TNT9: Helping Academic Websites Make the Grade

Sara Clark: OK. Today we're going to talk about 'Helping Academic Websites Make the Grade', the project that we started at Missouri State in an effort to try to make our academic websites functional but better and work toward our recruitment goals.

Just so you know a little bit about our campus so you can relate what we're doing to how big we are and how it relates to you, we're located in Springfield, Missouri--HighEdWeb was there a couple of years ago--we have about 20,000 students, and probably the most important fact that you need to know is we have about 150 undergraduate programs and about 45 graduate programs. So when we're talking about our academic websites, we're talking about in that context.

So what our goals were were to update the academic websites so they would meet our recruitment goals for the university. We know that academic websites are the most important content for students when they're trying to choose what school they go to, and we also know that our academic websites aren't always the best at telling people about what they have to offer.

So our goal was to upgrade the site so they would meet our recruitment goals, they would meet the trends, but then we also wanted to build consistency within those sites.

We wanted to make it to where the sites within the campus, if you are shopping for your major or if you wanted to find your way around the campus, you could do that without it being completely different every time you went to a different college, a different department, a different program.

And then, of course, the last thing we wanted to do was encourage the use of our content management system, because we wanted the academic departments to be able to maintain our content after we had helped them.

So it was part of our process to think we want to have good sites, we want to have them done the way that we can help them best when they need to maintain them, and we wanted to make sure that they work.

So how this all started for us was the Psychology Department came to me and said, "Hey, my website's not so great. Can you help me out?" And I thought, 'Sure,' because academic websites are something we should be working on.

Well, I got back to the provost that we were working on academic websites, so I get an email from her saying, "Hey, I hear you're working on this site. We want to work with you. What can we do to make this happen?" And I thought, 'OK. Great. Now I can do all the academic websites.'

So we started to talk about what we needed to do. She organized the meeting where we had our graduate college, our undergraduate admissions, our associate provost for undergraduate education and then her webmaster get together and say, "What is it that we want to do? How do we want to make this work?"

And we talked about some of the options. We knew that one of the challenges we had was who's going to do the work, who's going to take care of it. And on our campus, unfortunately, a lot of it was student workers taking care of things or administrative assistants with little to no guidance.

So we knew that it wasn't just that we could come in and we could fix it really easy. It was something that we had to work through to make sure that the process we came up with was going to work long-term.

So we started talking through "How are we going to do this? Who can help?" and I said, "Well, University Relations may be able to help you kind of upgrade the site, and then you can maintain it once it's done." And they were like, "Oh, that would be great. Then we can have our people help. We can have everything together." They said, "Let's just come up with a template." And I said, "OK. What's our template?" "You know, something that makes everybody look nice and kind of look the same."

And that's where we came to our first excuse, because I said, "Well, that's kind of a trick question, because you're talking about making everything look pretty but you're not talking about the fact that the websites don't tell you how to apply, the websites don't tell you if you can get a job, the websites don't tell you how to get your classes. They don't tell you anything about the academic program. It doesn't matter how pretty we make it look. If the content's not available, we're not doing our recruitment goal. The students are coming here to find the answers to their questions, not to see all the pretty pictures of all the faculty that you have."

So it took about three meetings before we finally got to the point of saying, "We're not creating a design template. We're creating a content template of all the things we need to have within the websites. Once that's done, then we can make it pretty and we can put the design element on it. But we're not going through this process to talk about what the masthead is going to look like. We're not going through this process to pick the colors. We're going through this process so that the websites have the content that's necessary in order for the websites to be successful."

So the first thing we need to do is get buy-in. We needed to present the recommendations. And so I went to our meeting of all the department heads and deans on campus and presented our recommendation. "Here's what we want to do. We want to make your websites better. We want to help you do it. And we want to make sure that you can maintain them once it's done."

But I knew it was going to be a challenge because I knew there was going to be three questions I was going to get asked. One, "Why should I care?" And they did ask that question. "Why should I devote my time and resources to this effort? I have so many other things going on. Why should I care?"

And so we actually had our Director of Admissions get up and tell them all the stats about why websites are important. And he said it to them in such a way to where they can understand. He said, "We had our incoming freshmen come in. They told us the Number 1 recruitment tool was the website."

