SAC3: Designing a New User-Centric College Public Website: Lessons Learned

[Intro Music]

Announcer: You're listening to one in a series of presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference in Springfield, Missouri.

George Sackett: Khouloud and I are going to do this as a team today. It represents how we've actually built the website. I'm the king of content and then we have the queen of the technical end, and Khouloud actually handles that part of it.

As we go through our presentation, we're going to tag-team a little bit. If you have any questions, please, please, please speak up. We will try to pick questions as we go along. And we will have some question-and-answer period at the end.We do have seats down front. So, if you're coming in late, please, please come on down. You're not interrupting anything at this point so come on down front.

Also, as I mentioned, if you did not get a survey or the response sheet, please get one because we have some bribes for 75 people that turn in their response sheets. We have a shameless bribe that has a candy bar with a picture of our website and the URL for the presentation. Rather than handouts, we'd give candy bars instead. Hopefully, they'll be even more effective.

Khouloud, go ahead. She is going to begin for us.

Khouloud Hawasli: OK. Welcome, everyone, to our presentation. Today we're going to be talking about how we went about designing a new center website for our users and all the process that we went through. This project started back in 2005, when the leadership realized our website is so fragmented and we needed a more representation on the public website.

So, we're going to be covering today a little background about the college, a little history behind the website, how we went about researching the website, and the research behind the whole project, the development that went behind the project, the implementation process, and the lesson we learned from that project.

St. Louis Community College is one of the largest public system in Missouri. It was voted by the users in 1962 and it covered about 700 square feet miles in St. Louis metropolitan area. It is made up of four campuses and three educational centers. We offer transfer and career development programs. We offer as well non-credit continued education courses as well as workforce development in the community. And it is a member of the League for Innovation Institution.

Every semester we serve about 25,000 students and about 40,000 students for non-credit each year. That's how many people come and go through our systems. It's a rather very large database. And we also serve about 31,000 in the workforce development area. We have 130 credit programs and 57 development programs in the workforce department. The demographics of our employees, we have about 1,800 faculty, 420 full-time faculty and the rest are adjunct faculty. The employees are made of full time and part time. We are about 3,500 employees.

The old system of the Web services in the college is made up of three different sections. We have the public website. This one had the old look of the old website. We have the user server, in which the faculty and staff have their own public website. They share materials with the students that don't belong to the Blackboard. That's another mechanism they use. And we have Internet services which are made up today of three different services, an Internet and document center, which is our SharePoint Server 2001.

Why did we need a brand-new website? We are one college but we were not presented as one identity. The old look and feel was made up of so many fragmented pieces. There were a lot of issues. The content did not work together. It did not have the same feel and look. It had a fragmented identity.

The issue we had and the problem we were facing, the old site was so difficult to be navigated. We had 16,000 pages but no standard to follow. Every department had its own development and style. The site was not built for our external users. There was a mixed use. It was mixed between Internet and Intranet. Some content was on the public website that really does not belong to the Internet. So, that was another challenge for us. All the pages did not follow the best practices. Everyone had their own style and their own personality. So, go figure. [Laughter] Most pages did not comply with any standard. There was nobody pushing any specific template to anybody.

George Sackett: It was a great example of the Wild West. Everyone did their own thing. The idea was we had content that was contradictory. We had content that was out-of-date. We just needed to get a better handle on these, and that's where the whole project started.

Khouloud Hawasli: Our biggest challenge in the past was always broken links. With so many hands in the pots and so many people wanting to do their own things, broken links were all over the site. It was very hard to keep it straight. It was never ADA-compliant. It was hard to keep it as such. Contents were always going out-of-date because most people don't know how to integrate content from database. They all relied on static pages. There is no obvious brand-new entry. Every page has its own logo in the right or left and so forth. There was no workflow in place for editing and processing or approving process. That was missing in the old website.

So, our challenge as a committee or as a project team is to take the content that is on the old website, which was made up of 16,000 pages, and make it just what we need for the audience that we identify to be our need, and to take also the department and the subsite and make it integrated with the current brand-new website and have the same look and feel.

George Sackett: Before we go, for example, business administration is one degree that we have. Four different campuses represented the same information differently, and it wasn't always the same information. Part of the idea was how to identify the same information, what was the appropriate information to represent the school and not just the campus.

Khouloud Hawasli: So, you want to talk to the audience?

George Sackett: Thank you.

Where do we begin? We went out to talk to the campuses and introduced the project to seek cooperation and support. Obviously, when you do something like this, you're going to be stepping on a few toes. We needed, by and by, this faculty and we demonstrated how ugly and poor our website was. It was really not too difficult.

