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- Sections/areas, not separate sites.
- Much smaller and simpler - audience focused, clearly defined purpose.
- Content much more integrated with mainsite. Content exposed in key areas of site where visitors are looking at related material. Strong links from F and S areas.
- No content duplication.
- Flexible approach - 'local' content that has no logical home on mainsite remains on school site.
- Aligned with mainsite approach for content being organised by task, topic or user group - not by organisational structure.
- Encourage people to think about F&S content (rather than F&S 'sites').
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Risks
| Risk | Description | Likelihood | Impact | Mitigation | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | True buy-in from faculties and schools is not gained prior to starting work | Faculty and school staff may not support the approach; or may support it on face value, but not truly understand how it works. | H | H Approval for the approach may be obtained, but when work starts there could be repeated rounds of negotiation required, putting stress on relationships and timeframes. F&Ss could go along with the approach, but build their own sites, wikis (etc) independently. | Approach communications and consultation on the approach as a process of change and education. In particular, staff in faculties and schools (who? the decision makers? administrators? managers? academic staff?) need to understand and buy in to the user-centred approach to IA (rather than organisational unit-centred) and plain language. This may mean having more mini-workshops and meetings with groups of staff. Showing built examples of key deliverables will help stakeholders visualise where they need to get to (eg, topic area and example page, UG degree page (if changed), F&S area). Reiterate the benefits (better design, reduced content management, their content more accessed in other areas, evidence that it works for their target audiences). |
| 2 | Approach takes a long time to implement | Content on faculty and school sites encompasses a wide range of significant areas. Improving and relocating the content, and associated areas of the homesite, is a big job. | H | L-M Faculty and school sites won't change for some time: they may continue to have old design and content. Current issues will persist for longer than we'd like. | Prioritised approach to the required work. Careful planning: this is underway in the project team. Request more project content resource. |
| 3 | Loss of 'online identity' for faculties and schools | Much of the content that is currently on faculty and school sites will be merged with similar content on the homesite, or moved to a central location on the homesite. Faculty and school sites will be decommissioned: instead, there will be much smaller faculty and school 'areas'. Faculty and school staff may feel that their presence and importance as organisational entities is significantly diminished on the Victoria website. | H | M There may be resistance to the approach. Socialisation of the approach may take a long time. F&Ss may build independent sites/wikis etc. | Explain the benefits of the approach for them as a faculty or school. Present the example faculty and school area mockup (in test environment). The example mockups show that the areas have:
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| 4 | Diminished sense of content ownership across faculties and schools | Much of the content that is currently on faculty and school sites will be merged with similar content on the homesite, or moved to a central location on the homesite. Faculty and school staff may have a diminished sense of ownership of content that is no longer on distinct faculty and school sites or areas. | H | M Faculty and school staff may not update the centralised content.
| Gain true buy-in to the approach during the initial consultation (education) and while working with faculties and schools on the content changes. Develop strong web author/editor networks to ensure people remain connected. |
| 5 | Complexity around page ownership and page edit permissions | Some of the content currently on school or faculty sites will be integrated into existing homesite pages.
| H | M No-one may update a page, or there may be ongoing small edits.
| Plan content management with the Web BAU team. |
| 6 | Content ownership of important, centralised pages could fall to the web team | Topic and programme pages are highly important for undergrad recruitment. The topic page is a media-rich marketing page; and the undergrad degree page presents complex information in a way that makes sense to school students. To avoid these pages becoming ineffective over time, they will need to be maintained by people who fully understand the strategy behind them and have specialist web content and copy writing skills. The web team are under resourced to do this work. | M | M This could put stress on the web team. However, the team will gain an extra web writer at the end of 2015. And topic and programme pages are unlikely to need frequent review.
| Plan content management with the Web BAU team. |
| 7 | The Faculty of Engineering may be resistant to moving away from using a wiki for web publishing | The Faculty of Engineering (and school) uses a wiki to author and display some of their website content.
The faculty may feel be resistant to having to move some of their activities to university-standard methods.
| M | M
| Faculty and Marketing managers meet to clarify the best approach to be taken. The features of the new university approach need to be communicated (ie, it's now better).
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