smeranda shares Oct 06, 2008 10:43AM Attending the Designing a New User-Centric College Public Website - Lessons Learned. #heweb08
smeranda says Oct 06, 2008 03:49PM leadership realized website fragmented, so thed decided to fix it. St. Louis Community College. www.stlcc.edu/
smeranda says Oct 06, 2008 03:49PM Going through some history of the college now, large community college
smeranda says Oct 06, 2008 03:50PM 3 sites, public, internal for faculty sharing and a sharepoint site.
smeranda says Oct 06, 2008 03:53PM Good to see the college realizes the user-centric problems created by inconsistency, non-ADA compliance.
smeranda says Oct 06, 2008 03:55PM lot's of great user stats from research. Hope the slides will be online soon.
smeranda says Oct 06, 2008 03:56PM 30% of students couldn't find what they were looking for on the site.
smeranda says Oct 06, 2008 03:57PM 10 minutes into presentation, and speaker concerned he is behind... must have a lot of content to go through
Mort_Blort says Oct 06, 2008 03:59PM Increased enrollment is goal ... will be interesting to see how they attribute that.
Mort_Blort says Oct 06, 2008 04:01PM I just say "the website is responsible for all increased enrollment."
smeranda says Oct 06, 2008 04:01PM Not sure that you can, but you can report on other metrics... speed of which content was found, decreased friction...
almostcool says Oct 06, 2008 04:02PM hrmm... we had increased enrollment right about the time we launched the full redesign in '06....
smeranda says Oct 06, 2008 04:02PM "create an agile development for future-proofing" that is always helpful
Mort_Blort says Oct 06, 2008 04:03PM Yes; then assumptions can be made on which you can base theories and test them. Surveys of entering students.
smeranda says Oct 06, 2008 04:05PM load-balancing graphic on the screen... This was more than a visual redesign
smeranda says Oct 06, 2008 04:07PM taxonomy creates navigation - Many areas recreating the wheel and they are trying to change to a more collaborative effort. Sounds familiar?
Mort_Blort says Oct 06, 2008 04:09PM They seem to have a much more systematic approach to content, though, which I suppose is more possible at a CC level.
smeranda says Oct 06, 2008 04:12PM Quicklinks convention by the user is that you will jump to another website according to speaker.
almostcool says Oct 06, 2008 04:15PM looks fairly comprehensive, although i admit that i didn't click really deep. did they say what % of the 16k pages they converted?
smeranda says Oct 06, 2008 04:16PM New positions were created to help, restructure the IT department to be more web-focused.
smeranda says Oct 06, 2008 04:16PM Content belongs to community relationship/structure support belongs to IT. Great model.
smeranda says Oct 06, 2008 04:18PM New focus on enrollment management, new position/department created
smeranda says Oct 06, 2008 04:20PM successful integration of home-grown applications. Define "successful".
smeranda says Oct 06, 2008 04:22PM Speaker: "Never outsource content development, this is what you do as an institution." Right on.
Mort_Blort says Oct 06, 2008 04:24PM But that's a perspective we could probably use; simplicity and friendliness.
smeranda says Oct 06, 2008 04:24PM Little things can break the user experience. It's a fragile world.
smeranda says Oct 06, 2008 04:27PM they had more hardward than necessary... We'll take your extra servers!
almostcool says Oct 06, 2008 04:29PM again, if they take questions, ask about the % of pages they flipped. i'm just curious given our own experience
george sackett is Oct 07, 2008 04:18AM flipped very little content. almost all rewritten - went from 16,000 pages to 1,600 pages
