Using WordPress for your School District Website

Educational Podcasting Today is a weekly podcast that celebrates podcasters and podcasting. Its mission is to help educators learn how to create podcasts and amazing WordPress websites for their podcasts. For more information, please visit www.EducationalPodcasting.today.

In today's show, we ask the question “How can our school districts use WordPress as our main website platform?”

• Learn how to combine WordPress and Google Apps for Education to create a seamless digital hub for your school community.
• Learn how school districts both large and small are utilizing WordPress as a way of saving money and effectively managing both information and personnel.
• Learn how you can potentially save hundreds of thousands of dollars from your budget by applying for FREE web hosting with major players in the web hosting world.

Show Topics

• Why make the move to WordPress?
• Can WordPress and Google coexist?
• What do you need to look for in a web designer?
• How does a school district migrate all of its current data into a WordPress environment?
• Empowering Teachers and Support Staff through the use of WordPress and Google Tools 

Links of Interest

• http://k12presser.com
• http://cameronbarrett.com
• http://linkedin.com/in/camworld
• http://twitter.com/camworld
• http://about.me/cam/

About Our Guest

Cameron Barrett has been working in the web design and development industry for 20 years. He co-founded a dial-up ISP in Northern Michigan in 1995, taught “new media design” classes in 1996, pioneered the blog format in the late 1990s, and has since gone on to build large online community sites for General Wesley Clark (2004 presidential campaign), John Kerry, the U.S. Army (at West Point), The World Economic Forum and dozens of other companies, NGOs, and non-profits both large and small.

He is responsible for the 70+ WordPress multisite that powers the district and school websites of Newark Public Schools, the largest district in NJ. Using WordPress, he cut the district's website operating budget in half after the first year and is on target to cut in half again for year two.

Cameron is now spinning up a “WordPress for Schools” services-based company called K12Presser that promises to bring this costs-savings model to all 14,000+ public school districts in the country. He encourages you to contact him to find out how he can help your district migrate off the expensive, proprietary, vendor-controlled, not-very-good SaaS solutions currently powering most district and school websites.