And he said, "And that means it was more important than the high school counselors. It was more important than all the college fairs you guys go to. It was more important than everything that you do, even the printed guides that we mail out to all the students. This is why you should care. They are looking at your website, they are looking for answers, and that's how they are evaluating you."

And that was really good for me because it took the pressure off me as the web person because I'm obviously going to say the Web is awesome. But if the Admissions guy comes in and says it to them, then everything can play off from there.

The second question they asked me is, "Why if I don't want your help?" So here I was presenting to all the deans and department heads saying, "We'll do the work for you. We'll write your content. We'll make it pretty. We'll code it up for you." And some of them, of course, said, "Well, we don't want your help. We can do it ourselves."

And so I said, "Great. Go ahead and do it yourself. Follow the recommendations I'm going to give you of what content you should have, and when you're done, if you're graded as meeting the criteria we have in place, you'll get reimbursed for your efforts. If at the end you don't meet the recommendations, then you're not going to get paid for your efforts."

So that gave them a little bit of latitude to do what they needed to do, but they still had to work within the same parameters we were in.

And then the biggest question is, "Who is going to pay for all this?" because they didn't want to have to put all their time and effort. In University Relations where we all work, we typically do chargebacks, and so they were like, "Am I going to have to pay you to do all this work and everything that's going to happen?"

And this was another selling point that came in for us was the provost actually funded the project for us. She said, "This is really important. I don't want anybody to say that they don't have funding and won't be able to do it, so I'm going to give you $150,000 to do this project. Work through it, hire the GAs, hire everything that needs to happen, one-time money, we'll get everything kind of upgraded, and then it can be maintained from there."

Everybody says, "I'm coming to your presentation because I want to find out how you got the funding." And you're going to be really disappointed because I just sent her an email and she said, "Sounds great!" and that was it.

[Laughter]

Sara Clark: Provost has a lot of money. Anyway, that helped us hire two graduate assistants, which are helping with our content generation. It funded the chargebacks that we need in order to pay our student staff that are coding the websites. And we set up for procedure that it's going to be this much money per website based on what we thought it was going to take us to do the work.

So I got the funding, I got the buy-in, I presented it to everybody, we're all on board, we're moving forward. So then the next thing I did was I emailed all of our seven deans and said, "Tell me what the priority is on how you would like us to go through your academic websites." I said, "Think about size, think about recruitment goals, think about who needs the most help."

And so the deans actually prioritized every program in their college, sent it to us, and what we're doing is saying, "OK, first priority from every college first, second priority from every college next, third priority from every college third," and that's our prioritization list.

So we spread everything out amongst all the colleges. The deans actually set the priorities, so they haven't changed once since they were set, which is great. And we have a process to be able to work through.

And then we officially began this project in Spring of 2010. We're hoping it's a two-year project. We sold it as a two-year project. But you'll hear later about our lessons learned on how that was all going to work out.

So before I turn it over, here's one last thing I want to tell you about. This is our overall process. You can kind of see how we're working things in. When we start on one of these projects, the first thing we do is we meet with the client. We kind of interview them.

The next thing we do is we hand it off to the content generation. So that's where we're writing all the stories, we're getting all the content gathered, we're looking at everything that's there. Then that content gets given to a designer. The designer makes it look good, organizes it a little bit, adds some photography, makes sure it matches the golds in the printed publications the department has.

Then after that it gets switched over to coding, and then my office goes ahead and puts everything together. And then we hand the site back to the department, and then they get to maintain it.

So we have a lot of different areas here, and that's why there's three presenters because we have content, design, and then coding. And we're working together to make those websites happen.

Don Hendricks: Can you see that? My paper would've been so long and amazing that I didn't want you to be overwhelmed by grading it.

[Laughter]

Don Hendricks: I'm a former educator, so what I say is in that context. I can make fun of what we do. The best thing about working in a university setting is working with people that are educated and really smart. And probably the worst thing about working in a university setting is working with people who are educated and very smart.

So, educating educators. It is a challenge and a process. And I also thought about this being in heading the content aspect. I keep hearing at this conference, "Content is king." So what do you call the people who create the content? It must be pretty good.

