...
The short answer is because we must. Just think about our subjects on the old school sites (even where on homesite the content is still mastered on school sites). Our new approach is based around topic pages, not subject pages. While most topics consist of subjects from the same school (e.g. the topic Film and theatre contains two subjects, Film and Theatre), others cross schools (e.g. the topic History and classics contains five subjects from two schools), and some even cross faculties (e.g. the topic Environment contains six subjects from two faculties). Add to this the confusion for students deciding on what to study if we "bounced" them between old subject pages and new topic pages depending on what subject they wanted to look at next. As we have already accepted that it makes sense to prune the CSP information off all faculty and school sites, the first "by content area" sweep, the next question is . . . .
...
- Postgraduate: Programmes (subjects will be done in Phase 2), information, forms, etc on faculty and schools sites, but excluding FGR's faculty site and postgraduatelife postgraduateLife, that will be handled in Phase 3
- Research: Information for, on and about research (including funding, etc) that is currently in faculty and school sites, but excluding the research centres, institutes and chairs, as they will be handled in Phase 4.
- Information to support current students: That is in common to other faculties and/or has a natural home in the Current Students zone on Homesite, but excluding current student information that is unique to a faculty and/or does not have a natural home in Current Students (until more work here is done, be that I/A or refactoring).
...
- Follow "by content area" so long as the domain is common to all/most faculties, contains a significant volume of content, and has a clear target area on Homesite where the current I/A and core team resourcing can "receive" this content. If the answer to most of these is not yes then the content could probably stay on the old site until the "by faculty" approach deals with it.
- Content that could not be moved - but ought - can be park parked in a temporary and ring-fenced page/section on the new faculty site until resources or timing is ripe to deal with it properly.
- Stand-alone sites that are specifically mentioned in the high level scope for another stage should remain unchanged until that stage.
- Resist the temptation to perpetuate the life of the old sites by surfacing new content on the old faculty and school sites, even if it seems to meet a short term objective. It will be tempting, but is likely to extend the time span for disabling the old site.
- Content with low usage/unique views could be dealt with by any method, any time. If few people are looking at tit it then lets not stew over how and when to handle it. The lower the usage the less we need to weight or consider the impact on users.
- Avoid having more instances of the truth than we currently have. This means we try to turn pages off as there are replacement pages available and live.
...
- More redirecting: area being pruned will require an audit and plan for the links to that area from elsewhere, especially on the old faculty site it is coming formfrom. Sometimes we might be able to enable the new content on Homesite and leave the old working on the old site without any great disadvantage. Making changes on a stable, albeit old site introduces risk. While testing can mitigate this risk, it costs and is unlikely to entirely eliminate it.
- By domain is likely to extend the elapsed time over which we need contact with the web admins in faculty and schools. However, it will be less intense on any one faculty or person, so on balance is probably a better idea. It also gives us more opportunities to win people over and show what the new content looks like in on Homesite before we disable their old faculty site.
- I am unclear if one approach is more efficient (i.e. quicker/cheaper) over all.
- I am unclear if one approach has less workload impact on the core team. Having said this it is clear that doing things well will place high demands on the core team, both the impact on the
- URL's: We would have less flexibility to reuse existing urls for the new topic pages until such time as the old school and faculty sites are disabled, freeing up some more desirable urls (e.g. www.victoria.ac.nz/design
...
Although it is comforting to have an approach decided well ahead of time (mainly so we can communicate it to others) we are continually learning how to do WIP better and as such might make a better decision if we left it until later. Maybe the best compromise is to have an agreed approach at any stage, yet be open to refining the approach as we learn more. This means we could agree on an approach now (maybe even the old we are already following) but review this as we near the end of CSP.
...
Other questions from Chrissi awaiting answers:
- What impact will it have on the testing required and how will it influence the remaining test plan
- What impact on delivery/timeframes – can we do this all by the end of 2016? Is there an approach that is quicker? Does that mean we cut corners?
- Content mapping – in addition to the spreadsheet on F&S v2 page > https://victoriauniversity.atlassian.net/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=16154703
...