Web Development at

Higher Education Institutions

By Hap Aziz, Director of Web Services

a publication of:

SunGard Collegis, Inc.

December 2004
Table of Contents

The Issue of Web Stewardship

Introduction

The Web Development Team’s Position and Charge

Web Development Team Responsibilities

Necessary Partnerships

Methodologies of Web Design

Determining End User Needs

Assessment and Analysis

Identifying Model Websites

Applying Web Best Practices

Collaboration as a Closed Process

Collaboration vs. Simultaneous-but-separate Development

Campus Websites or Subsites?

Recommended Web Development Process

Appendix A: A Possible Web Development Process

The Issue of Web Stewardship

“Even if you repurpose very valuable non-Web content, you will at best get a slightly valuable website. The Web is a new medium. It’s different from television, it’s different from printed newspapers, and it’s different from glossy brochures, so you cannot create a good website out of content optimized for any of these older media.”

Jakob Nielson from “Top Ten Mistakes of Web Management”

Introduction

Higher education institutional websitesare quite often comprised of thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of individual pages. Frequently, website pages are grouped together as stand-alone subsites, and these subsites are as different from each other in functionality and form as they are from the web aesthetic established on the institution’s main page. In fact, it is a common practice in the higher education web development process to treat new web subsites as completely independent sites sharing only a few cosmetic similarities such as a global navigation bar and branding information such as the college logo—and sometimes not even that. The result is often that the higher education websites function as multiple separate sites, confuse the end users, and deliver information and services poorly to both students and faculty.

Typically, thedevelopment process is fundamentally flawed in several respects:

  1. The website is developed without contributions from and collaboration with students, faculty, and departments representing the broader institutional community.
  2. Industry-standard “best practices” are overlooked or disregarded.
  3. Marketing and branding considerations take priority over learning-centered principles as applied to the web.

As a result, comments such as the following are received from both faculty and students, and they are quite common regarding an institution’s website:

“First, THE GREAT WEAKNESS of the current site is that it is almost impossible to find anything on it - even when you work here and pretty much know almost everybody. I find it to be a poor introduction to the college. It is virtually un-navigable. There are plenty of great college websites which are easy to navigate and very informative after which we could pattern ours. I think it's time for a top-to-bottom overhaul. I don't believe the current site has any strengths. I by-pass it whenever possible. I'm sure students are even more confused than I am.”

– A community college Humanities professor

A website should be both a functional product for end users and a marketing representation for the institution. A truly excellent website, however, is much the same as a learning-centered institution. An excellent website focuses on results: what information is gained and how well it is delivered. One of the primary missions of an institution’s website is to advance the mission of the institution itself. The role that marketing and branding issues play in the development of the website is important, but ultimately secondary to the understanding that the website is an interactive computer-based product that must provide services and information to students, faculty, and staff.

The Web Development Team’s Position and Charge

“It is a huge mistake to treat the Web as if it were an online brochure and manage it out of the marcom department.”

Jakob Nielson from “Top Ten Mistakes of Web Management”

A truly effective website redesign should result in increased utilization of an institution’s resources as well as increased familiarity with an institution’s key initiatives (and the institution’s pedagogy written large), and these results, in turn, will be linked to more effective career and academic goal-setting and planning for students. One of the fundamental goals for an institution’s website redesign is the development of a web-centric culture. In this vision, the thoughtfully designed and oft-visited web interface that the web development team constructs will itself become a key determinant in shaping institutional culture. The website will become so both on its own merits and as a consequence of drawing students into the vital face-to-face interactions with faculty and staff that are crucial to retention and academic success.

In order to develop this web-centric culture, the development team must realize it has a very specific set of responsibilities in order to ensure successful cultural transformation.