[Laughter]

Don Hendricks: This also falls within a campus marketing initiative that we started a year before this. And there are good news and bad news about having a campus marketing initiative.

Before, we kind of operated under the assumption that everybody is a marketer. Marketing is every place. There's no centralized location. And that's a good thing to have. But as administrators changed, board members changed, the thinking on that changed.

So this little button that you see up there is really a by-product of that marketing initiative, a tagline which we didn't really have before or changed so much you didn't really know what it was. So now we have one. So another purpose to doing these websites is to incorporate some of the messages from the marketing campaign and some of the imagery.

But we wanted to answer certain questions. Like we would try to tell people when they look at your website, "Who cares about this stuff?" And of course, originally, when you're talking about people within a program or within a department, they care passionately, but they don't really know how to explain it to other people why should we care about what you're doing or how you're doing it.

And that's a very simple question. And if you can't answer that question, "Who cares?" then you have problems. So getting people to think about it from a recruitment perspective in particular, because we're trying to change the focus from all about this department or all about this program to attracting students into the program or interesting them enough, getting them to focus not on the features of the program in particular but what are the benefits if somebody enrols in this program.

That third bullet, I think, seems obvious, but maybe not so much. I used to teach this in my English class writing something: "Well, what's your point?" Have a point. Make your point. And move on to something else.

So, again, when you have people whose careers become learning more and more about less and less, sometimes it's hard to get them to look at that, "Well, what is the point? How do you attract students? What is it that appeals to them?" because they're having to think and come at it in a slightly different way.

And the other thing that you'll see a lot that we encountered a lot on websites is they'll say, "Well, what is the benefit of your program?" "Well, we have the largest program in the state." OK, well, that's not a benefit; it's a feature. And this idea being the biggest, baddest, meanest, mostest doesn't really appeal to a whole lot of people.

So that's a real sort of culture shift with varying degrees of success. I think we've made progress in that area.

Right content in the right way. So, again, getting back to the benefits of the program, making it scannable, having interesting headers, getting your SEO content in there--all of that is part of generating content for the Web which a lot of it, as you probably know, is either pulled from catalogue copy or it's course requirements, kind of a laundry list of courses you have to take.

And this is like the homepage. So it's extremely appealing and riveting copy, but getting them to see this from a marketing perspective is a little bit of a challenge.

And from a student's perspective or for the visitor's perspective, "What's in it for me? Tell me what I need to know. Tell me how I'm going to get something out of this."

Tell them right away. Don't try to entice them on the third page to get there. It's got to be right there. It's got to be like the old newspaper top-of-the-fold-type thing. And to establish what that point is, that kind of gets back to the 'have a point and point it'. Get there, get there quickly.

Obviously, part of this is the navigation, the navigation structure which, when you have people marketing and doing their own websites approaching in different ways, you have all kinds of different navigation structures that differs from the university top-level page structure, or even structures within their own website, because these websites have developed over time and different people have worked on it. Once you get past that first page, you're lost or you can't get back, or whatever the case may be.

So one of the things that we developed and we did get buy-in from all the principle entities here from the Provost office, from the graduate college, from the recruiting folks, but this is what we want to emphasize in terms of the homepage links.

So we can get directly to programs, we can point to student opportunities and services, the courses offered so that people can make intelligent choices about where they want to go and go right there and not have to surf around until they find what they're looking for.

And you can see, too, that in order to have a finite set of links, we wanted to make certain decisions about what we're going to include and what we're going to include in some other portion of the site, and this is the list that we came up with what would seem simple enough, but there is a lot of conversation that went into this.

But again, getting to where you want to go is a big part of it. People want to find what they want to find quickly. Things that happen with social media and Web make us impatient to get the message and get it right away, and we don't have to spend a lot of time doing that.

So just a couple of slides here to give you a 'before and after' in terms of applying some of this stuff. And you can see here, this is a graduate program in Criminology. And this is the original content and the original design. And notice: where's the navigation?

[Laughter]

Don Hendricks: Yeah. Yeah, 'Click here'. Real good. And a logo that was actually utilized in a later design, but, well, I don't have to really go too far to convince you that this isn't the most wonderful webpage on the planet.

Audience 1: It's very natural with the photo...

