Stakeholder: Susan Campbell

Registrar Website: http://www.middlebury.edu/administration/records

WebRedo Contact: Renee Brown

General:

It’s important that it’s easy for us to update our departmental website (CMS).  The current method works but is rather cumbersome.

The master calendar is a very valuable tool.

Maintaining and/or improving the search functionality will be very important.  Since users have to drill down deep in our current website (pages buried 5 and 6 levels deep) the search function is especially valuable.  We need the website to be easy to navigate for our constituents

(faculty, alums, current students, parents, etc).

Format-wise, a home page that occupies all of the space in the window (not framed in white, or centered) is more visually appealing.  Our current page is flanked in blue space, whereas Harvard’s homepage content spans the width of the entire window.  Some web pages navigate directly to the proper page when you type it in the search engine.  See vassar.edu.  Also, larger font is a must!  Users often comment that the font size is too small.  We understand uniformity, but it would be great to have at least a headline font size as well as a text font size.

Goals:

We would like to be able to explore the possibility of increased functionality of the web to reach our constituents in new ways.  For example, creating a Q & A  first-year blog for registration questions, etc.  Or, an on-campus registration blog during web registration time as new ways to reach students.

It would be useful to employ the “hover” function on the home page with the large categories that allow users to link right away to an embedded page.  Many schools use this functionality well online.  For example, see williams.edu.

It would be very valuable to have a searchable, online database that archives course data (meeting schedules, course descriptions, etc).