As one who proposed that the workshops have purpose as one focus, and having since listened to all the team share their thoughts I feel obliged to distil out my thoughts on this subject. But first a few insights around the general/overall topic of faculty and school sites:
- 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. I believe that Anne will now pick this up this opportunity and I will support her in this.
- 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). I believe that participants often failed to identify the purpose or goals of their site, rather stated that they thought a website should achieve/support.
- 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.
- Given that WIPI established these audience foci I believe that WIPII should build on or extend them by using the same approach to organise the content from sites not yet on homesite. Only when this does not work (for the primary audience or if it becomes illogical) should we dispatch with this approach.
- 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). Is this what A/B testing could help with?
Underlying/foundational issues if we are too make a substantive move/change in the direction away from faculty and school sites:
- Need to sell it well: This represents a lot of change and as such we will need to bring people on board. Assuming we have the evidence and are proposing a good solution (one that meets the expectations of stakeholders) it should be doable. However, as the global menu was distorted by politics, our approach might also suffer a similar fate.
- Make good use of metadata: We want content mastered in the best place for the audience, but realised that the same content might need to be surfaced in other places on the web site. This will require making better use of metadata (or tagging) to identify what content to surface where than is currently done. These same tags could be used to power a personalised, subscription-based information approach, if we want and are able to do this.
- Resourcing: Most/all of the content currently on faculty and school sites is maintained by staff in the faculties and schools. Moving more of this to other more central locations will place pressure on the resourcing model, both the capacity of the core web team as well as the "ownership" of work by staff in the faculties and schools (if their content does not "appear" in the one place).
Purpose (components) less well suited to an audience channel:
- Unit identity: Faculties and schools are organisational units and as such will expect space to publicise their identity and contact information.