Don Hendricks: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[Laughter]

Don Hendricks: Next to girls under trees, this is--or, you know, microscope slide photo, yeah, it's... Yeah. Yeah. OK.

And this is the newer design. So you can see actually navigation now. And you have 'Evaluating success'. We have 'Why pursue Criminology graduate program?' with bullet points that actually give you benefits to students. And this screenshot doesn't give you the whole page but, again, top-of-the-fold concept based on what you can see before having to scroll down.

You have the information. You see the logo is actually incorporated up there in the top. Looks a little classier, a little nicer. So, a radical departure from what we had before.

And I'm going to turn it over now to the design people who make it look pretty.

Stacey Funderburk: OK. I'm tethered, so I can't run out the door. I'm not a public speaker, so I apologize upfront.

This slide says a lot. Basically, where we started was the process of Sara explaining to our academic council, "You have to tell me what your goals are for your website before we're going to help you out. And I'm telling you upfront, having a student call you is not a goal. Not acceptable." You go, Sara! I'm telling you. So that kind of set the stage up where we came into play.

We also found out that faculty can dole out the homework, but not necessarily do the homework. In the process, we provide surveys to have the fundamental questions answered for us before we get together as a group. So we asked our faculty members associated with the programs that we're covering, "Please answer these surveys for us."

We have our graduate assistants go out and then gather the existing content. So when we get together for our client interviews, at this point we're filling in the gaps. So we thought.

So we find out that the faculty don't always include survey information whenever we're asking for it. So our client interviews turn out to be two hours' worth of interviewing the clients about their particular programs. And shrugging the shoulders and the deer-in-the-headlight looks happen quite frequently.

So this is the time where we're asking those hard questions: What about your program is unique? What would entice the student to come to Missouri State? Why would they want to study your program?

And we had some interesting answers, some not very well-thought answers. So we continue to probe with the faculty.

We're also asking them: What's existing that you're not showing on your websites? Do you have student programs that are very active? Do you have videos that maybe would entice that story that you want to tell on your website? Do you have faculty members in fields that they're excelling in and you want to tell stories about them? Do you have high-achieving students and successful alumni? Can we tell that authentic story about your program and the success stories that are going on?

We were also asking them about social media: Do you use it? Do you understand it? Is it on your website? A lot of answers to those questions are 'no' and lots more explanations going on.

So Don, Sara and I set out with a workflow. And we knew that our three independent offices had to remain independent but work collaboratively. So we needed common ground. We have a simple repository where our workflow has remained. It's a written workflow that we tend to very frequently and we've reviewed it several times and added to it and changed it and honed it.

We also have lots of checklists that our graduate assistants and others in the team utilize. We have material that's generated and utilized on most of the websites that share their best practices as well. So it's been a learning process that we've shared with each of the members of the team.

I think in the workflow, we've added several steps and we've removed some steps, and I think that's one of the things that's been very well about this workflow.

What worked very well with this workflow is that we've been flexible. We've also found where the bottlenecks are it's not flowing. So we're working through those as well. And as Sara said, this has been a two-year process, and we're just under a year into it, so we're finding our flow.

And then the other thing that we developed, each of us had a set of guidelines--writing or designing guidelines. And we had to compare those guidelines to make consistency happen throughout so that our websites flowed. And when we had a client that was unhappy with something and had a personal opinion of the way they wanted it to be, then we had a source to go to.

And so this is in our marketing tool kit. This is the way that the university is doing it. This is the way that we will do it for your website.

So, our team. Once we get our workflow together, we get our team together. We have three team leaders, if you will.

We have three departments that we address at a time. Each department has a team lead from University Communications. Each team has a graduate assistant who generates the content, gathers the content. Each has a graphic designer. Each has someone from the Provost Office, a representative from the Web Office. We also have either an undergraduate or a graduate Admissions official. And then we also have the program director or their designee.

Our first thought with the workflow is that we would have the department head. And we quickly changed that to have the program directors, because the department heads don't always have the opportunity to keep track of every detail of the programs, and that's what we're looking for, the details.

In the workflow, what we try to do is start--as Sara had mentioned, we gather the content. We meet as a team and we talk about what content we have, where are the gaps, what information do we need to put in. What is your website not telling the students? Now, as Sara had mentioned before, you need to think about these things.

