Examples of other sites

We’ve tried to assemble a range of examples from college websites that exemplify some options that Middlebury might emulate. Please provide additional examples in the comments if you see any that speak to you, or have comments on these sites that we used to present to staff on Dec. 16:

– Oberlin has recently redesigned its site into a highly dynamic & multimedia system. Particularly noteworthy is their group blogging site, encouraging students, staff and faculty to participate in a multifaceted conversation.

– Gettysburg has a good example of how a personalized bookmarking system might work – you can create a profile (if you don’t have a Gettysburg email, you can register as a prospective student), and then bookmark any page you might find to save in your profile. Also check out their strong use of embedded video.

– Bates has an embedded audio site that is simple and effective.

– Amherst‘s site (which is built on Drupal, an open source system we’re actively considering) effectively integrates information from its registration system (comparable to Banner) into a range of sites. For instance, a faculty page automatically feeds what courses they are teaching from their schedule, and links to individual courses (which, if registered in the course, includes access to course rosters, eReserves, announcements, etc.). Such an integrated system of sharing data from various platforms is a definite goal of Middlebury’s makeover.

– Colby has an extensive list of wikis, which range from administrative functions to student initiatives to course projects. While Middlebury does have a wiki platform, it could be much more active and integrated into the core web functions.

Please share your thoughts on these sites as well as links to others in the comments.

Branding Mapping

I’m in the process of a brand mapping exercise. Your input would be helpful. There are many sub-brands that are producing a little fragmentation of Middlebury College’s core offering. How do sub-brands leverage and support “Knowledge without Boundaries.” The goal of brand mapping is to help identify missed opportunities in our communication with our Audience. I hope that discussions on this topic will help us enhance the quality of the interaction we have with our audience and help leverage what is available in Middlebury College for sub-brands.

Benefits of Mapping Sub-Brands:
•    Strengthen the brand experience for our audience and ensure it reinforces and builds the parent brand
•    Provide a framework for the sub-brands and products to adapt their offerings and positioning to their individual audiences
•    Provide a strategic framework to leverage the college’s core beliefs and offerings
•    Identify gaps or missed opportunities in the college’s offering
•    Identify core brands throughout the organization that should be high profile due to their potential to benefit the parent brand
•    Clarify the college’s offering to its different markets and avoid misperceptions or confusion

Why now?

Given the financial turmoil within the College, the country, and the world, we’ve been asked by many people on campus: why are you doing this project now? Is this really the right time to be re-doing the website?

Here are some reasons why we think it is still the right time to do this:

  1. We have to change the underlying platform for our main website. Microsoft has declared that they  will no longer provide technical support, bug fixes, or security patches for content management system we license from them, and so we have no choice but to change to a different system.
  2. Our preference would be to choose an open-source system to manage our web, and while such a system is not free we do think the overall costs of an open-source system will be less than a commercial system. An open source system requires no purchase costs, and will have a broad-based support system of developers and users from around the world. The labor costs for designing and maintaining such a system are far less than comparable commercial systems like the Microsoft system we’ve been using, with no outlays for upgrades or bug fixes.
  3. As we enact attrition within the workforce through a hiring freeze, we will need to become ever more efficient in how we conduct business, provide services, communicate, share materials, etc. We think that an improved website can allow the various offices on campus work to work more efficiently, and will focus our efforts on achieving these sorts of goals.
  4. A more effective website will in turn reduce our reliance on print, which we think can save money in the long run and also help reduce our impact on the environment.

There are no doubt other reasons why moving forward on this project is a good idea for Middlebury in spite of the budget situation, allowing for better alumni, donor, and prospective student outreach, and further positioning Middlebury as a global and forward-thinking institution.

— mike roy

Update from Requirements Team

Here’s what’s new from the requirements team as of November 19th:

1. We’ve established who the stakeholders from the various offices, departments, and constituents should be, and contacted them to let them know that we’ll be calling on them to help us define the requirements for their area.

