Many institutions are replacing homespun, student designs with slick, professional sites
A college Web site must be many things to many people -- an advertisement aimed at prospective students, a tug at the heart- and purse strings of nostalgic alumni, and an administrative tool for current students and professors.
A number of institutions have recently devoted new attention to their Web sites, replacing their early, homespun designs with slick, professional sites. Gone are home pages run by students or volunteer network technicians. The Web site is now an integral part of a university’s educational, administrative, and business efforts, and institutions are devoting the same resources to it that that they would to any other critical function.
Administrators say that between 60 and 70 per cent of the hits on their sites come from outside their campuses. Students, faculty members, and staff members are in the minority of a typical site’s visitors. Most Web pages are designed to show off the institution to people outside -- prospective students and their parents, and alumni.
“We believe it’s a primary tool for presenting the public image of the college and, by extension, communicating with our key audiences,” says Paul Pribbenow, Wabash College’s dean for college advancement. Wabash redesigned its Web site in March. When considering new designs, Mr. Pribbenow says, “We want the look to be striking, we want people, when they see the front page, to say ‘that’s Wabash.’”
“Especially for small colleges in small towns, you’ve got to provide some sort of visual connection,” he says. That link is important for alumni who may not come back to the campus for years at a time. Wabash’s site offers images of the campus, of student life, and features the college’s signature bell tower. “You have to help people picture the place.”
Rob Herzog, director of new media for Wabash, says a Web page is a way for an institution to build its name recognition. “For so many prospective students, that’s the first image they get of the college,” he adds.
Some institutions use their Web sites to ease town-gown communication. Tom C. Bruce, director of university relations at Anderson University, says local community members follow university events and programs on the Web. Anderson, which is affiliated with the Church of God, also uses the Web to communicate with churches throughout the United States.
When it comes time to design the campus Web site, administrators must take into account those multiple audiences to determine what to include in their pages.
At the University of Georgia, Web designers began their recent site redesign by laying down an alliterative set of design principles that they call the “Seven C’s of WebService Design.”
Albert DeSimone, Jr., the university’s Web-services coordinator, says the principles embody the ideal elements that any college or university Web page should have. When his designers sat down to plan the new site, he says, they looked at ways to put those ideals into practice.
A chief concern, he says, was to make as many of the university’s on-line offerings as accessible as possible. “We had an attractive page, I thought, but important items were buried a little too deeply in the hierarchy,” he says. “So we wanted to percolate a few things to the top without compromising the visual appeal of the page.”
That idea follows one of the “Seven C’s” -- Client-Orientation. Mr. DeSimone, like many Web designers, examined the site’s access logs, which show the pages visitors use most often. Search functions, for example, got a lot of use, but were not immediately accessible on the front page. “Everyone was running to the search engine,” he says. “So instead of having an item that says, ‘click here to search,’ why not just have search boxes?” The new front page features search boxes for the university’s phone book and for a site-wide search engine.
Connecting visitors with the information they seek is vital, according to Wabash’s Mr. Pribbenow. “If someone reads about a faculty member in biology, they should be able to find an e-mail address for that faculty member,” he says. If an alumnus is trying to find out how to make a gift, a university certainly wants to make that information easy to find. “You have to make it possible for people to complete a communication loop,” he says. “You can’t take them only so far, then tell them to pick up the phone and call.”
Another important element, says Mr. DeSimone, is dynamic information -- news and announcements about the university (that’s another of the “C’s” -- “Currentness”). Those items keep visitors apprised of the latest happenings at an institution, which is important for public relations. Like an on-line magazine, the University of Georgia’s home page displays news briefs, along with upcoming events.
News is also important for keeping a site from looking as though it has been abandoned by its designers. “It’s deadly to have the same material every time a person visits,” says Anderson’s Mr. Bruce.
Although they may be a smaller audience, those on a campus are still of concern to Web designers. Among the standard elements of just about any college’s Web site are links to departmental home pages and student services.
Administrators at Wabash are considering ways to expand Web services for students. Mr. Pribbenow says the college is planning to integrate a Web-based e-mail service, an on-line calendar, and some student and staff record-keeping into its site. In that way, he says, college Web sites are becoming more like corporate intranets, which offer information to employees of a single company.
While such enhancements are meant to improve the college’s services, there are some jobs that are best handled off-line. Mr. Herzog, Wabash’s Web-site director, says that students may not need to use the Web for organizing groups and making announcements.
“Our campus is so small that students find it just as efficient to send out all-campus e-mail or post fliers in the right spots to communicate, and that’s part of the collegeculture that we don’t want to change.”
As Web sites become more sophisticated, university officials now must decide who should run them. Many institutions built their first Web pages five or six years ago with the help of an enterprising student or employee who learned HTML and designed a basic site.
As Web use has grown, universities have turned more serious attention and resources to their Web presences. For some, that means creating new positions or departments to handle Web services. Others have left them under the purview of the their information-technology department. And many consider the Web, like other media, to be the domain of the public-relations department.
Regardless of who is in charge, most administrators say, the campus Web site becomes a cooperative venture, incorporating information from all parts of the institution under one virtual roof.
A growing number of institutions are handing the site-design job over to professional Web designers beyond the university’s gates.
For some institutions, particularly the smaller ones, outsourcing Web services can be more economical than doing them in-house. Although small colleges may have fewer technology staff positions to spare, “I still have to have a Webmaster,” says Mr. Pribbenow. “That same person could be serving a much larger place.”
And finding an existing employee to handle a complex Web site can be hard. “It’s very difficult to identify one person who has the expertise in computer design, art design, communications, writing,” says Mr. Bruce, Anderson’s university-relations director. “That’s a tall order.”
Anderson, which redesigned its Web site last October, turned to a professional Web-design firm, Brainstorm Design, to craft its new on-line look. Several other companies, such as Stamats and Lipman Hearne, which specialize in providing marketing services for universities, have added Web design to their offerings. According to Mr. Bruce, the university wanted to quickly update its “basic” site. Hiring someone to do the job in-house would have been expensive and time-consuming.
At Wabash, administrators have gone outside the college for parts of their site that would be too difficult or expensive to handle in-house. For example, the college’s on-line admissions applications are handled by a company called CollegeNet. Yahoo! Store, a service of the popular Internet company, provides the technology for Wabash’s on-line bookstore.
The service costs the college a few hundred dollars a month, but it saves the bookstore the bother and expense of setting up its own on-line store. “We don’t have the staff or on-campus knowledge to do e-commerce,” says Mr. Herzog.
It is no accident that a college Web site has some affinity with an Internet giant like Yahoo! University Web designers are beginning to regard their own sites as in the same league as big commercial sites. “People have a certain experience with e-commerce,” Mr. Pribbenow explains."They can go buy their Christmas gifts at Eddie Bauer’s Web site. When I go to a college site, I want to be able to do the same thing,” he says. “I want to give my gift on line, I want to buy something from the bookstore, I want to register for an alumni event.”
The people who visit university sites “don’t make the distinction that this is a commercial site, or this is an educational site,” says Mr. DeSimone. “They go to a site, and they’re looking for a specific piece of information.”
“The general population is going to have certain expectations as to what a site is supposed to look and feel like” regardless of its subject matter, he says. “When you go to a research center here on campus, something like the Center for Metalloenzyme Studies, you visit their page, and it’s extremely appealing visually with a nice logo. And we’re talking about metalloenzyme studies here!” he says. “I’m not really sure what that is.”
He adds, “There’s a look and a feel that people are expecting to find.”
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