Once the content is developed, it moves on to the design aspect. And then the workflow, we made a conscious effort not to provide the client with a folder full of Word documents so that they could sort through and see what their website is going to say. We felt that Word documents are not going to let the flow happen with the website. So we've waited until the design phase for them to actually see what their website would look like and what it would say.

Once we go through the proofing process, onto the coding, as we have mentioned before, again, we can see a proofing at that point. And then after we'd go through and everybody has approved and we launched, we've added one more step in our workflow at that point.

We want to deliver this to the people who we've intended to see it. So all those prospective students who have contacted our Admissions office for their undergraduate or graduate, we then send them a customized email and talk to them about, "We understand you're interested in Psychology. Well, here's all you need to know about our Psychology program," and link them directly to our new websites.

So we had our team identified, and we've talked about foundation. The one thing when we leave our big two-hour meetings, we go back and we work independently. And again, as I mentioned, we have three offices working independently.

We have professionals who interpret the material differently, so the lines of communication have to stay open. And we've learned lots of lessons from each other, and ongoing lessons, and I think that's fantastic. We work well. But a year and a half in, we're still learning the lessons. Or almost a year and a half.

OK. This is where I had an "A-ha!" moment during one of our content-generating meetings.

Psychology was getting ready to launch. We had six other websites in the queue; three had already gone through the content-generating or were in design development and three others were going through gathering information from our faculty members. We learned that two of those seven forgot all about their minor programs.

And then we had, I think, one more site during our information-interviewing concept. They had a couple of programs they really didn't want to talk about because they were low-attending programs. And then one other college actually talked about the fact that the catalogue is different than what their website said. And they didn't really want to go along with what the catalogue said; they wanted to go with what they were saying. So we found out our resources weren't always reliable at this point.

So during one of our meetings, Don's graduate assistant pulls out this form. And she had developed a matrix going by the catalogue, finding out exactly what the programs were in the catalogue, because not all of the faculty members covered those areas for us.

This is our matrix unloaded at this point. We found out, when you get to a department that has more than 20 programs, you tend to start losing a few of those programs, confusing some of the details, and this has really become a tool that we started originating with the survey. And it's helped the faculty keep things in line as well as the content outline that goes throughout the process itself.

So kudos to a student who taught the faculty what they needed to be doing.

Sara Clark: So we went through all the process, we're interviewing the clients for gathering the content, we're designing things up, and then we begin to code things up. And we knew that there were a lot of things that were going to be re-used.

And so we started thinking about "What can we build upfront, that's going to be a lot of upfront work, that can be used for all of these programs that we're going to go through?"

And we're going to have this available for you. We have the link at the end where you can download this, too, and the workflow and the recommendations and the survey.

Say? That's all right. All right.

So we knew we had to build some pieces and we knew it was going to be upfront work, but we knew it was going to save us time in the long run. So I'm going to show you some examples of some things that we've put together and why we did it. And then you also get to see some examples of the academic websites and how they are using those.

So the first thing we did was, we knew that there were some calls to action that we wanted all of our future students to have easy access to. We knew we wanted them to be able to request info, visit campus, explore our majors, and apply. Those four things are probably things that you're always thinking about, too. We wanted our students to be able to do this.

We also knew we wanted them to be able to get to the future students' homepage easily, because what we didn't want to do was have all the academic departments re-create information on their site that we were already presenting.

When I presented to the academic departments, I said, "We're a team. I'll provide the financial aid information, you provide the academic program information, and we'll work together. You don't have to do everything on your own. You need to work with us so we have one collective site."

So there's actually four iterations of this Future Students feature buttons--we had to call it something really long--so that we would have a graduate version with a link to our graduate guide, an undergraduate version with our link to out undergraduate guide, and we customize this based on which program it is we're talking about. If we're talking about our MBA, we're going to have this Future Students feature buttons. If we have an undergraduate program, we use the one on the top.

When we actually developed this part of the process, the academic department said, "I don't want to explore majors on my academic website because I don't want them to stay with my major. I don't want them to explore the other things on campus." And I said, "OK. Fine." We'll just do that. Future students get some right to explore majors anyway. But it was kind of a way for us to work things out.

