Children's Centres Web Sites

This page outlines for children’s centres, the support which is on offer for setting up a web site and email services from the Hertfordshire Grid for Learning (HGFL). Please also refer to the Communications Toolkit.

Web Site Support Services

The Hertfordshire Grid for Learning Web Team provides advice and support for web site development for children’s centres through training courses, onsite visits and telephone help.

The HGfL Web Team offers an initial visit which will involve some basic planning and guidance on site structure and content and enables you to focus on the goals and aims of what you want to use the web site for. This is usually followed by a longer visit which involves building the web site and adding the content which has been put together following the initial visit. It is a good idea to book the visits around attending the Dreamweaver training course. Dreamweaver is the software used to build and update your children's centre web site.

Dreamweaver Training Courses

There are one day Dreamweaver training courses in building and updating your web site using Dreamweaver software.

‘Dreamweaver  - New to Building a Web Site from Scratch’ is for Children’s Centre staff who have some experience of web site design and are intending to build their own site from scratch. We have a basic template we can supply which you can use to get started with your site after you have been on the course.

‘Dreamweaver – New to Updating your Site’ is for Children’s Centre staff who are new to web site design and have recently taken over responsibility for an existing web site. This course is suitable for you if you have had a web site support visit from the HGfL Web Team and have a site already built using templates, tables and stylesheets.

For details of courses currently available and to book online visit the HGfL web site:

• www.thegrid.org.uk/schoolworkforce/training/

Dreamweaver Software

Children’s centres may need to obtain a copy of the latest version of the Dreamweaver web publishing software. Children’s centres based at schools may already have a copy of the software with the appropriate license, but may need to purchase additional licences. The software can be purchased from Hertfordshire Business Supplies. Tel: 01707 292300.

Web Site Hosting

Each children’s centre has web space available for their web site on the HGfL web server which is managed by Research Machines (RM). A domain name for all Hertfordshire children’s centres has already been registered as:

www.hertschildrenscentres.org.uk

Each children’s centre web site will have this domain name followed by their centre name e.g.

www.hertschildrenscentres.org.uk/childrenscentrename/

Children’s centres will be issued with a username and password for accessing their web space.

Children’s centres will need to agree their centre name for their web address, according to the process outlined in the communications toolkit, before the web space and email can be set up by the web hosting service. Once agreed please inform Dee de Bruin so that HGFL can raise a request with RM for setting up the web space ready for your web site support visit and training.

Preparing for Your Web Site Support Visit

• Refer to the Communications Toolkit on this web site.
• Look at some of the existing children’s centres web sites for ideas for content.
• Collect information like newsletters, diary dates, what’s on offer and details of toy libraries.

Contacts

For more information and advice please contact:

HGfL School Web Site Support
Tel: 01438 844944 (Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoons)
Email: school.websites@hertscc.gov.uk

Please email in the first instance.