Beaver Area School District is the school I attended for middle and high school, so I'm pretty familiar with what goes on at the actual school. As I was leaving high school, the district decided to update and completely redesign their website. Generally this is a good decision because it means being more current and user-friendly. The site looks attractive for the most part, but the ease-of-use significantly decreased with the revamp, though I see they are working to resolve some of the issues.
The logo of Beaver Area School District had been changing for years, but they finally decided on a nice clean logo for the website that they now use for everything. The page layout is appealing for the most part because all the main features are shown above the fold. Anything the viewer needs to scroll to see is just a continuation of what is above the fold. There are a lot of links at the top and though I like the setup of the ones in the boxes, I'm not fond of the ones above that including "Sodexho, MySchoolAccount, Moodle, PowerSchool, HighSchoolSports, and Jobs." I think it would've been easier to add a link to a page with student resources so that the students might actually visit the site to learn things. However, I believe Beaver Area School District's target audience consists of parents and community members. Back to the links, I think the top links distract from the main links and they're also not aligned with the others. The next thing is the huge expanse of maroon that holds a few words and an image. The block of color isn't being used as effectively as it could be and in the end, there's a lot of empty space in it. The "News" section is prominent and it is scrollable. To the left of the "News" section is a biography of Beaver Area and the schools. At the bottom, kind of slapped on, is a section to subscribe to the Beaver Area School District Newsletter, which could definitely look more attractive.
As little as a few months ago, the faculty and staff listing could be found only under a link entitled "Extraordinary People & Lifelong Relationships." How anyone could possibly find anything on the Beaver Area School District site with links so vague is a good question. That's probably why they changed them to be a bit more descriptive, actually. Now the link for faculty and staff is actually a link in the top row, titled "Faculty & Staff." If you click on that, however, the headline on the page still says "Extraordinary People & Lifelong Relationships," so I think that needs to be updated. This banner is more like the one on the home page should be because it doesn't waste any space. This main page is very short, almost to the point of looking cramped because everything is up at the top. In the main area is a short paragraph about teachers and the relationships they have with the students. To the left are three links: Main Page, Administration Bios, and Faculty. If you click on "Faculty," you notice a page shift as the new page loads. The list of faculty members is in a table with categories of (from left to right): First, Last, Bldg, Department, and Email Address. The names of the teachers are alphabetized by last name, but this is in the second column, so it is awkward to search. "Main Page" takes you back to the faculty and staff subpage.
Beaver Area School District is definitely not a bad website, but it could use a little bit of designer TLC to grow to its full potential.
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