Our friends at OFSTED keep us on our toes with new and interesting requirements for your school website but one of their latest is something we’ve been suggesting for quite a long time.

There is something of an ongoing argument about the best way to deliver policies, reports and documents on your school website. Some camps think that presenting a simple list of documents that are available to download is the best way. The argument is that it is simple to keep one file up to date and make it available online.

That is indeed true but the counter-argument is that this makes reading the content harder than it needs to be. Other users think that having the content within a page on your nicely responsive website will make it easier to read and to digest.

There are certainly benefits to both examples.

By having a file that can be updated and uploaded to your website you do have the ability to keep tight control of the content, keep things simple and make sure it is easy to keep the document up to date.

By having the text of the file within a page on your site you will be doing the very best to make sure that users can read the content easily and accessibly.

OFSTED have recently added a clause to the “Publication of Governor’s Details and the Register of Interests” which states that “a governing body should publish on its website up-to-date details of its governance arrangements in a readily accessible form.”

Readily accessible is defined as being information “on a webpage without the need to download or open a separate document”. Oh dear. That’s the end of that argument then!

It doesn’t cover every piece of information on your school website but it sounds like it is a step in that direction.

What should you do?

We are ahead of the game because we have already started development on a fantastic new feature that will cover every base mentioned above. You will be able to upload a document that can be downloaded by users or just as simply viewed within the page while also being fully responsive so it can be viewed on any device.

Bear with us on this one for a short while because we need to build the thing but it will certainly be worth waiting for! It will also add a further layer to the burgeoning feature list of our market leading Schudio School Website CMS.

In the meantime, if you want to make sure all your documents, policies and reports are fully accessible on any device but have an option to download, take the content and add it to a page of content on your site. Then link to the PDF file (don’t use .doc files) by way of a backup. This does mean a bit more work for now but you know you’ll be doing a great job of presenting your content.

… and then watch this space …