We then actually contracted an external firm to identify or help us map out what we wanted to do. They did surveys of current and prospective students. They did some focused studies with a variety, not only just our credit students and degree candidates but our continued education, the adults as well as the administrators and faculty. They also did some random surveys online, which are very helpful and instructive.

What were our students' expectations? This is probably pretty general for almost any college. Registration was huge. They wanted a hub for communications. They wanted to be able to see what programs and classes were available, not only from the school but they wanted to know when they're available, what times. They wanted to be able to do everything online.

What were their expectations of the website? These were the statistics from the survey and, again, this is probably pretty typical of almost any large group. They wanted to be able to have accurate information timely. They wanted to be able to find what they need to do easily. They wanted descriptions of the programs. That was their primary focus, what they wanted to know about, why they might want to come to our school. They also wanted to be able to do things like easy payments.

These are some of the statistics, but on top of that, I'm going to jump through this real quick. These are additional resources that we have on our website, why they might want to be using our website. Blackboard. The catalog, it was primarily a PDF but it was still a very popular function. How can we present this better was another one of our challenges.

But our biggest problem was 30% of our audience could not find what they were looking for. Even though we had search bars, we had navigation, it was just so poorly organized and so nebulous that no one could find what they looked for. Even the faculty and staff were doing on a daily basis struggle.

Audience 1: Any work on LMS?

Khouloud Hawasli: Not yet. We're working on the LMS part of it. It's another project that now is going on.

George Sackett: They did some studies about the technical end of it, which was what was actually on our website. We mentioned that there were 16,000 pages, 92 charts of snapshot of our website. We had the typical stuff. We had the HTML pages. We had graphics. We had links. We did try and use Server Side Includes to help organize consistently our footers and headers. We had the usual sporadic distribution of PDFs and XLS and PowerPoint presentation.

We did some one-on-one interviews and, again, more discovery on how we're going to proceed. I'm going to go through this real quickly because we're a little bit behind. I want to get plenty of time to cover what we would do differently.

We also talked with those who were directly at work on the website. We had contact persons in each of the campuses to understand what we were trying to do. The idea of four campuses is fairly critical. We are one college but all four of our campuses are very unique and had their own look and feel, an individual identity. We didn't want to lose that in this process. We wanted to talk to them about how we were going to do this.

Khouloud Hawasli: The project started and our main focus was to make sure that this project is strategically in line with our mission and the vision of the college. And that is not to forget the technical aspect of it. We have to integrate a very important dynamic infrastructure behind it to support the public and all our constituents and not to forget the users. So, we had three goals to accomplish in this project, strategic, technical, and a user-centric website.

The project was, in plain words, just replace the whole thing. We don't care what's out there. That was our goal. We're going to have to revamp the whole website, start from scratch, and that was a big thing. And then, we're going to have to focus on our external customer, our external constituent, who is our student. So, our focus is the student and everyone that touches our website. Forget our internal users because they have their Intranet site to go about finding their stuff. This is what's facing our public image.

George Sackett: To emphasize, we really wanted to focus on the future or the potential student, the prospective student. With a pretty extreme measure, we didn't even have one of those, you have the links for the prospective student, current student, and all that. This is one piece. We're just really going to focus on the prospective student. It's the real focus of the whole website and all the content was driven by that fact.

Khouloud Hawasli: The intention was merely to increase our enrollment. A lot of the universities are in competition for the same students. St. Louis has additional community colleges that are competing with us. We lost some enrollments. We are using this new website also to drive our enrollment up. We wanted to align, obviously, with our strategic mission. We want to simplify the user experience of our website, to go in and find what they wanted, and also make sure our management and staff have the mechanism or ability to push content and own the content and facilitate this experience for them.

The approach was, we don't have the internal resources. So, we're going to have to go out and seek somebody to help us in the process. So, we seek an outside vendor to help us in the process. We also put in place a content management system. We selected Serena Collage Content Management System to help us in the Web-offering environment.

George Sackett: Can I ask a quick question? Anybody else using Collage? [Laughter] Thank you.

Khouloud Hawasli: Thank you. That's a lesson learned.

We identified three objectives, an overall objective for the project, a technical objective, and we have user-centric objective. The overall objective was to rebrand our site to make sure we are one college. Everywhere you visit, you'll see one identity. We are one college. We wanted to build a site that allowed the visitor to find their own personal need the way they choose, the path they want. Any path you select you should have to be able to find what you need. Create a new content and put it in the delivery system that people can have easy way to update content and push and keep maintaining the same template and standard all over the website.

