Forum Moderators: phranque
I have been handed our website at the college I work for and it is in bad shape and needs an update.
My questions range from what CMS to use to which navigation system would work best for the stakeholders of the college. I know that there is some discussion about switching from category navigation to task based navigation.
I believe I have all the technical skills necessary (well if I don’t have them now I can learn them as I go) and I have access to all the software I need. What I am lacking is the management/administrative side of it. I would really appreciate any tips or suggestions anyone here had to offer. Also any links you could sticky mail me to college web management information would be great.
The best part of this is I now get paid to lurk at webmasterworld!
I don't have much to do with the undergrad side of things, but I do know they've been touting the new student interface where a student can do all kinds of things having to do with class registration and fees all in one place - probably part of the "task-based" format you're talking about. For years now, they've been posting exam scores and class materials online. And, of course, the libraries are connected. You can do a search of just one library or search the main library, law library, and medical library all at once (I'm not a database person, so don't ask me how that works). PC World magazine put us in the top ten "wired" campuses this year - not bad for a small private university in a fly-over state.
There's also a lot of information for parents and prospective students. For example, there's a "faculty bibliography" area where prospective students can pull up the publication lists of faculty members to see what kind of work they concentrate on.
The one thing that's been happening recently that I find inconvenient is that a lot of material is being moved onto subdomains. Sometimes makes it hard to find what you're looking for unless you know what subdomain to go to. But that's been done primarily with parts of the site that are for faculty and staff, so I suppose we'll learn our way around eventually.
Who your "stake-holders" are is important, too. If alumni are important to the college as a whole, you want a place where they can check in easily to find out what's going on - both on campus and with alumni "clubs" in different cities, etc. And make it easy for prospective donors to find out not only how to donate but why they should.
Your best research might be checking out the websites of "competitors" - colleges that are about the same size and appeal to the same kind of students and other important groups. Besides seeing some good stuff, you'll probably also find lots of mistakes to avoid.
[edited by: Beagle at 2:16 am (utc) on Oct. 19, 2007]
