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Developing A Web Site for Your Campus
By Bill Eben,
Associate Director for Technology
Kutztown University
Chances are that your campus web site already has at least a few pages devoted to housing and residence life. But even if it does, you might be wise to take a fresh look at those web pages to make sure they're meeting your visitors' needs. Ask yourself a few questions. What are your site's goals? Is the site easy to navigate? Can visitors quickly find the information they seek? What are similar sites doing? Let's face it. There's no way this article, or any article, can tell you everything you need to know to develop a killer web site for your campus. You need to glean the design and content considerations presented here and elsewhere and use the bits you find applicable. Whether you're starting your site from scratch, or revamping an existing site, one piece of advice I hope you heed is to realize that development of a successful web site requires regular re-evaluation to ensure that you're effectively meeting your visitors' needs.
Know Your Audience: Before you can sit down at your computer to begin developing your web site, and even before you can begin sketching out a plan, you need to determine who will be visiting your site. Whereas printed materials provide the luxury of near total control over distribution -- you can target pamphlets to current students, incoming freshmen, parents of prospective students, etc. -- your web site needs to deliver all your messages to all your audiences. But how can you be sure you're getting the right message to the right audience? You can't ever be sure of who may ultimately visit your site, but there are resources available to aid you in making an educated guess. If you're starting your site from scratch, you may first want to sit down with other members of your department or division and see what information they deliver each day and to whom. The information gathered might help identify the messages you need to deliver on your site. If you're revamping an existing site, you may already have guest book or feedback forms, which tell you something about your current audience. Another possible resource for getting to know your audience is your web site administrator. He or she has access to (and if you're lucky, has already sifted through) volumes of data your server collects which can provide insight into where your visitors are located (i.e. on- or off-campus), what pages they're accessing most frequently, and what information they're searching for. At our campus, we found a surprisingly high percentage (about 85%) of all searches on the department web site were initiated off-campus. As a result, we modified our overall page design to highlight virtual room tours and residence hall room "fast facts" which are targeted toward prospective rather than current students. One pitfall you must avoid is to make the web page hierarchy mirror your organizational chart rather than the visitor's needs. Keep your focus on the customer.
Have A Plan: Your site plan and page design go hand-in-hand. If your site will have more than three or four pages, sketch it out in a hierarchical chart. Come up with a short list of topics (fewer than 8, if possible) focusing on the main elements of your message and make them part of a consistent navigation scheme. Also, try to flatten the page hierarchy as much as possible. This eliminates the need for visitors to navigate through layers of menu or index pages in order to get to the good stuff. There are many good web sites (a few listed below) covering the dos and don'ts in designing web pages. I'll just touch on a few factors to keep in mind when designing pages for your campus
- People don't browse linearly, so don't rely on Back and Next buttons for navigation.
- Some visitors will know exactly what they're looking for, so provide a search field.
- Give your pages a consistent appearance. It can be disconcerting to a visitor if he sees different layouts, logos, backgrounds, colors or fonts on each page. He may think he's left your site entirely.
- Keep pages short. Usability tests show that people don't especially like to read web pages. They don't like to scroll either. Your site will be better served by a greater number of concise, well-written pages than by fewer pages containing lengthy prose.
A balancing act all web designers perform is in finding the right mix of text and graphics for their pages. A general rule-of-thumb is that a page and all of its graphics should be no greater than 30K-50K in size in order to download in a reasonable amount of time over a 28.8 modem connection. However, if you really know your audience, you may determine that your on-campus residents access certain pages almost exclusively. Assuming your residents have access to high-speed Ethernet connections, you might choose to deliver heavier pages (for on line photo albums, staff pictures, etc.) to them without worrying as much about download time.
Things to consider: A cool web site may help attract prospective students to your campus and residence halls but don't forget about the students you already have. There is any number of creative ways to utilize your web site as an internal resource for residents:
Staff recognition: Do your RAs really know the other residents on their floor? Do they always feel appreciated? Do residents feel comfortable discussing personal problems with residence life staff? I'm not suggesting that your web site can solve all these problems, but it might be able to help. Including staff pictures and bios on your site can make your staff more recognizable and approachable to residents. ("Hey, we went to the same high school!" or "I'm a big Limp Bizkit fan, too!") It can also be a good team-building exercise to let the staff members take pictures of each other. Don't miss a chance to nourish their creativity.
Online programming: Unless you always have good attendance at in-hall programs (yeah, right), you may want to use your web site as an advertising medium for upcoming programs. Another possibility is to use it as a resource for staff members to browse for programming ideas or to see which programs have better success at particular times or locations.
Virtual tours: Ask someone for the definition of a virtual tour and you'll get a virtually different answer from virtually everyone you talk to (still photos, video clips, live web cams, etc.). One common type of virtual tour, which you can easily add to your web site, is a QuickTime VR movie. QuickTime VR Authoring Studio (Apple Computer, http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtvr) automatically, almost magically, stitches together a series of still photos into a 360-degreepanorama, providing the visitor an illusion of standing at some designated location on your campus and being able to look around in any direction. These user-controlled movies are as effective portraying wide open spaces, as they are tight quarters, like dorm rooms. If you plan to implement virtual tours of your residence halls, again, don't miss an opportunity to involve your staff and residents as much as possible. At our campus the Housing and Residence Life Office teamed up with the Residence Hall Association to devise a room-decorating contest where the photographs of the winners' rooms were turned into Quick Time VRs and posted on the University's web site within a couple of hours. The program was a big success, and students are already looking forward to next year's contest.
Keep it up: The easiest thing to overlook when you begin planning your web site is that it is always a work-in-progress. You undoubtedly have limited human resources allocated for web site maintenance, so design pages that are easy to maintain. For example, you might want to designate a single web page (typically the home page or a "What's New" page) to feature dynamic information such as a list of upcoming campus events, information on new services, a housing calendar, etc. By including all the information, which changes regularly on a single page, it makes it easier to get into the habit of updating the page regularly and making sure the content remains fresh. Even the pages you consider as static need to be reviewed and updated regularly. Nothing will turn off a visitor more than broken links or outdated information. Keeping your site up-to-date is vital to building awareness and credibility with your visitors. Remember that building web pages is just one step in developing an effective web site.
Reading List
- About.com guide to web design. Contains articles and tons of links to just about anything a new or seasoned web developer could need.
- "How to Build Lame Web Sites", Web Developer's Journal. A tongue-in-cheek guide to driving away customers with an amateurish web site.
- eFUSE.com. "The friendly place to learn how to build a better web site."
- Webmaster Station. Free web tools, services and resources.
About the Author
Bill Eben is the Associate Director for Technology in the Housing and Residence Life Office at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. He has more than 11 years experience providing computer and network support to mostly non-technical users, and he has been designing web pages for about four years.