Basically, we're trying to do business the right way now and have the flexibility for people to update and change content as they need it so we're not just locking everything down to ourselves, and of course, provide the mechanism. Everybody who published website knows, "Oops! I pushed the content that is wrong. I want it back." Content management system provides that ability for versioning so you can roll back and call the old version.

The technical objective was, obviously, to streamline our technology and to put an infrastructure in place that facilitates all this development and the deployment of the content, and also put in place some mechanism to track traffic and do ongoing analysis of the website so we can maintain it and approve it as an ongoing process because we all know a website is never a finished product. It's always an evolving project. We wanted to put in place a system that has full tolerance, that has enough servers to tolerate hits from anywhere in the world, and we have a zero downtime basically. We can't afford to have any downtime. That should be all in line like any other infrastructure we put in place for the college.

As far as our users, we want to make sure they find what they want. That's the whole goal of the website. We want them to find what they want and get the service they need. We wanted to make sure the content is targeted to our audience. So, if you're a student, you want a catalog. Here's where you find it. You want a class schedule? Here's where you find it. So, basically, it is mainly targeted to our students' need and use.

And we needed a process so people can update content on a daily basis. It became a part of the normal business process. It's no different than going and entering any acquisition to a Banner. That should be another application that we put in place.

We selected project teams. Those are the teams that we identified we needed for the project, obviously. The one component that we probably added ourselves because we were short in staff, we added two external vendors that we used, Millennium and Tower29. Millennium helped us in developing the content, to write up the content, and Tower29 helped in doing some development. We didn't have enough deep skills in development so we had to rely on external vendors.

We put the timeline for the project, the milestones we wanted to hit, and pretty much I think we accomplished many of them. We had to realign sometimes because some of the dates didn't serve the way we wanted.

So, the system we put in place is, we put two front-end servers in our perimeter network, which is a DMZ, and we put in front of it a Cisco content switch to do load balancing between the two front ends; a content management system which is Serena, an internal network, but we had to resort to putting another system to put in all the homegrown applications like ASP and ASP.NET and other applications. At that time we put it, we didn't know how compatible it is. The challenge was to make it compatible with Serena. So, we had to improvise and put another system to push those homegrown applications to the two front ends.

The issue we were facing with this project is we had a cultural issue. People were not used to a process of how to push content. They own the content. They push it when they want it, and nobody asks them what they had put up. So, that's a cultural change in the whole institution. The responsibility of the website has changed. There used to be a Web coordinator on every campus. They are the persons you go to to get access and get to push public. They shifted all these responsibilities to the community relations now. So, the roles have changed and the responsibilities changed.

We have a new group of Web authoring, which is almost everybody in the district. You are in admission. You own the content. You can publish it. You don't have to go to a coordinator to do it. But somebody like George has to approve it. The other issue is we have to identify additional users who have never pushed the content to the website but that's their content.

George Sackett: Very quickly, we'll talk a little bit about the specifics of our website. Identifying the navigation became a prime priority. We had the ad hoc committee. We reviewed other websites. We looked at the best practices for other schools. We looked at what worked within our school currently. And we looked about, kind of a soul searching, what really needed to be on the website, with the focus being on the external constituent, the potential student. We looked also at statistics, what we're actually being looked up by the website. We wanted to obviously change the focus so that we had timely and consistent and accurate updates.

We talked a little bit about the multisided effect of the college. That became a huge deal in trying to get the English department in one campus to talk to the English department in the other. There was a guy I met from Hawaii yesterday that has nine campuses on different islands. I can't imagine theirs is even more challenging than what we've got here because we're all on the same city within 40 miles of each other, anyway. So, it was a huge deal to try and get each of these to talk to each other. Everyone felt they had the best program so theirs should be the model. And then, if there's any differences, it was because theirs wasn't good enough.

Some users actually never search. We have search bars on the existing one but we wanted to make sure that our navigation was logical so that people that weren't using searches could function and find the information they were looking for.

We intended to use an outside content firm. We'll talk a little bit more about that because it actually became a problem. Many of you that are a part of the higher education institution know that it's unique in many ways and different from the business world. So, when you talk to a business and they're trying to write your content, they may have their own perspective but it really doesn't necessarily match what the student is looking for. That became a huge deal.

