As we deploy a new website for a faculty (and the associated schools) in WIP II Phase 2 we will disestablish the old one.This means that any content on the old site must be handled prior to decommissioning, either covered by newly written content (probably either on the new faculty site or elsewhere on Homesite) or dropped/deleted (a legitimate option for some content). In the current delivery approach Phase 3 covers postgraduate information (all postgraduate degrees/programmes, the Faculty of Graduate Research's site and http://www.victoria.ac.nz/postgradlife/) and those short courses relevant to postgraduate students run by the Faculty of Graduate Research, and Phase 4 covers all (or less if we de-scope some) the sites for research centres, institutes and chairs. Named student information sites are left for Phase 5.
As the project team's understanding of faculty and schools (current sites and the proposed future sits) has grown we have realised that our proposed delivery approach can be improved. The main direction for improvement lies in pruning content areas off all the existing faculty and school sites in repeat "by domain" sweeps, rewriting it for the Homesite prior to redeveloping the first new faculty site. This pruning, at least in part, will cover content that would otherwise be in a future stage, but where doing it earlier seems to make more sense. Each sweep would reduce the size and complexity of all the faculty and school sites, so that eventually the only content left is that which will be covered on the new site or dropped altogether. The project team all believe that this revised approach is better, as does Nathan. However, this leaves some important questions that need answers before an approach decision can be made.
Why are we already planning to approach CSP "by domain" not "by faculty"?
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. Wile 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 domain" sweep the next question is . . . .
How much do we prune off all F&S sites before starting to build the first new faculty site?
Our current approach for Phase 2 is that CSP (and staff profile) content would be addressed "by domain" across all faculties, rather than as we address all the content on a specific faculty site (i.e." by faculty"). By implication, the remaining content on a faculty site would then be considered and either dropped/deleted or rewritten. The big question is whether this "by topic" approach should be utilised further, extending this gradual whittling down/thinning/pruning of the faculty sites prior to the new replacement faculty site being developed?
There are currently three or four areas (in common to all/most faculties, significant volume of content (i.e. number of pages), with clear target areas on Homesite) in contention for also being addressed "by domain" before we start on building the first new faculty site:
- 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 be left
- Research
- Information to support current students
In documenting the opinions of the various stakeholders:
- The project team members have different views and there is no clear consensus.
- The workload impacts will also be real on the core (unles this is project or shared work?) team (remapping of urls, taking pages down, fixing "issues" that emerge as we tinker with old and existing sites) yet they have had little involvement in this discussion to date. Nathan supports the CSP and staff being done first but is unsure if further "by domain" sweeps is (on balance) beneficial.
- The workload impacts will also be real on staff in the faculties (subject matter experts, review of new content, critique/error spotting, etc), yet they have had little involvement in this discussion to date.
- Impacts of users, while important, might be easily overstated. They are not actively looking on faculty and school sites for postgraduate and research information. It might prove impossible to quantify the impacts on them.
On balance I propose that we approach this in the following, prioritised manner:
- Deal with CSP "by domain"
- Deal with staff profiles "by domain" just as soon as a way forward is arranged with ITS
- Once we have this experience behind us, decide whether to extend the "by domain" approach to postgraduate and research or whether moving to the "by faculty" approach is preferable.
How do we guide users to new information on old F&S sites?
No matter whether we only prune CSP (and staff) before moving to a "by faculty" approach or do subsequent "by domain" sweeps we will have to help users navigate between the old faculty site and the new content on home site. The following are guidelines (not rules) on how to approach this temporary transition period:
- Do not display new content on the old sites: We want to move users to the new site, not retain them on the old faculty era sites
- Redirect/guide users to the smallest number of points possible on the new site: Lets minimise the granularity of redirects to be as few as possible, both to save work and to guide users down a small number of supported/scaffolded paths.
And some questions:
- Do we have a preference to leave old content live, in parallel with the new content or to remove as much and as soon as possible and redirect more often?
- How often/granular do we unable new content? For example, would we do it by topic/programme or by megatopic and all related programmes?
- Implications of each approach…..
- Other areas of the wider channel it will impact i.e. new content for current students requiring IA change
- How do these approaches fit with the wider high level IA changes
- 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
- Will we still tackle PG sites and any research sites documented for phases 3 & 4 after this or as part of the F&S work?
- Implications of having 2 sites or two lots of content live?
- What content could we move as is? Implications of reskinning pages?
- What are the development views?
- Can we wait until staff profiles and CSP is done?
- Can we do relative sizing yet or is the approach required upfront?