Preschool Newsletter and Website

[VodaMum]

Hi,

Our current committee has kicked our playgroup into the 21st century (20th even!) by initiating a website and regular newsletter. I've been actively involved with both - compiling the newsletter in my own time and providing initial content for the web site developer.

It makes sense to me and the rest of the committee that the staff take on some editorial duties for both of these (i.e. regularly updating them with news and information that they need to advise current and potential parents about, etc). Members of staff have shown an interest in editing these publications, but they wish to be paid for doing this in their own time.

Our preschool is undersubscribed at the moment and although we have a staff:child ration that could in theory free up a member of staff to spend a little time editing these publications during each session for a week, they are saying that this work would be impossible on the premises with the children around. As a playgroup, we are just breaking even with regards to income and expenditure and I am wary of setting precedents and expectations that future committees will have difficulties extracting themselves from.

My questions to you are:

1. Who in your setting is responsible for maintaining your a) newsletter and b) website?
2. If this is a member of staff, do they do this in their own time or spend a little of each session doing this? How is this managed if during sessions?
3. If in staff's own time, do you pay them for this?

Your comments and suggestions are all appreciated.

[Mayron]

We don't have a website but here are my answers to your questions based on newsletter.

1. Pre School Leader is responsible for newsletter.

1. She does this in own time.

1. We give her an extra hour a week for all admin - which includes key worker admin too. It's no where near enough and she does so much in her own time - I am raising this with the committee next week but again it's all down to not having a lot of income!

We have also started doing a committee newsletter - which went down quite well with the parents. Very few of them realised a voluntary committee kept the group going! I do this, as chair of the group.

Vodamum how have you gone about setting up your website? This is something I would like to do - what costs are involved?

[Eddas]

1)a&b the manager(should possibly be the admin lady but she's a bit crap)
2) Done in her own time but she is paid 8 hours for admin each week
3)Paid

But we are in the fortunate position of having high children numbers and the managers hubbie is a website designer so i'd imagine he does a lot of it!

I think a website is essential these days. Our website was under construction for a fair while until the manager had time to get it up to scratch, she has very high standards, and since it's been up and running and looking very professional we have had a lot of enquiries from it

[Carmody]

Hi Mayron, We used one.com to create a domain name and website. It was recommended to me by a professional web designer and cost £9 for 1 year and comes with:

• 3G web space
• unlimited email accounts
• photo gallery
• blog
• web editor
• daily back-ups
• web statistics monitor

which is great value if you can keep within the web space limits. I think that this price is still valid. They do have other packages if you require more space, which may be important if you factor in that stored emails, photos, etc. all count towards use of the web space. However, deals and packages change a lot and you should still shop around for even more competitive value.

Regarding actual website creation, we are lucky in that one of our parents is a web developer and he is creating our website for free after which committee and staff will maintain the content. As a guide I was quoted £10 per web page by another web designer who was factoring in that we were a charitable setting. Other designers may charge you a fix cost for the whole development including registering your web domain (e.g. "yourpreschoolname.co.uk").

Do ensure that anything you have built is well documented and that the actual content is easily maintained by non developers (i.e. typical committee and staff members). You should also ensure that the website code framework is developed in such a way that it is easy to completely change say the background colours and fonts throughout your website by making code changes in just one place. (Translation: the website code is standard and easily understood and maintainable by a different developer to the one who built it).

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Carmody
Formerly "Vodamum" until made redundant!

[cktwo]

Our pre-school leader does the newsletter and one of the committee updates the website.

The leader does this out of pre-school hours but she does get paid overtime

[Mayron]

Thanks Carmody - we have a committee meeting next week and I think I'll put it on the agenda. I've been thinking about looking into costs involved having a website, but didn't really know where to start, so thanks!

[eandh]

I won't answer your questions as I am chairperson of the preschool Eddas mentioned (shes our fab treasurer

But so you can see his is our new website