School and district Web sites will soon look different and be organized in new ways.

MMSD Today is revealing here the new design for the MMSD home page, at least the way the page would have looked on December 11.

"Our goal was to make the entry and overall access to the MMSD web site content as practical, informative, easy and visually consistent and enjoyable as possible," said Jim Armstrong of Good for Business, the company that worked with MMSD staff on this project.

"The resulting home page serves as both a dynamic and easy to open doorway to experience the school district right now, what happened in the past and what is envisioned in the future," said Armstrong. "It meets the goal of being a community-building site on many levels."

Most of the pages will be accessed by using the buttons at the top: About Us, Community, Parents/Guardians, and Students. Rotating photographs will continue to be part of the home page, as will the hottest current topics, a calendar, and MMSD Today reports.

Pages will be accessed based on audience interests and needs. For example, community members seeking career opportunities or facility rentals will find what they want behind the "Community" button.

School pages will have a similar design, but schools can alter their pages to reflect school colors, their logo and information pertinent to their school community. Users will feel like they are in the same place as they move from page to page and school to school.

At the same time — sometime this Spring — that the redesign and reorganization appear, online pages will move to a new content management system called Drupal. Users will not be able to tell the difference between Drupal and the current HTML management system, but this switch involves major improvements for ease of publishing.

More than 32,000 pages of district, school and department pages have to be converted before the switch occurs. As one staff member wrote, "the switch to Drupal is still going — slowly but surely."

When you see the new design and page organization, you will know that the switch to Drupal has also taken place.