So this is not an academic webpage. This is our 'about the university' page. But we made sure to incorporate those Future Students actions right there on the page so that the top level is using it so they can see how it will be done.

We put it in our Undergraduate Admissions guide right here. Again, consistency, so that the students who are navigating through our sites see it. But now it's on an academic website, too. This is our Psychology undergraduate program.

So seeing the consistency, they can re-use it. They don't have to develop it. And all those links that we need, those calls to actions that are universal are there and available. And our little marketing tab here links back to that 'About Missouri State' page so they can find out more about why they would follow their passion, find their place at the university.

Another thing that we knew we wanted to do was develop some spotlights. Even before this academic website process happened, we knew we needed to tell our story. We needed to find ways to show people how they could be successful so they could see people like themselves, so they could see how they would fit into the program, they could see how the program was individualized to a certain face.

So we actually have a database of stories and photos that go together. And every time we publish a photo or a story in our magazine, in our guides, on our website, we put it in the centralized database so we can re-use them and be able to place them on the websites.

So this is the same spotlight. It's a photo, headline, a little information and a link to read more. And we just kind of customized it for the department based on what their site's going to look like just using CSS.

But the value here is, this student right here was in our Undergraduate Admissions guide, but she was also a Psychology student. So now the Psychology Department gets to use the professional writing services and show another spotlight on their site, and we're all working together.

And as part of this process, we actually developed three spotlights for the departments as we develop their website for them.

So here's how it looks within the website. It's personalized to go with the Library Science look. It's got the alumni showing that they're successful. We have spotlights on students, faculty, staff, alumni, or donors. For the academic websites, it's usually students, faculty, or alumni that we're targeting in.

If they were to click that 'Read more', they would be able to see the full spotlight story. Sometimes there's video here, sometimes it links up to other resources. But again, it's just re-using that core stuff that we can put onto the websites as we go forward.

We had a really... I don't know if any of you--do you guys have photos of faculty members that are just plain scary?

[Laughter]

Sara Clark: OK.

Audience 2: [32:46 Unintelligible]

Sara Clark: Or 50 years old, or a glamour shot, or in their bathing suit, or--it just goes on and on. We had scanned driver's license photos put up for our faculty.

[Laughter]

Sara Clark: We had scanned printouts of black and white put up here.

So what we said was, "Maybe we need to make these faculty look a little more professional and a little bit more engaging in what they needed." So we actually needed to address this problem.

So what we did was we actually developed a template. That's a faculty abstract that has their photo, has their name, contact information, and a little blurb about why they're cool.

And what we did was we partnered with our Photographic Services department, and once every major semester they have what's called Portrait Day. Faculty can come in, get their photo taken for free, they get to go through their portraits, pick the one they want, and now we have a portrait for the faculty member. So if they're a portrait 20 years old, they can come in and get it redone. We've had some who had to have their photo taken every single Portrait Day for the three Portrait Days because they're not happy yet. But it's just an opportunity where everybody can come, no appointments necessary, no fees involved.

Now, it would be great if this faculty member was interacting with students or if he was doing his research or there was something really cool, but at least in the beginning it's nice just to have this portrait available so you can see him in professional dress and you can see him going.

And we've had a tremendous response to this because when we work with the academic department we say, "We need a photo of every faculty member, and here's where they can get it done for free," and the department heads are actually getting their faculty members there to the Portrait Days.

Here's what that links to. This is the full profile. So you get a larger photo of the faculty member, you get whether they have a Ph.D. or their background, what they're teaching, what their research interests are and any awards they've won, as well as their contact information.

And what we were trying to do there is show that our faculty members are professionals, they do have interests, and especially for our graduate students, you can find out what their research is so you can decide if you're going to be a good fit here.

But the whole goal here is to say, "The faculty are accessible. This is what they really look like today. You can find them, you can find out more about them." And it just makes the program feel more official and open.

Yeah?

Audience 3: [35:00 Unintelligible]

Sara Clark: The faculty member can update it or the department can update it. The way we actually have it right now is all the information on the left is coming from our centralized directory service, so that gets updated by HR or whatever. And the stuff on the right is content that they can update.