2. We are finalizing a campus-wide survey that we’ll be sending out shortly.

3. We will use the results from the survey to develop questions for focus groups that we’ll hold in early January.

4. We plan to hold a set of open sessions in December and January.

5. We’ve updated the website for the project to allow people to sign up to be in a focus group, take the survey (once it is complete!), requests features/functions, and make general comments.

6. We hope to have a first draft of our requirements document in place by the end of January.

–mike

Design/IA committee update & timeline

The Design/IA group of the Web Makeover Team has been meeting since October 24. Meetings are on Friday afternoons in the Library, Room 145, from 2 to 3:30. 

Group members: Bryan Carson, Alex Chapin, Tim Etchells (chair), Ian McBride, Amy McGill, Jamie Northrup, Jeff Rehbach, Mike Roy, Mark Zelis.

Our discussions so far have covered these topics, among (many) others:

– Taking a preliminary look at Middlebury’s and Monterey’s current information architecture, and discussing what we need going forward. The consensus of our group is that Midd and MIIS should shoot for doing most of the IA work in-house. We envision seeking some help with this part of the project from the partner or partners with whom we work on the redesign of the site.

– Comparing notes on what we feel are well designed, well structured and attractive Web sites (some in higher ed, some not) that successfully deliver a wide variety of content. URLs and group member reports are available at the Webredo wiki.

– Developing several diagrams that illustrate the group’s thoughts on the information architecture of the site, as well as preliminary wireframes of the home page for the public facing Web site. Graphics available on the wiki.

– Sharing thoughts with members of the Requirements Group and the Platform Group on progress to date and expectations for the future.

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Design/IA Timeline, through 02/13/09:

November 14: Research under way on vendors for design/IA; ongoing: Continue work/discussion on IA development

November 21: Determine how much help will be needed from vendor on IA

December 1: Wrap up vendor research; prepare RFP’s

December 12: Send RFP’s to design/IA vendors 

January 16: Receive vendor proposals, and see demos at Middlebury

February 3: Receive bids from vendors

February 13: Select vendor for design and/or IA

Platform Committee Update

  1. Created a system inventory and identify dependencies.
  2. Generated a list of platform requirements.  These would be in addition to what is found by the Requirements Committee.
  3. Based on discussions, we identified three strategies for building a new presence.
      • An Aggregator Home Page with no central CMS, content authoring and managing would be done through multiple systems
      • Central CMS for the content of www.middlebury.edu, would include a personal homepage for authenticated users.
      • A combination of the two.
      1. Investigated platform possibilities, with advantages and disadvantages.

      We are currently narrowing down the possibilities based on our requirements, and looking for examples of use in other higher-ed institutions.  We are leaning towards a combination cms/portal platform, and will be deciding whether these two functions should exist on the same or different platforms.

      Some thoughts on editing

      This idea emerged out of a conversation that Renée Brown and I had last week, and I thought it worth sharing with the group.

      Renée & I agreed that one of the problems with our current web system is that the editing functions for CMS are ineffectively distributed around institutional staffing. Focusing only on academic departments (our mutual site of expertise), departmental coordinators are the people who hold the keys to the CMS and edit/update the material on departmental sites. However, most of the content revision requests come from faculty & chairs, not the coordinators, and coordinators update sites so infrequently that most lack confidence and comfort in the tasks, and thus seek out help from LIS. The net result is that department sites are typically out-of-date, stagnant, and clunky in their design.

      The interesting aspect of the conversation was our different solutions for fixing this problem. Renée suggested that web updating and editing should be more centralized, with staff who are expert at the website fielding requests from departments & other units for changes, revisions, design overhauls, etc. She felt that coordinators lack both the time and skills to dedicate themselves to this task, and will never have enough to do on the website to justify developing the necessary skills. She approaches this issue as someone well-versed in the current CMS system, and sees how the learning curve and historical problems with the system has made it difficult for coordinators to carry out their roles as active editors.

