to be easily navigated to find the information you are looking for. We did away with the traditional waterfall menus, which are not mobile friendly. Our new column menus make it easy to see all the content that is most important to our users.

Plus, our “Department Menu” is an index listing of all the important categories in alphabetical order to make finding what you’re looking for easy. The index is based on keywords that were created from our most-visited sites determined by webpage analytics and statistics

Big Menu Buttons that Direct Our Users to Our Highly Visited Sites 


These big, multicolored buttons link to our most visited sites. When clicked, they take our audience to "hubs" for specific sections and links just for them.

Clicking on the “School Button”, takes you to an index listing of all our campuses and centers. We know parents love to visit their personal learning community, and want to make it easy to get there. You will also notice our newly designed school pages patterned after our front-page design. 


The “Parents and Student Section” takes you to hubs with information and programs designed to make your school year a success. We spoke with students and parents about what type of content they want to see on their page, and then created a hub around those in-demand webpages.  From these hubs you can get to things like parent and student self serve, library resources, useful calendars, and much, much more.

The “Opportunities Section” is continually being update everyday with links to programs and special events for students, parents, job seekers and the entire CFB Community. Visiting this page will give you a glimpse of the wonderful opportunities CFBISD has to offer.

Trending Section with Important Announcement and Events


The “Trending Section” on our website is a place with our most important events and programs.  No more searching through calendars, written text or lengthy menu options.  The trending section will highlight important information our entire CFBISD family needs to know about. Located toward the top of the webpage will make it easy for visitors to know what is happening in CFBISD.

Calendar Section that Focuses on Important Weekly Events 


The “Calendar Section” on the front page is a weekly event calendar of awesome events happening in CFBISD.  Everything from fine art programs to athletic events will be featured on our main website in this section. The weekly calendar will give our community a snapshot of great things happening in our district.

Click on “Show More Events” and visitors will be taken to a monthly calendar with a chronological listing of events happening in CFBISD. Each school website has this feature as well, concentrating on school specific events for that campus.

News Section Featuring Recent Accolades and Important Events 


The “News Section” on the main website will feature awesome accomplishments and breaking news stories happening in CFBISD. Using visuals instead of paragraphs of written text, the news section delivers content that is fresh and exciting. We encourage everyone in the community to send us great things happening at our schools and around the district. And to encourage sharing, we added social share buttons to all of our news posts. It's an easy way for our visitors to share our content.

Community Section for People Who Want to Get Involved 

The “Community Section” on our front page is a wealth of resources for the entire CFBISD community. There are special sections for realtors, volunteers, business partners, senior citizens and both student and adult ambassadors.  Webpages in the “Community Section” allow people to sign-up to make a difference in their community

No more searching through endless menus to find the information you need. The website is designed to get you where you need to be… plus, it’s mobile friendly for your tablet or smartphone device.

Come visit our page and scroll through our awesome site at www.cfbisd.edu