The purpose of putting the principal’s message on the home page of every school website is to give the principal an opportunity to promote their school, whether it is about upcoming events, awards or achievements or even, ‘Did you know this about XYZ School?’
Ok, to be honest with you, we can track the visits to your school site. We know that page views track very specific times of the year with peaks occurring at the start in August/September and January. Page views also drop predictably over weekends and holidays with the lowest time (other than the summer) being between Thanksgiving and New Year. How can you get parents and students to keep coming back to your site? By being more current and relevant. Information should be updated on a regular basis. For the home page, that might be weekly. Changing content several levels down from the home page is not obvious to visitors. However, one way to call attention to changes is to highlight it in the principal’s message. (I will discuss other methods in future posts.)
By being on the home page of the site, an updated Principal’s Message gives students and parents another reason for coming back to your school site more often. It does not need to have all the details. That what the other site pages are for. Think of it like the Editor’s Message at the beginning of a magazine that highlights the articles in the issue. In this case, you can draw people into your site with just a sentence or two what highlights new things they can find in the site. It can even summarize with specifics your School/Principal’s Newsletter if you currently have one and then refer the visitor to the full newsletter.
It should be brief. It should encourage the visitor to want to learn more. It is your advertising message for what makes your school great. If you never change it, it gives visitors the impression that nothing is happening at your school that you are proud of. Worse, it you remove the Principal’s Message and replace it with School information like the start/end times, phone numbers, address, etc. you are merely duplicating information found elsewhere and that will not draw visitors into your site. If a reporter for the local newspaper stops you on the street and asks you what is going on at your school that makes you proud to be the principal, that is the same answer that should appear in the Principal’s Message on your school’s Home page.