Web Development Team Responsibilities

The development team at an institution has the following responsibilities regarding the website:

  1. Create the logical structure of the institution’swebsite. The development team is to provide the flowchart and hierarchical layout of the site from a global design perspective. It is essential to understand how changes to this structure might impact website operation in any or all other areas of the site.
  1. Design the navigation of the institution’swebsite. The development team is to provide the rationale for the website navigational format based on acquired user data and site surveys. The team is actively involved in gathering information on end-user patterns and behavior in order to completely evaluate the architecture and overhaul it for improved functionality and usability.
  1. Define the data structure of the institution’s website. The development team is able to determine the optimal structure based on design considerations such as site performance and available resources.
  1. Ensure global Section 508 Compliance (level 1). The development team is to understand the process of becoming compliant, tracking compliance in each web subsite.

Necessary Partnerships

While the development team has specific responsibilities as derived from the Web Governance Charter, the Statement of Work, and other pertinent documents, there are two specific development areas that are not typically the responsibility of the development team.

  1. Content for any web subsite is the responsibility of that respective department. The development team will provide assistance and training in the technical aspects and process of maintaining content (through the use of such tools as Site Builder Toolkit) as requested or required by the department. The academic and administrative departments at an institution are the content experts of their respective subsites. The development team will provide web systems that will allow all departments to maintain and update their web materials without intervention of any other “third party” department at the institution.
  1. Marketing and branding issues are solely the responsibility of the institutional department charged with the duties of publication and overall marketing strategy. Marketing and branding are independent of the logical structure and navigation global to the institution’s website. Marketing and branding issues are sometimes specific to individual subsites on the institution’s website.

Methodologies of Web Design

“Web design is impoverished because too many sites strive for the wrong standards of excellence that made sense in the print world but do not make sufficient advances in interactivity.”

Jakob Nielson from “Differences Between Print Design and Web Design”

In his numerous publications and speaking engagements, noted web development authority Jakob Nielson, Ph.D., repeatedly lays out a process that emphasizes three fundamental product design tenets:

  1. Determine end user needs.
  2. Identify model websites and understand taxonomy of industry-related websites.
  3. Apply web “best practices” and technical expertise specific to website design process.

Criticisms of an institution’s website like “it is almost impossible to find anything on it” are indicative that end user needs were not adequately determined, model websites were not examined nor was the taxonomy of college and university sites established, and web best practices were disregarded or not identified.

A common web design error is to convert an institution’s print media material directly to web pages (as though a website were a billboard designed to present static announcements). As Nielson writes in his article “Differences Between Print Design and Web Design”:

“Anything that is a great print design is likely to be a lousy web design. There are so many differences between the two media that it is necessary to take different design approaches to utilize the strengths of each medium and minimize its weaknesses.”

Determining End User Needs

Users visit websites for a variety of reasons that are most often dependent upon the content of the site itself. Web hit statistics and end user surveys show that visitors to higher education website are students who come primarily for course and program information. A web design teamshould be able to determine actual site usage based on statistics generated from the tracking of visitors to the site; however, the design team should also be also familiar with usability engineering as well as the technologies and implementation techniques applicable to designing an interactive product. Additionally, familiarity with human factors design guidelines and the awareness of published standards such as ISO 13407 are necessary for the creation of functional and useful websites.

In his article “Top Ten Mistakes of Web Management,” Nielson writes

“Confusing Market Research and Usability Engineering… A Web design is an interactive product, and therefore usability engineering methods are necessary to study what happens during the user’s interaction with the site.”

A common error is to substitute market research for usability engineering in the design of websites, and this error generally reflects the thinking that the primary purpose of a website is to market a particular product. While the marketing of an institution (especially in the context of student recruitment for various high-profile programs) is one function of the website, by far the majority of users perceive the site as a location from which they obtain services and information. In other words, first and foremost an institution’s website is the product, not merely a marketing tool for the product.

Assessment and Analysis

In a survey of userat a large community college (performed by Collegis) regarding student needs for the institution’s CareerCenter, several Internet and website-related questions were asked. The data obtained indicated several points of concern for the institution’s website, and these points of concern are not uncommon to higher education institutions in general.

  • While 83.3% of the students polled use the Internet several times a week, only 9.9% of the students visited the institution’s website in that same time frame, and 60.3% of the students only visit the institution’swebsiteonce every few months.

This would indicate that a large number of students find the Internet useful in general, but they do not currently find information or services useful to them at the institution’s website.