      My idea for solving the problem is to create more editors, rather than fewer. With our new platform, we might imagine a more organically integrated editing system, where any user with a login could “make edits” to any page on our website – click a button that says “Edit this page” and have at it via a simple user interface. Any submitted edits would be sent to a moderator who would approve & tweak submissions to fit stylistic norms, proper formatting, and vet questionable content. Since it would be tied to a Middlebury login, vandalism shouldn’t be an issue (and can be easily disciplined if it becomes one). The moderators, probably at Communications or LIS, wouldn’t need to know the content area, just the form, with contact people for each page if there are content-related questions – since the process of moderation would be fairly simple, approvals could be done quickly rather than taking time for much editing, redesign, etc.. All users would be empowered to collectively improve content and quality, make suggestions and recommend clarifications. It wouldn’t be a wiki free-for-all due to the moderation, but it would marshal the energies of more than just designated web editors. (Renée’s main skepticism about this model is that too many people would simply choose not to participate, still asking coordinators to make changes – I’m more optimistic that there are a few energetic editors out there!)

      I thought that our different visions on the potential solutions highlights the different assumptions of, to use a jargony phrase, Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0. Personally, I think that our makeover should try to come up with a wide range of ways to build upon the efforts of many input sources and invite participation broadly under the banner of User-Generate Content, without turning the site into a decentered playground. I’m curious how others might view this or similar problems and possibilities…

      -Jason

      Requirements Group Activities and Questions

      1. Build awareness of project
      How do we let the community know that we are looking for input/suggestions? How do we explain our process, goals, and inform people of their various opportunities for commenting, providing input, suggestions, etc.?

      2. Draft a focus group protocol and methodology
      What questions should we ask? Who will lead the focus group? Who will take notes? How do we recruit participants? When do we schedule them? How do we analyze the results?

      3. Draft a survey
      What questions should we ask? Who do we send it to? How do we analyze the results?

      4. Organize open sessions for faculty, staff, and students
      When? Where? Who to facilitate conversation? What questions do we ask? (How is this different than the focus group?) How to advertise?

      5. Position statements from stakeholders
      Develop a format/set of questions and invite stakeholders (academic departments, faculty, students, administrative offices) to develop position statements that allow them to articulate their goals for the web, and to sketch out scenarios for how various communities might interact with their office, and each other, through the website.

      6. Statistics and inventory of existing environment
      What do we know about present usage patterns? What key tools, services, utilities need to be converted to whatever we move towards?

      7. What else should we be doing to gather feedback and ideas from the Middlebury community?

      Questions we might ask (for use in our surveys, focus groups, open sessions, one-on-one conversations, etc.)

      (These are the questions proposed by the Internet Strategy Taskforce; what other questions ought we ask? How might we re-write these questions? What questions might we exclude?)

      1. What impact does our web presence have on you and your role at Middlebury?
      2. What would you change if you were given free reign over our web presence?
      3. What would be the impact of keeping with the status quo for our web presence?
      4. What three opportunities might the web help you take advantage of that you are not currently utilizing?
      5. What three problems do you hear most often about our web presence?
      6. What emerging trends (technology related or not) will have the most impact on your work moving forward?
      7. What do you feel we must do in order to stay relevant/fresh as an institution?
      8. What web sites do you visit/use most often and why? Are there aspects of those sites that you think could be incorporated into Middlebury’s presence?

      Groups that we will need to consult

      Academic Departments  (All)
      Admissions
      Athletics
      Bread Loaf School of English (including remote sites)
      Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference
      Center for the Arts/Museum
      College Advancement (APP)
      Communications
      CSO
      Environmental Council
      Faculty Council
      Human Resources
      LIS
      Middlebury College Alumni Association
      Middlebury Language Schools
      Monterey Institute for International Studies
      President’s Staff
      Project on Innovation, Creativity and Leadership
      Schools Abroad
      SGA / Student organizations
      Spring Student Research Symposium
      Staff Council
      Strategic Communications Committee of the Board

      Who else?