We're hoping that in the next year or so, we can merge it with our activity insight system, which is where the faculty put all their vita information for their merit evaluations. And so that could just pull directly in because they are already doing this. And what's happening now is our provost liaison is getting to the faculty and he is pulling the information for them, and then we're putting it on the website in an edited format.

But it's really been successful. The hardest part of this is we had to scale back how much information they sent us--only the last five years of publications--we had to kind of make it a little bit tighter, a little bit leaner so that people would actually read it all. But they can have links to their course pages, their research pages, anything else they have, so this isn't the only way you can learn about them. This is just the starting point, and then you can jump off and get more.

Another thing we built was a template for our four-year graduation plan. A provost told all the departments that they needed to have three-year graduation plans and four-year graduation plans on their website so students could see how they could successfully graduate in three or four years.

We think that's great. It shows you exactly what you need to do. It gives you a plan of what the classes are you're going to take. What we did is we actually connected this with our catalogue, which is in our content management system, so that all these titles of the courses are pulled out automatically. The only thing that they enter are the ones where it's more variable like these. So I can say, "You need to take PT 100." It fills in 'Fitness for a Living'. If I change that course name next semester and re-publish the catalogue, this gets re-published along the same time.

So it's just so they don't have to maintain so much. They don't have to think about it. And every webpage says the same thing rather than having different versions of things in different places.

And then this link here will also, when you click on it, take you to the catalogue and you can read the course description. So again, just trying to keep those things together.

Audience 4: [37:14 Unintelligible]

Sara Clark: The question is, do we make sure that it's accurate information and doesn't conflict?

What we pegged this as is a sample schedule, not the exact schedule you have to take. But we're working with the faculty to make sure--they're just suggesting you take PED the first semester, you could take it the second semester, you could take it the last semester, but they just want you to get a feel for how you're going to go through this program.

So the other thing we did is we made sure that anytime a website where the information was in the catalogue, we pulled it from the catalogue rather than rewriting it.

So this is the admission recruitments for our MBA site. It's not really riveting content. It's not written in a marketing way. There's no photo that says, "Step 1, you must have reached the Bachelor's Degree. Step 2, you must do this." It's right from our catalogue.

But our goal was now the graduate catalogue says the exact same thing the MBA website says. So if a student goes to either place, they get the same information. But the other thing is, this isn't the page where we're trying to sell them. This is the page where they want the details. So let's give it to them in a way that they can understand, a way that's consistent.

And the faculty member that has to maintain this page is a static because she doesn't have to change this content. When she updates the catalogue through the curricular process, this page gets updated along the way at the same time. So she has got one more page of information she needs to have, and she doesn't really have to maintain it in the long run.

This is the Criminology homepage. Don showed you the Criminology graduate program earlier. But another thing we created right here was we knew that they needed to have someway to do news, someway to tell about updates.

So every time we created an academic website, we gave them a blog. And in that blog, it's a little bit more open, a little bit more free. They can have more editors and they can put up, "Speaker coming on Wednesday. It's going to be held in the auditorium." Or "Don't forget to register for classes if you're going to be graduating." It's just all those different little details they want to say but they really don't want to have in your website because it's usually time-sensitive, but it's an easy way for them to update it.

One thing we learned, though, is we don't always tell them it's a blog. We tell them it's a place where you can put your news and updates, like your newsletters you send out to people that tell them what's going on, because they seem to really like to have a place to put news but they don't really seem to want to have a blog. But it's the same thing. It's WordPress speaking in that stuff to the website so that we have it available.

And that's been really successful. And the departments are getting a little bit better. And it makes their website look a little more dynamic and reaching out not only to the future but to the current students.

Though, as we went forward, we learned a lot going through the process, when we learned that the timelines need to be very generous because sometimes we're ready to move and the client is not. Sometimes the client doesn't answer. Sometimes we run into hurdles in the technical implementation that causes the program to slow down a little bit.

But you just need to... What do they say about programmers--however long you think it's supposed to be and then you're supposed to double it so that you have enough time to be able to do it? Just make sure you give yourself adequate time.

The second thing we learned is that all the people in our different offices are thinking differently. When the writer sits down in Word and writes out what she thinks it's supposed to be, and then she gives that to the designer, sometimes the designer doesn't always know exactly what the writer was intending. So they need to discuss things. They need to talk to each other. We need to vet things.

