Mercer Island School District Launches New Websites

The Mercer Island School District is pleased to announce we have relaunched our District and school websites.

The relaunch process started in September of last year with the selection of FinalSite as our new website provider. This selection was followed by community feedback sessions on potential templates, site designs, site reviews and testing. 

Take A Video Tour of our New Website with MISD Communications Coordinator Ian Henry

We know how important video is to telling stories about the great students, staff, and programs in the District and we are excited to have integrated video into all of our sites. On each site's home page we have a welcome message from a District or school administrator, or in the case of MIHS, a video highlighting all the school offers from Student Board Representatives Andrew Howison and Asha Woerner. There are other areas where we have incorporated video into our sites, like on our District Videos page, where we have videos ranging from Superintendent Rundle to our Discover the District series to unique features we have produced. Some of the videos are hosted on our new FinalSite content management system and some are YouTube embedded videos. As we use video more and more we will be hosting more of the videos on our site and embedding YouTube videos less frequently. 

Our new sites have the capability to be translated into a language other than english. In the lower right corner of all our sites you will see an icon that says “English >”. When you click on this icon it will load a menu vertically upwards with languages that our sites can be translated into. The translation includes all text and menu navigation on pages on our sites. Right now we have five language translations enabled and will be adding more languages as we move forward.

With our new sites we have highlighted the search function with a bar in the navigation menu. In our community feedback sessions we heard about how important it was to be able to find the search function to find what a user was looking for. The search function results will improve as it is used, so the more our community searches, the more accurate the results will be. So if it is not as robust with results as you would think to start, it will get better.

On the District site, we have incorporated group photos of staff that work in each department as well as group photos of Superintendent advisory groups. We look forward to adding group staff and teacher photos from each school to our sites. We think this will be the start of doing a better job celebrating our staff and the groups that do awesome work with Mercer Island students.   

In the upper right corner of our sites you will see a button that says "Website Correction?". While we worked hard to update every page, link, and button, while also creating new pages and also checking spelling and grammar on all pages, we know that we might have missed something here and there. So if you see a correction, click on the button to fill out a form that will let us know a correction is needed.  

At the top of each site you will see a "Staff Hub", "Student Hub", and "Parent Hub" drop down menu. Each of these hubs have links to pages we think each group will find important. Below the rotating news photo gallery on each site you will see a horizontal row of square boxes with a graphic icon and text. Each of these boxes link to information we know visitors to the sites are looking for. These boxes were chosen by analyzing the Google Analytics from each site to determine what pages our community were visiting most often.

Here are the addresses of each our seven sites:

District - https://www.mercerislandschools.org/
MIHS - https://mihs.mercerislandschools.org/
IMS - https://ims.mercerislandschools.org/
Island Park - https://ip.mercerislandschools.org/
Lakeridge - https://lr.mercerislandschools.org/
Northwood - https://nw.mercerislandschools.org/
West Mercer - https://wm.mercerislandschools.org/

We hope you find our new sites helpful, informative, and celebratory of our great school community.