Document status: Under construction
Current state of faculty and school sites
Staff said:
- Design: Tired, complex, unattractive and difficult to use.
- Content: Too much on most pages and too many layers of page. Maintenance is time consuming so time-sensitive information is often out of date. Quality suffers. (e.g. spelling mistakes, links that don't go anywhere).
- Content Management: Lack of time and resources (especially writer) for web content. Too many editors. Too little time for many to become/stay proficient in Squiz.
- Staff profiles: Difficult to maintain, so often out of date. Very dated/tired look. Poor representation of the University.
- Channels: Too many channels with the same information as (anywhere on) the web (and as each other). Students still miss information despite repeat listings. Would like social media listed more prominently.
- Analytics: Needs to be more widely accessible and used, especially data on goal conversions.
- Search: Site search doesn't give useful results.
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- Why are they different?: Future and current undergraduate students didn't understand that faculty and school sites existed as separate sites "This should all be one thing – school, faculty and Victoria. We are one university and there is no reason why it can’t all be together."
- Very low engagement: With f&s sites only used for a few things (to find a person, get course info, access a shortcut to a tool (via the header menu)).
- Staff profiles via site search: To avoid knowing in what school to look for somebody, but also missing f&s news, events and other homepage content.
- Prefer email and Blackboard: As channels for information from Victoria, with all students also following relevant pages on Facebook.
- Postgraduate students: Greater awareness of separate faculty and school sites, but still had a very narrow information need (staff profiles, administrative services, forms, etc).
- Secondary school students: Students didn't understand the roles of faculties and of schools at all.
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Future state of the Victoria University website
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- Sections/areas, not separate sites.
- Much smaller and simpler - audience focused, clearly defined purposemore focused on the audience needs, with a clearly defined and distinct purpose.
- Richer, more engaging and more recent content.
- Content much more integrated/aligned with Homesite (i.e. strong links to and even content surfaced from Homesite.
- Focus is on the audience context for showing content and building a relationship between existing content, not the duplication of it.
- Flexible approach - 'local' content that has no logical home on Homesite remains on school site.
- Aligned with Homesite approach for content increasingly 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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| 3||||||
| Approach takes a long time to implement | Improving and relocating the content on f&s sites is a big job. This may mean that some sites don't change for some time, continuing to have an old design and content. | M | M
| Planned and prioritised approach to the required work. Set and manage expectations carefully. Request more project content resource. | 4||
| Loss of 'online identity' for faculties and schools | As content that is currently on f&s sites is merged or moved the new f&s sites will be much smaller/leaner/lightermore focused. This may lead to f&s staff feeling that their importance as organisational entities is diminished. | M | M | Use all three consultation approaches listed in risk 1 above. Demonstration versions, as covered in risk 2 above
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| 5 | Diminished sense of content ownership across faculties and schools | Same cause as with Risk 4 above. This may lead to a reduced sense of ownership of the content, resulting in to slower updating / information out of date. | M | M
| 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. | 6|
| Complexity around page ownership and page edit permissions | As more content currently on f&s sites is integrated into existing homesite pages page ownership could become unclear and authoring permissions may become more complex | M | M
| Plan content management with the Web BAU team. Train and communicate effectively. | 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 and be resistant to having to move some of their activities to university-standard methods. This may lead to the Web Team having to support two models, one for only one faculty and one school | H | L-M
| COMT management to initiate this conversation with the faculty management, trying to find a good way forward. Separation of presentation layer from content management offers flexible options not previously available.
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