WALLINGFORD — In an effort to improve communication between the district and the community, the Board of Education has announced a redesign of the Wallingford Public Schools website.
Karen Veilleux, director of information technology for Wallingford Public Schools, said the updated website went live on October 17.
“We are delighted that parents and community members can find up-to-date information in an easily accessible format,” Veilleux said.
The website update process began in April 2022.
“The process was a months-long initiative designed to provide the most user-friendly and up-to-date communication platform for our families and communities,” said Wallingford School Superintendent Danielle Bellizzi.
Veilleux said the staff was focusing on a theme/design and how the website data would be organized.
“Most of the work was done over the summer and early fall,” Veilleux said.
It has been many years since the schools’ website had a major overhaul, Veilleux said.
“We focused on organizing the information in a way that would be easy for community members to access,” Veilleux said. “Schools were also organized with the same menus/drop-downs so there was consistency across the district.”
School board president Tammy Raccio said the district has always used a vendor for the website. Bellizzi said the one-time redesign fee was $6,700 in addition to the website’s annual renewal cost of $26,220.
With this update, Veilleux said each school in the district has its own website, homepage, URL and branding, which includes its school’s colors and images.
“Our old website only had one website,” Veilleux said. “Each school had a ‘page’ on the main site, mostly links to other information.”
Moreover, thanks to Weglot, a translation tool, the website can be translated into different languages so that families can read the information in the language of their choice.
“Our parents speak many different languages, it’s important that they can access this information in their native language,” Veilleux said.
Raccio said the old website had no machine translation, so the district had to wait hours to get a message from the superintendent translated.
“It’s much easier to just have it on the website,” Raccio said. The superintendent “posts a message, boom. You choose the language you want and she simply translates it.
While Bellizzi is thrilled the website is being updated, she said ease of access is what’s most important.
“This is an exciting, updated look on our website,” Bellizzi said. “Most importantly, it will make accessing school and district information even easier and more user-friendly for our community.”
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