Visitors to the Jessamine County School District website as well as the individual school websites, will be seeing quite few changes in the new site that rolled out last week.

One of the main goals is to make the site as user-friendly as possible, said Director of Technology Erin Waggoner.

The idea to update the website arose at the end of last school year. After doing a survey on the old website and getting about 50 responses, the site’s design began to take shape.

Some of the complaints on the survey were the calendars not being utilized by staff, that the previous website was not mobile friendly and that the navigation bars were in disarray.

Over the summer, Waggoner worked with Schoolpointe, a company that creates school websites all over the country.

The new website is streamlined, all navigation bars are on the top and those bars remain static. The main bar includes pages such as home, about, departments, contact us, section for students, family, faculty and staff.

It is also available in a mobile version.

“Its much more phone friendly than it was,” said Patrice Jones, director of school community and public relations. 

Using the calendar is now a requirement for staff at the school.

“Everything that’s got a date goes into the calendar,” Waggoner said.

The site also meets the Office of Civil Rights regulations in areas including adjustments made for those who are visually impaired, she said. 

A suggestion was made Monday at a school board meeting to make a new tab for those who are new in the district to make it easier for them to find items such as registration forms and indicators of what school a child will attend.