Help with School Website design

[tyderium]

I have been tasked with rebuilding a small private school website. Me and my uber wisdom said, "no problem, I can do that". Outside of building some html docs for a personal website of mine 2years ago, I don't have a good idea on where to start. I have the next few months to work on it to get it ready for the new school year so time is either long or short, depending on how difficult it may be.

If all they wanted to do was create a few pages about the school, calender of events, etc it would not be a problem. Unfortunately, during the brainstorming they all had the idea to setup logins for every student/parent for online grading, assignments, etc. I am looking for some ideas from people that have done this before to point me in a starting place of where to go on this. I 've been trying to research this and looked into .net and php to help me start out. I have no experience in either of these technologies but I have the time and smarts to do it, I just need someone to point me in a good direction.

We will be using 2000server on the server hosting the site locally, but that may change if hosting locally is to much of a problem. There is approximately 115 students. They don't want anything real flashy, just something functional that can grow with time to add more features such as teacher weekly student comments, multimedia of activities, etc.

Where do you think is a good direction to start? Has anyone done this before? Please let me know what you think.

 

[Spleeze]

This won't solve your website delimma, but as far as the grading thing goes...

The local district here has adopted something called "PowerSchool" from Apple...

It's a system that allows teachers to input grades and comments etc. and the parents can check from home with a login/pass assigned to each student.

http://www.apple.com/education/powerschool/

Also after a little bit of browsing I found that there's a number of these systems that you can use... they're called "student information systems"

here's one i found after a google:

http://www.webeim.com/

hope this helps a bit

 

[tyderium]

Thank you for the info, I did a search as well for student information systems and found an open source program called centre http://www.miller-group.net/

opensource=free private schools like free!!!

this looks to be a good package with add ons to grow when funds become available.

Now comes the fun part on getting it to work.

Anyone else have any ideas?

 

[nuclearfly]

PHP is pretty easy to learn, I picked it first and found it similar to Perl. There are all kinds of web technology tutorials here. Also a nice tool to get started with PHP, if you are hosting your own.. and aren't server-able, is EasyPHP. This app gives you Apache, MySQL, and PHP in one bundle.