PaperThin

Organization Overview  

• Located just south of Cleveland, Ohio, the Parma City School District is composed of three communities: Parma, Parma Heights, and Seven Hills
• Today, the School District has a total population of nearly 120,000 people, and enrollment has been stable at 13,000 students for the past decade
  
• The School District and the three cities work in close partnership on a number of projects to improve the education of children, and the quality of life for residents

Situation

• Parma City School District did not have a content  management system prior to CommonSpot—the website was produced entirely in HTML limiting content contribution to those with technical skills
  
• Different contributors in different buildings managed their own areas of the website with no site governance or controls in place. As a result, the website was poorly branded, disorganized, and content was outdated and difficult to navigate

Business Challenge  

• With a limited budget, the School District needed to find a reasonably priced, easy-to-use system that would enable many content contributors to author content on common areas of the website, with customizable roles and approval workflows
• The School District needed to put controls in place to ensure website content was organized, current, and adhered to established government regulations such as 508 compliance
• The School District also needed to take control of the brand by ensuring a consistent look and feel across the website

Solution

• The ParmaCitySchool District used CommonSpot’s flexible template architecture to lock down the look and feel of the brand. Through the use of templates, users can now quickly create new pages leveraging aspects of the overall website design—without eroding the brand or having to write HTML
• CommonSpot enabled the School Districtto implement roles and approval workflows giving more than 400 content contributors ownership rights to manage a section of the website, an entire page, or portion of a page. Now authors can easily create, manage, present and re-use content throughout the site—while maintaining control of content and content organization. Distributing the workload to more authors has made it easy to keep content fresh and relevant

Benefits

• The ParmaCitySchool District website is now well branded and well organized. Content is fresh and easy to navigate, and the community uses the website for up-to-date information. Website traffic has risen from 1,500 unique visitors per month to 28,000 unique visitors per month—an 1,800% increase since implementing CommonSpot.