Transcript Designing a New User-Centric College Public Website

 College
background
 Old Web site
 Project research
 New Web site development
 Implementation
 Lessons
Learned
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Largest community college system in Missouri
serving an area of about 700 square miles;
created by area voters in 1962
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Four campuses, three education centers
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Transfer, career and developmental programs
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Non-credit continuing education courses
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Various workforce development initiatives
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A “League for Innovation” institution
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26,000 credit students each semester
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40,000 non-credit each year
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31,000 workforce development students
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130 credit programs
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57 workforce development programs
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1,800 faculty (420 FT)
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3,500 employees
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Issues and problems
with old site
Developing a new
brand identity for the
institution
“One College”, … but
not a well defined
identity on the web
site
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Site is difficult to navigate – and to find
content – 16,000 pages with no standard
navigation
Internal use content mixed in with other
content
Pages did not follow best practices for web
design
Most pages did not comply with our loosely
defined college standards
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Common to have over 2,000 broken links
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Non-compliance with ADA requirements
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Out-of-date and conflicting content
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No unified appearance – brand identity was
fragmented at best to almost non-existent
No workflow, editing or review process
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Trying to represent the constant of the
district-wide college while maintaining the
uniqueness of each campus
Taking content from the existing 16,000
pages to distill the items of need to audiences
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Meetings at each campus to introduce project
and seek cooperation and support
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2005 – Audience research conducted by
contracted firm
• Current and prospective students – focus groups
and online surveys
• Continuing Education and high school guidance
counselors – focus groups
• Key administrators and faculty influencers – phone
interviews
• Larger sample of faculty and staff – random, online
survey
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Registration
Hub for student news and communications
Access to all programs and classes
Class availability, times/room numbers,
changes, grades
Do everything online:
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Pay for classes
Get parking passes
Get books
“Not have to go to the campus”
Ervin Marketing Report, May 2006
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84.7%
82.4%
81.8%
77.9%
60.3%
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29.9% - can’t find what they are looking for
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-
Registration
Student Resources
Class Schedules
Blackboard
College Catalog
Ervin Marketing Report, May 2006
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The existing public website will be replaced in
its entirety
The new website will focus on the needs of
our external constituents and will incorporate
the College’s new marketing, branding and
image campaign
• Provide an informative, effective marketing tool
• Provide for the needs of current students
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Align with the college strategic mission
To increase enrollment at the college
Simplify the experience for students
Management, faculty, staff and
administrators given the ability to develop
and update content to web-site
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The contents of the new website will be
developed by the outside vendor
A second vendor will take responsibility for
building the initial Web site
The new web site will utilize the Serena
Collage web content management system to
simplify the publishing process and enable a
workflow driven web authoring environment
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Rebrand the site to project STLCC as one
college
Build a site that allows visitors to select a
path based on personal needs
Create a new web content delivery system:
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Easy to update
Reinforces web standards
Provides a consistent user experience
Flexible to respond to changing needs
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Huge change in the culture of the way the
website was maintained
Shifting responsibility from campus to
Community Relations and web coordinators
Web Authoring as a distributed responsibility
Identify person(s) responsible for web
authorship
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Taxonomy - (navigation, structure,
organization)
• Ad Hoc Web Advisory Committee – played a big role
• Organized by function rather than content
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Frequently accessed content on home page
• Without trying to include everything
‣ Automate consistency and standards
through templates and required elements
‣ Rich text editing eliminates the need for
HTML or web editor experience
‣ Manage workflows with the combination of
task management and a review/approval
system
‣ Allow authorized users to easily add or
update content “anytime, anywhere” through
a browser
‣ Roll pages back to a previous version as
needed
‣ Schedule content replacement or removal
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SungardHE Banner (ERP) Self-Service
BlackBoard LMS
Home-grown applications
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Course Schedule
Schedule of Late-Starting Courses
Employee Directory
Continuing Education Registration
Student Application
Sexual Harassment, FERPA, and Diversity Tutorials
New system – Windows Live student e-mail
‣ New website went live March 9, 2008:
‣ In order to have a go-live date, a “line” had
to be drawn somewhere on what content
would be part of the initial deployment
• We used the Ad Hoc Web Committee to develop
basic guidelines for what was to be included for
Phase 1
• There are some whose content was left out that
felt their content was too important to not be
included
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Representing a district-wide college (“One
College” brand) while presenting the
uniqueness of each campus.
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Underestimating timeline for content and
technical development
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Working with several different vendors
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Focus can get sidetracked with input from
concerned parties
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New positions, new employees
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Deploying new WCMS in conjunction with new
site
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Internal audiences – time it takes to
communicate – delays caused by summer
schedules
Managing expectations of new site –
Launched with 1,600 vs. 16,000 pages
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“Phase 2” almost completed • Corrections and updates - Added over 1250
pages based on feedback and metrics analysis
• Development of interactive, more dynamic
content
• WCMS contributor training
• Development of department and “academic
discipline” pages
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Implementation of enrollment management
tools
• CRM
• Variable web content/print
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Continue to add content that was not
included in the first two phases that fit the
objective of the new site
Revival of the Web Advisory Committee
my.stlcc.edu student portal- SharePoint
Blogs/Social networking
Continued focus on brand management
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The overall goal of project of creating a usercentric website was achieved
The new website contributed to the goal of
increase in enrollment
Phase I rolled out smoothly
National Council for Marketing and Public
Relations – Silver Award
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The use of an outside consultant
• Provided confirmation and justification for taking
on this huge project
• Justified funding for project
• Identified the need for dedicated positions
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Active involvement of the faculty and staff
Use of outside vendors for web development
Good internal cooperation between technical
and content
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Integration of home grown apps successful
WCMS – edit, review and deploy functions
went smoothly
Implementation of AP style
Setting a deadline and trying to stick to it forced us to make some tough decisions to
meet that deadline
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Outside vendor
• Web development team needed a lot of effort to get
up to speed with our WCMS
• Vendor used for writing of content never really hit
the mark
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WCMS
• Issues integrating applications - vendor never got
a handle on this
• User interface – edit function not as “friendly” as
desirable – Many support calls from “occasional”
user
• Task management is cumbersome and does not
match our business processes
• Uncertain future of vendor support
• Required desktop settings not necessarily
compatible with campus settings
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In house team undermanned – made meeting
deadlines very challenging
Content needs to be re-written in a more
“user friendly” style – easier to read
Better communication/feedback process with
faculty and staff during development and
subsequently
Faster implementation of additional/missing
content
• Departments & academic disciplines
• Dynamic content
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Hard coding of static information – outside
vendor not familiar with internal resources for
dynamic content
We had more hardware than was necessary –
ASP & ASP.NET integration with CMS not
realized until after learning more about WCMS
capability
Internal technical staff would have benefitted
from earlier training
Identifying and training more content
contributors earlier
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The battle of the home page
• Next to the navigation, this was the biggest focus
of discussion
• Too much ended up being included making the
page very busy and, to many, unappealing
• Many links were represented by both buttons and
text links
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Some groups failed to take ownership of
content
Failed to maintain active Web Advisory
Committee
 George Sackett
Web Content Supervisor
[email protected]
www.twitter.com/George
[email protected]
 Presentation is available online at:
http://www.stlcc.edu/presentations/