Overview
In 2024-2025, the Richmond County School System (RCSS) website supported more than 1.6 million active users and 1.7 million new users, with more than 38 million page views across high-demand areas such as school calendars, directories, job listings, and nutrition services. This level of engagement demonstrates that our website is not only a vital tool for internal operations—it is also the primary gateway for family engagement, information transparency, and public trust.
Following the development of their 2025-2030 strategy map, I initiated a full redesign of the district website, all school websites, and a rebrand of its digital presence to address mounting technical limitations and elevate its communication strategy. This includes a redesign of the district website, app, and professional development strategy.
The Challenge
The previous website was outdated, the mobile app was no longer actively managed, and the organization’s legacy content management system (CMS) Blackboard was no longer going to be supported supported after the provider’s acquisition by company Finalsite. We were given a deadline of December 30, 2025 to transition to the new website, giving me a little more than six months to complete the project after becoming Director of Media and PR at RCSS.
These challenges limited our ability to serve families effectively and maintain a secure, accessible, and fully functional web environment. This project represents both a necessary technical upgrade and a strategic investment in stakeholder
communication.
Goals & Objectives
- Launch a fully redesigned, accessible district website and mobile app by January 2026.
- Train 100% of department web content managers on new CMS by January 2026.
- Increase district website accessibility score from 84.4% to 95% by summer 2026.
- Increase traffic to individual school websites by 20% within 12 months of full launch (by December 2026), as measured by unique users and sustained engagement.
- Achieve at least 5,000 mobile app downloads and a 30% monthly active user rate within the first 12 months of app launch (by December 2026).
Results
As of today, we fully implemented all 54 new websites by the December deadline and $20,000 under budget. All staff members were trained and we have already achieved our accessibility goal of 95%, putting our organization into Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance by eliminating more than 5,000 pages.
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