Ever wondered how you could save your school district thousands of dollars annually and put that money to better use than spending it on hosting for your district’s websites? If so, you’ve come to the right place. Below you will learn what SchoolPresser is, it’s features and services, and how you can save thousands of dollars annually by getting rid of your current vendor and switching to WordPress. Newark Public School’s made the switch, you can too!

About SchoolPresser:

SchoolPresser is a service that was founded in 2017. It consists of both a Software-as-a-Service solution for school districts and also a consulting business. SchoolPresser, LLC is the nation’s leading vendor for implementing WordPress powered school district websites. With a mission to get all 14,000+ public school districts onto WordPress, SchoolPresser is working towards saving taxpayer dollars at a local and national level. We care deeply about our schools and understand that school budgets get tighter every year. The money being spent on expensive, proprietary, closed-source SaaS vendor solutions is better spent on a website platform that can serve your needs better.

Services:

No More Vendor Lock-In: With WordPress, you own the code so you won’t be limited by your CMS vendor’s technology anymore! We’ll even help you migrate to WordPress or migrate away if you ever decide to leave SchoolPresser.

Migration Services: Our content migration scripts can automatically migrate your school websites from the leading SaaS vendors like SchoolWires to WordPress.

Ease-of-Use: WordPress powers over 26% of all websites on the Internet, and its easy to use content management makes it a very popular solution for keeping websites up-to-date, fresh and relevant.

Modern Web Design: Our technology is state of the art and modern, and so is our web design. We offer a full range of services to districts of all sizes. Smaller and medium-sized districts can take advantage of our pre-designed themes and templates which result in dramatic cost-savings. Larger districts with a need for more custom design solutions can work with us to get a 100% unique design that completely meets your needs. All of our themes and templates feature responsive design that works great on both desktops as well as in mobile devices, tablets and smartphones.

Affordable Hosting: We are hosted with the world’s largest WordPress hosting company. Our cloud-based servers are secure, fast and backed up nightly. We are currently offering discounted hosting for non-profit schools.

Custom Mobile Apps: As an Add-On service, we can partner with AppPresser’s innovative WordPress-to-Mobile app builder giving you your own mobile app, branded to your district or school.

You Own The Code: Have someone excellent with WordPress on staff? You own the code (git access). If you don’t, we offer all levels of support from none to fully managed.

WordPress CMS Training: Our online tutorials make it easy for your staff to learn how to use WordPress. We can also help you find a local WordPress expert to be your first line of support for when things go wrong.

Support: After your district launches on WordPress, we will work with your support staff or your local WordPress guru. We offer different levels of support, including a complete Content Management service.

WordPress-Powered: WordPress is 100% Open-Source software, with no more vendor lock-in. There is also 50,000+ plugins available for use at zero cost.

Safe & Secure: We update WordPress and all installed plugins immediately upon learning of an exploit or security problem. Your sites will always be safe with us.

Nightly Backups: A nightly backup is run on all of our servers, allowing us to recover something on your site if anything goes wrong. Recovering your site or sites is as simple as one click, and you’ll be back to normal in seconds.

Site Portability: We’ll help you migrate off our servers once your contract is up if you want to host WordPress elsewhere.

Features:

SchoolPresser has hundreds of built-in features.

Document Management: SchoolPresser has a powerful document manager built right in, allowing you to organize and host thousands of PDFs, Word and Excel files.

Secure Logins: We’ve locked down WordPress to make it more secure and we can also connect to your Active Directory/LDAP server.

Teacher Sites & Pages: Page Builder for classes, homework assignments and classroom news.

District Site & School Sites: Our unique parent-child theme relationship means all of your school sites will borrow design elements from your district site.

Site-wide Alerts & News: Weather Closings – We make it easy to add a site-wide banner across every Page in case of inclement weather or other important messages.

Custom Solutions: Our WordPress installs are all unique, meaning it’s easy to extend WordPress meet your district’s exact needs.

Multiple Calendars: Use our calendar system or hook up your Google calendars.

SchoolPresser Has Your Back: Founded and run by school operations professionals, SchoolPresser is a full-service, services-based company. Not only will we help you design, build, develop and host your school district websites, we will also provide online support. We are here to help, no matter how big or small your district is.

Pricing:

• Small District: Under 2,000 Students – $2,000 per year
• Medium District: 2,000-5,000 Students – $3,000 per year
• Large District: 5,000-25,000 Students – $5,000 per year
• Custom: 25K+ Students, Custom Solutions – $7,000+ per year

 

Schools Using WordPress:

Saving Money:

We can guarantee a 50% reduction in annual costs by migrating to WordPress. Reach out to us and let us know exactly how much you’re paying for a proprietary vendor and we’ll provide our services for half that price.

How Newark Public Schools Saved $200,000:

In October 2013, blog pioneer Cameron Barrett, accepted a job offer at Newark Public Schools where he was tasked with replacing the proprietary platform all of the district’s web sites were running on top of. After taking one look at the vendor’s proprietary Content Management System, he was less than impressed. A change was definitely needed and Cameron put a plan in place to use the open source solution of WordPress to replace the very expensive vendor. Work began in March 2014, and the new websites, with 68 in total, were launched in August 2014, just in time for the new school year.

By 2013, Newark Public Schools was spending around $59,000 annually for the hosting of their websites. This price included support, but didn’t include content maintenance or any custom development. If they wanted to add any new features or functionality, the CMS vendor had to issue a Change Request and add it to their software development lifecycle, which took months to complete and tens of thousands of dollars per new feature.

Shortly after, Newark realized that by adopting WordPress, they would be able to control the development lifecycle and add any new functionality they wanted by installing free or premium plugins from WordPress, who has over 50,000 plugins available to download. If they needed a plugin that didn’t exist yet, a WordPress developer could easily write a custom plugin for Newark for a lot less money than the cost of hiring the proprietary CMS vendor’s team. By “going open source,” any custom plugin Newark had developed could easily be contributed back into the WordPress community for use in other school districts.

Newark also realized that hosting on top of WordPress, would cost less than staying with the proprietary vendor. In the first year, Newark overbought a dedicated managed server at $1200 a month and downgraded to a $600 a month in the second and third years, meaning that Newark went from spending $59,024 per year to spending $7200 per year. Newark was able to save over $200,000 in hosting costs over four years.

Newark is still embracing WordPress and the community around it in the fourth year. A small team of two people in the Communications Department maintains all of the WordPress sites, develops news ones annually, and contributes back to the WordPress community with bug fixes, advice and software code.

How to Learn More:

Reach out to us on our Slack Channel or our SchoolPresser contact page at: https://schoolpresser.com/contact/

Links & Resources:

SchoolPresser Site: https://schoolpresser.com/services/