General:

• Many in our office use the AA website for disseminating forms, and providing general information, but we fear that many on campus are not aware of what is there
• Many use Banner and/or webmail but these are not easy to get to without several clicks.
• We also use the schedule of courses to see when faculty are teaching, and reference the College Handbook online quite a bit
• We also use the scheduler on RS25, however it is not the “complete” campus schedule as several offices do not use it to list their events.  We generally like the ability to request space from the site itself.
• Although our experience has been less than positive with CMS, one thing that it does is allow you to set a date for a page to expire, which is very helpful
• the college’s search engine is not ideal as it is difficult to find pages
• a related issue is the length of pages, esp. in the handbook.  It’s difficult to point someone to a particular place when it may be half-way down the page, or someplace in the page that may be difficult to direct someone to.

Goals:

• having more freedom to connect to pages outside of our area would be great, such as links to faculty pages or more connectivity to registrar or advising info
• ability to disseminate information more easily (perhaps by avoiding email), such as upcoming talks, lectures, meetings, or reminders of deadlines, etc.
• it would be ideal to know when faculty are teaching, which we do now by hunting through class schedules.  I like Amherst’s schedule tool, where you can add your own
• It would be nice to have a collection of faculty accomplishments available on the AA website.  Right now we send out an email with that info on a semi-regular basis
• Allowing folks to tailor their page to select their own “widgets” sounds like a good thing
• How about links to local sites, like weather, CNN, the Chronicle, etc?
• Please make sure we leave our address on the front page.  This is a real issue for me when looking at other school’s websites, which I do frequently
• Could we add a virtual campus tour?
• Would like to have a list of grants that have been approved so faculty can check on the status of their request when they log in
• We would like an area for all relevant forms separate from informational sections.
• it would be helpful if links within a site were listed alphabetically
• AA should have a section that provides a “division of duties” chart for all staff in the office that can be referenced by others
• Some sections of the site seem to be a “dumping area” for lots of stuff that makes it difficult to cull through. For example, a separate section for course proposal forms, student independent project proposals and guidelines
• improve the search feature