How much do we prune off all F&S sites before starting to build the first new faculty site?
As we deploy a new faculty (and associated school(s)) website developed in WIP II Phase 2 we will disestablish the old one.This means that anything on the old site that is must be handled prior to decommissioning, with the content either covered somewhere else (new faculty site, or elsewhere on home site, or even elsewhere on the web) or dropped (a legitimate option for some content). Future stages will cover postgraduate information (phase 3), research centres/institutes and chairs (phase 4) and student information sites (phase 5).
Our current plan in 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 or rewritten/carried forward. 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?
The two areas in contention are information for postgraduate students and research information. Should these be tackled "by domain" or "by faculty"?
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?