Plus, there were some nuances within the college itself to understand, like our general education degree certificate. It was so poorly written. It was 65 pages of content just for one degree. It was so challenging to try and sort it out that they actually never figured it out and got it all wrong when they tried to rewrite the content. We ended up doing it ourselves. We wrote most of the content ourselves, which also created some problems down the road, besides the fact that we just were overwhelmed with the task of doing all those content pages.

As I said, community relations ended up doing most of the content writing. We then had to get that content reapproved. We mentioned four campuses. All this content goes out to all the deans, all the vice presidents, and all the department chairs for review. And we were doing this during summer, not an easy situation that way.

We did decide that AP Style was going to be enforced on the website, and that has been fairly successful, not without challenges but we do have exceptions. Unfortunately, the room was full about the style guide discussion earlier so I missed that one. But we ended up creating our own style mini guide that went along with any AP Style Guide.

Once we had a website put together, we went through a series of beta testing, both internal and with future students as well as current students, and they were very successful in telling us things that we needed to change. This was an early version. This was the first home page. This is what we started with in the old website. This is what we have on our new website. I should say that this image and the message that this has delivered changes each time a visitor comes to a website. We have four messages and every six months we rotate them out. These are actual student images we are using. So, we are trying to then transition from their end to student stories so that we can do both videos and just student highlights with message.

Programs, Applying is Easy, Paying for College. Our three biggest buttons, three biggest things we want students to come to our website and do. We have news items. We also have some need to know stuff. The calendar was also a high item we wanted to be able to feature on the website. And then we have our links just to our campuses. This navigation across the top is consistent across the website. By the way, we just got a silver award from the National Council for Marketing and Public Relations. It's a little braggy, I apologize.

Little highlights, some of our effects. Again, the navigation is consistent. We also have the footer navigation, your contact and jobs and all that. Typically, we follow the traditional header and footer. We also have enhanced our content. We tried to improve the look, the feel, and the message. We tried to be consistent about the navigation being the same. We did break one tradition and we do have some major navigation elements on the right-hand side.

We also have quick links which breaks the navigation. So, the idea is if you're looking at a quick link, traditionally you can expect as a user that you're going to be jumping to a different part of the website so that if you stay in this navigation, you're going to be staying within the same part of our website. The navigation is absolutely consistent.

Campus pages. I mentioned that we want to maintain that unique flavor. We've got their own newsroom. We want to enhance this functionality at this point but we've got, again, consistent navigation from campus to campus and their own newsroom that they can maintain in the same database so that we can pull that wherever it needs to be pulled.

Web content. The management system was rolled out and it has been very effective. The rich text editing, Collage, does provide for that. It is clunky and that is one of those things that we'll talk about, things that could have been done better. All those Collage users were sympathetic. It does work with managing workflows but, again, there were some issues with doing that. But it does have a nice review and approval process that we have been able to effectively use to manage the content as well as the style.

We talked about the oops factor so we can roll back when someone really screws something up, but Collage does lock things down well enough that you really can't mess with things too much. And we can have schedule replacements. So, we have content that I created last week that will go up while we're here at the conference because we can do some future dating on the website.

We also integrated some external systems. Again, we used the counter system from...

Khouloud Hawasli: Active Data Exchange.

George Sackett: Active Data Exchange. It's a familiar one. Again, we looked around to see what was working in other colleges. There are some issues with that as well but we've been, in general, pretty happy with it. We have some homegrown systems that we're using. We're integrating Banner, Blackboard, LMS will be coming. We've got other homegrown applications like course schedule; employee directory, which is a very popular item, especially within the college itself; education registration; and student application, as well as employment applications, another one that's rolled out recently. We've also been trying to add the Windows Live student email function. That's a whole different topic we can cover for another presentation.

So, these are the effects of adding within successful integration of some of these applications within our website. This is the Banner page, our course schedule page. The functionality is not that different but the whole way it presented, the look and the feel is updated tremendously.

Phase 1 got completed just about seven months ago. Given the challenges we have, we felt we were really pretty much right on schedule. We had to integrate around other things, like we had...

Khouloud Hawasli: Oracle upgrade.

George Sackett: An Oracle upgrade a week before. We were actually going to shoot for the first of March but the Oracle upgrade just sucked all the resources that we needed to do the upgrade for the transition.

We had a Java line, though. There is some content that we wanted to put on the first phase that really didn't make it. And we used the ad hoc Web committee, which was our sounding board and our mechanism of communication between all of the campuses and the faculty and staff. They helped us draw that line. There were some people that felt that their content was just too important not to be left there and we certainly heard from those folks.

