As one who proposed that the workshops have purpose as one focus I feel obliged to distil out my thoughts on this subject.
- The parent page to this one lists our individual thoughts as to the purpose of faculty and school sites, as provided by the workshop participants.
- The starting point must be to acknowledge that these are real/legitimate in the eyes of the contributors.
- However, we have had little input from the main audiences and therefore have a demonstrable need to discover what the main audiences go to a website for and how they would like to receive information and access services.
- One of my recent realisations is that much of what staff described as the purpose of their website is actually true for the website as a whole (i.e. applies equally to victoria.ac.nz as to any part of the site).
- As such, most of the information described as necessary on a faculty or school site could just as defensibly be located in an audience specific global menu option/hub as per the black strap now or another audience-centric IA option.
- This leads me to the realisation that as well as testing our staff assumptions by speaking to other stakeholders we need to test the IA assumptions that information could justifiably to organised by audience (and then task/purpose)
- Moving more content to the centre is fine so long as we can (with good metadata or tagging) surface it where required. The work to do this well could (at a later date if not before) power a notifications services that would offer an interests-based subscription service.
- I will do the purpose page, but request that people think deeply before adding to it (as it has to be more than the content areas). Sam Motion (Unlicensed) maybe if I add a column for victoria.ac.nz you can try to capture how the purpose's shared by staff for their faculties and schools could be met without dedicated space. I see any output from this page as being like objectives or principals to inform and guide (especially but not exclusively) the content writers. As such, most content should support or further the purpose, but no problems if some does not.They could also serve as a reason for moving content to somewhere else (or even dropping it all together).
- Up until last week I had though we could ring fence Research and park it somewhere until a later phase. I now know we can not leave it this long - We have to have a vision for Research earlier.