And when it gets to my coding staff, they don't think like a designer or a writer. And so then we have to kind of go through it all over again. So we just need to make sure everybody's on the same page, but we need to be flexible.

The next thing we learned about the template is that we have a standard set of guidelines. We have recommendations we have. But we have to be open that there are exceptions. 

And what we've learned so far is we have about a third of our 50 projects in play right now, and every site has an exception. It's just the way academics works. And you just have to be open to that. You have to talk through it to make sure it's an actual exception, but once you find that out, you need to make sure you accommodate it.

I also recommend you involve the web people in every phase of the plan so that they can catch any errors early and they can be corrected before they move on. The reason is, when it gets to the content management system, we have it set it works a certain way, and if they design it and it doesn't fit into our structure, then we're going to have to redo it. So it's better to redo it early so it can fit into the flow than to have to backtrack at the end of the process.

I pulled both of these people along with me. I'm like, "Let's go do some web stuff." And they had been great. But they've learned a lot along the way, too. So we just need to make sure that we're doing it in the way that needs to be done and that we're catching our mistakes as we go.

And then the last thing I'll recommend, it kind of goes with the timelines. Our project seemed to vary a lot. Our MBA program was one graduate program. It went along pretty smoothly. Our Agriculture department has 12 academic programs. Or more. And more.

[Laughter]

Sara Clark: It took a little longer. It's still in process. Those timelines that you tell the client in the beginning, once you find out how big their scope is, you probably need to re-adjust your timelines to be able to address all that stuff.

So we have the presentation posted at this website. And we also have the workflow, the survey we used, the templates. And it's on our blog, and we actually have some other posts about the academic websites, too, there if you're interested, our email addresses and our Twitter account.

What questions do you all have?

Audience 5: [43:02 Unintelligible]

Sara Clark: The question was where our spotlight is kept in the database. And they're kept in our SQL database, but we actually have a web interface that they use to upload the pictures and to put in all the details.

Audience 5: [43:20 Unintelligible]

Sara Clark: Yes. Yes. The only person who sees the database really is my office. And everybody else updates it through the website.

Yeah?

Audience 6: Are all of these in the blog?

Sara Clark: All the pages that I showed you?

Audience 6: Yeah.

Sara Clark: No. Criminology is in draft. It's on client review. But the MBA site and the Psychology site are live right now. And the MBA. So you can see both of those. And Library Science, maybe by the end of the month. Maybe.

Yeah?

Audience 7: [43:50 Unintelligible]

Sara Clark: So how many sites do we have to convert and how long do we think it's really going to take?

Well, there's about 50 projects in those 200 programs that we've talked about. And... I don't know. What do you guys think?

Don Hendricks: Forever.

[Laughter]

Sara Clark: I think it will be more than two years, but the way the funding is is that she just basically gave us a pool of money and we get to spend it until we're done. So we'll just keep trucking. Hopefully it's no longer than three years, but... They're laughing at me. I'm an optimist.

Yeah?

Audience 8: What type of plan did you guys have in place to manage the maintenance of the profiles? [44:38 Unintelligible]?

Sara Clark: The plan to maintain the maintenance of the profiles? Before the department can be reimbursed for the site, they have to agree to maintain it. And so our goal is to get them in there and get them updating it. And we found that's been pretty successful.

The secretaries in the departments actually update all of their HR information, anyway, and they're also updating their profiles for them. We've allowed the faculty to do it, but we're not really sure that they are going to. So we'll tie it in to as many systems they already use as possible.

Audience 9: Stacey, can you run through that list of individual... ?

Stacey Funderburk: Certainly. Can you hear me OK? Oh. The question was, running through the individuals on the teams.

We have a team leader, we have a graduate assistant gathering the content, a graphic designer. We have a provost liaison. We have a web coder. And we have the program representative, the program director, if you will, and also a representative from either the undergraduate or graduate office for Admissions.

Audience 9: And you guys, your two-hour meetings when you get started...?

Stacey Funderburk: Could be about a dozen people around the table.

Audience 9: OK. Thank you.

Sara Clark: I think our time is up. But if you guys have questions, you can go ahead and come up.

Thank you.

[Applause]