  • 35.4% of the students learned about the institution’swebsite simply by assuming the college had one. 33.7% learned about the site either from an orientation, from a teacher, or from a friend or fellow student. Only 19.1% learned about the site from on of the institution’s publications or a search engine, and 11.9% never heard of the institution’swebsite at all.

That over one third of the surveyed students learned about the website from the assumption that the college had one, while less than one fifth learned about it from an official college publication or search engine listing indicates that the site is not adequately or properly marketed to the public.

  • When asked why they like a website on a scale of 0 to 9 (least to greatest), “Provides Useful Information” rated the highest with an average score of 7.232, followed closely by “Easy to Navigate Through” at an average score of 6.838. “It Has Cool Graphics” rated lowest with an average score of 5.116.

These results demonstrate why users visit and what they expect from the interface to the website. The results also indicate that graphic imagery, a key component to branding the website, is not an important consideration to the end user.

Identifying Model Websites

Jakob’s Law of the Internet User Experience: Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

The basic premise of Jakob’s Law is that there is indeed a taxonomy of website design, and users develop an understanding of this taxonomy as they interact with other websites. There are countless physical world analogues of this: People understand the layout of grocery stores based on their experiences in Walmart, Publix, Safeway, etc. Therefore, an institution’s grocery store should be designed with typical grocery store conventions in mind. Unfortunately in many circumstances aninstitution’s website has not been designed with typical website conventions in mind. Taxonomy has been sacrificed for the sake of “uniqueness.”

In “Top Ten Mistakes of Web Management,” Nielson writes

“Users get very annoyed when they move between pages on a site and find drastically varying designs at every turn. Consistency is the key to usable interaction design: when all interface elements look and function the same, users feel more confident using the site because they can transfer their learning from one subsite to the next rather than having to learn everything over again for each new page.”

Take the time to examine several different institution websites. Often, a simple visual inspection will reveal that the varying designs of an institution’ssubsites goes beyond any differing visual aesthetics related to marketing and branding issues. The underlying logical structure of each subsitemay be fundamentally different from every other subsite developed within the institution. As a result, “users get very annoyed when they move between pages” on the site, and they have to “learn everything over again for each new page.”

Nielson makes this observation regarding content creators that are not specialists in web design:

“Content creators have been trained to develop linear content for traditional media: they have spent their entire careers doing so. They have to consciously push themselves to work differently than their natural approach to content, so unless you force your content developers to produce their material specifically for the Web, you will end up with substandard Web content.”

The methodology of duplicating print materials for the web environment is often the standard methodology used by institutions.

Applying Web Best Practices

In order to apply best practices to the institution’s website, the best practices must be ascertained and articulated. Often, prior to a web development team’s charge to develop aninstitution’swebsite, no best practices have been articulated or identified. The following is a list of 10 best practices for website design commonly applicable to higher education websites:

  1. The purpose of each page should be explained to the user on the page itself minimally through the use of introductory material addressing the purpose of the particular site area.

Common Problem: The current website does not consistently provide this information to the user. On the main page itself, there may not even be a simple introduction to the institution. The majority of the current main page consists of advertising material.

  1. Navigation scheme on all site pages must be consistent.

Common Problem: Again, a simple review of the current site will show that there is no consistent navigational scheme.

  1. “Cookie crumbs” should be provided that correspond to the hierarchical architecture of the website.

Common Problem: There are no conventions that identify a user’s location in the site, preventing the user from developing a “sense of place” in the website.

  1. All text should be rendered in standard text format rather than graphic objects. Exceptions may include heading text, button text, and caption text embedded in graphic images.

Common Problem: On a majority of pages created by graphic designers, text is rendered as graphic objects.

  1. Web pages should resize seamlessly to fit browser windows of different sizes.

Common Problem: Web pages designed by graphic designers often do not resize.

  1. Page layouts should maintain composition even if screen text is resized by the user.

Common Problem: Page layouts do not maintain composition.

  1. Navigation links must be obvious (i.e., standard underline) or provide feedback in addition to cursor change.

Common Problem: Links implemented are often embedded into pages as graphic imagery that do not stand out as obvious links.