Last week I gave a presentation to our small group of communicators, it shows the past, present and future goals for the wayne.edu Web site architecture. I didn’t have time to officially mind map the entire process so I just drew it up on the white board and took photos so bear with me.

The Past

Five years ago when I started in the Web Communications department the web environment was completely decentralized and every site was on their own server with their own content managers, designers and developers. An end user would be bouncing from site to site with no visual or information consistency. It made a lot of sense from a department standpoint because they could control their own environment.

The Present

Over the past five years we have begun to centralize the thousands of sites into a central server environment and identity manual. So far we have 350+ sites in a central look with completely new navigation which focuses on the end user. This is great that each site works well and from a first time visitor they know they are at Wayne State University.

The Future

In the next five years our plan is to improve the users experience even more. Right now the sites are still very separate which means the user has to relearn the navigation each time they bounce to a new site. We have identified some key paths our primary audiences need to take to be successful, our goal is to make those paths usable.  This means creating some central repositories to pull information into the main Web site and to disburse to the department site.

Some other added benefits would be greater integration of information and up to date content. A key facts database that can dynamically be updated across the web and reminds when they need to be updated. A central degree and requirements list. Press releases and news will all be housed in the same spot to pull from and reference. And last but not least a central faculty profile system, opening it up to all faculty, not just the ones in it now. This will allow each of the departments be promote information broader and for users who are not failure with our university structure to find information easily.

Execution

This is just a plan and there are many steps that would need to happen before parts of this are actually implemented. On the other hand there are a few things we can start doing pretty soon and we will be getting those in the queue over the next few months.

I gave the presentation as an overview of the importance of web standards and accessibility. Not only as the right thing to do but also how they can benefit any web project. Not only is there a cost savings to having and using standards but there is also a search engine benefit and overall your users will be happier.

Unfortunately the real world execution is not so cut and dry. Scope, time constraints and lack of communication effect the end result of both standards and accessibility. The key is communication, letting everyone know what the standards are and if there is an addition. Making standards and accessibility a habit and baking it into every piece of work you do will make it that much easier to execute on a consistent basis.

Presentation Video

Presentation Slides

Resources

• Opera Web Standards Curriculum
• The W3C Markup Validation Service
• Section 508: The Road to Accessibility
• jQuery: The Write Less, Do More JavaScript Library
• My DebugBar | IETester
• Cynthia Says – Accessibility Tester
• Web Development Tools – What’s in your web toolbelt?
• Understanding Web Accessibility Obstacles

Last but not least

!important is not your friend, please stop using it.

In the presentation I introduced what I call the Social Degrees of Participation. I wanted to give a little more explanation since the presentation was just headings and I talked in depth about pretty much everything.

Social Degrees of Participation

1. Observing – The first degree of participation is meant for people who know about the social networks and their tools from their friends or main stream media. They know they exist but have not ventured to interact on the sites.
2. Searching – The second degree is meant for people who are signed up for a few social networks and actively search out their interests or mentions of their self/business. They would like to know more about what people are talking about but do not take part in sharing content.
3. Conversing – The third degree is for people who see something on a network and respond to the comment/post. They actively seek and respond to questions or comments.
4. Connecting – The fourth degree is all about remixing content. Taking content posted externally and either reposting or remixing to post to get conversations started.
5. Creating – The fifth degree consists of people who are the originators or creators of content for the networks. They contribute content that is their own and people are actively responding to it.
6. Controlling – The last and most involved level is where you are contributing original content and people are actively looking for your content and connecting with you, making you the center of information and an expert in your field on that network.

What is your degree of social participation?

Learn about the opportunities social media brings for individuals, companies, and social causes. Find out how to use social media to

• engage your customers
• grow your career or business
• drive social change
• and more

Panelists

• Kevin Krason, President, Biznet Internet Solutions
  Founder of Biznet in 1994, Kevin’s strong leadership and business savvy have led Biznet to become one of the most successful web development companies in Michigan. Kevin’s skill at getting everyone on the same page has been instrumental for Biznet in establishing long term client partnerships.
• Shauna Nicholson, Marketing Manager, Biznet Internet Solutions
  Working exclusively in online marketing strategy, Shauna is known for her insight on social media marketing, Shauna is a resource for metro-Detroit businesses who want to leverage the most powerful online tools available. By transcending the social media hype and pairing reality-based business and marketing strategy to the tools, she positions clients to effectively secure measurable ROI.
• Ken Burbary, VP Digital at BIG Communications
  Ken has been involved in web development and interactive media his entire professional career. Constantly learning, he soaks up as many new pieces of information as possible. He’s equally passionate about both business and technology innovations driving his industry.
• Nick DeNardis, Associate Director of Web Communications at Wayne State University
  Nick oversees a staff of eight dedicated to web communications at Wayne State. He has initiated and maintains all of the university’s current social media initiatives. He hosts the video blog EDU Checkup where he reviews a higher education web sites live. Nick is also a .eduGuru writer and an active member of the higher education web community.

Where: Washtenaw Community College, Ann Arbor, Michigan. We will be meeting in Room 121 at the Morris Lawrence Building (map). Plenty of free parking is available adjacent to the building.

When: Wednesday, January 21, 2009, 6:30pm – 8:30pm

Cost: Free! Open to the public.

RSVP Here

Outline

We were tasked with the redesign of the Library and Information Science Program Web site. I started out with a general overview of our department then moved into showing the old LISP web site. It was not an in depth examination of all of our methods but a glance at our process

The Old Site & New Goals

Some of the issues with the old web site were

• Need for more university branding
• New online masters of library science degree that needed promotion
• Need for a news/events static area
• Use of a pixel pattern they use on all their direct mail pieces
• A place to promote their faculty.

We didn’t have access to their old web server or site statistics so we could only base student needs from emails and phone calls. We also used other university library science web sites as benchmarks. 

We determined the primary audience to be prospective graduate students since they only offer graduate degrees. Current Students and Faculty/Staff will have a presence but they will not be the primary focus for the homepage.

Organizing Information

Initially we pull down the site with WinHTTrack to get an idea of the size and folder structure. We then take their primary goals of the site and figure out the paths a user currently has to take to get to them. We then take those paths and chunk them together to shorten the time and organization of them for the new site.

We broke their navigation down by audience and since each section has quite a bit of links underneath it we decided alphabetical would work better than having to prioritize menu items, we did not want to make any assumptions.

Site Design

The main goal of the homepage was to create an impact, appear organized and up to date. Our mockup process is to create three designs, present them and they can either choose one or pick bits and pieces and we work back and forth with we have a design we are both happy with.

I presented the three mockups we created for the site. Each mockup has a homepage and two child pages. Child pages are pages with basic content on them, basically anything that is not the homepage. We create a two column and a full width child page to show how content will flow.

Technical Implementation

The html of the site is implemented in XHTML 1.0 Transitional because we have a CMS with a WYSIWYG editor inside which stumbles if the strict mode is enabled. It is built into a template and placed in the web content management system we created for the university. 

They ended up choosing Mockup #3. It offered enough flexibility to promote news, events, promotions and the pixel pattern did not distract from the content on the page.

Did we accomplish our goals?

Since we did not have any historical site statistics we could only rely on the new site statistics. The last slide shows the Google Analytics for the site since it launched. As you can see the top four hit pages are the goals we set out to promote with the new site. Homepage is number one of course but the online program is number two, followed by the admissions page, followed by the faculty profiles page.

See the design for yourself: http://lisp.wayne.edu/