We also got challenged by competing priorities. We're a small staff. I'm the only person from community relations that's doing Web content. So, if we had a public relations issue that comes up, that was a competing issue that would draw resources away from what we were doing. We underestimated what we really had to do. We knew it was going to be a huge project, but it was a daunting task even once we got going.

Working with several vendors, there was a vendor reshuffle. The project leader was actually let go in the middle of this project. So, that became a huge issue. There was a merger of the two vendors. Actually, they bought each other out. They liked each other so much that they bought each other out. That was an interesting challenge. And then just deploying the new technology was something brand-new for us.

I got a job through this whole process so I'm really pleased about it, but there were four positions identified as part of the initial study done by Irvine. We've actually only implemented two of those four at this point. We really wish we could have the other two, both one is...

Khouloud Hawasli: We're restructuring the IT department so it is a brand-new relationship between the community relations and IT. So, the responsibility has changed a lot. The college had decided content belonged to community relations, the mechanics and infrastructure belonged to IT. So, we only provided development and support of the infrastructure. They got IT out of their content totally. I think it's a good idea. IT people don't know how to write well.

[Laughter]

George Sackett: It's not necessarily a slam on some of the folks here in the room. I apologize. It's unintended.

Khouloud Hawasli: No, I mean, I am a programmer and I know I would never say I'm a good writer. And I'm so happy that he has this responsibility.

George Sackett: Once we had a rollout, we did have some issues, corrections, and updates. We did have a fairly error-free rollout. It was very effective but, obviously, there are corrections and updates that needed to be made. We heard about those pretty quickly.

Contributor training is an ongoing issue because as you roll them out, there's a lot of hand holding of these folks to get them comfortable with using the system. Indeed, we'll talk a little bit about some of those issues. I'm going to real quickly scroll through some of the things because we're a little bit behind.

We also did not do enough dynamic content so we're working on trying doing dynamic content. We'll mention that a little bit as well.

As a school, we never had enrollment management as a focus within the school. We hired an enrollment manager and they now have a new staff. It is a whole new focus within the college and we're still trying to implement and develop, integrate that specific role. Obviously, the website was designed for the external students. So, it's the tool that we're going to use for enrollment management. But there's still a lot more to come because of that.

The customer relations management tools, we're still trying to evaluate that. We're looking at variable print, Web content, and additional content that wasn't in phase 1. We're looking at blogs and social networking as well as continued focus on brand management.

So, things that well?

Khouloud Hawasli: Right.

George Sackett: We've successfully completed the project. It got done so we're happy about that. We have increased enrollment so that made all the money people very happy. For four years we've been trending down 3, 4%. We are now up 3% over what we were last semester.

We rolled out pretty much on time and we had some outside user evaluations that were very successful, justification for what we were doing, and the outside evaluation. Especially at the early stage, they did give us a stick to help manage this project because it was not cheap. There was some major funding that was involved in this project. Having that initial study to identify what we wanted to do provided some justification.

We mentioned that we were successful in getting this award. We have some active involvement from the faculty that has been a very big plus. The more active they are involved, why, obviously, the more supportive they are of what we're trying to do.

We have successfully used the outside vendors. That was a successful process, both in discovery and the development.

We developed some new partnerships. Khouloud mentioned that she didn't know me, I didn't know her. But when you have a weekly meeting for six months to hunch over this project while you get to work through some differences and some challenges, you make some new partnerships. That has worked out very well.

And that smooth transition to the new website, people really found when they came to the website that they had a transition. It went smoothly. Their content was there. We had the successful integration of applications and implementation of that AP Style, which really made a difference in the website's consistency.

Things that we could have done better, this page goes on and on. So, I'm going to let Khouloud take this one.

Khouloud Hawasli: All right. As far as the things that we think we've learned out of this whole project, we are in a public institution. Everything goes out for bidding. You don't know who's going to bid on a project that you put out for bidding. We had a firm bid for a project. Unfortunately, they were not familiar with Collage. The college themselves have to use Serena Collage, and they really did not have enough knowledge in Collage.

George Sackett: They claimed they did but when they came down to it, they only had a passing experience with Collage that they have overblown in their presentation.

Khouloud Hawasli: So, that slowed down our process in development and limited us in the long run. The other vendor that we have used is to write our content. It was thought that we didn't have enough internal resources to write content for us so we're going to seek an external vendor to write for us. Unfortunately, nobody knows your institution but you. This is institutional knowledge and you should never outsource this part. We ended up writing almost everything back again, the politics, the integrity of the whole institution. I think the money wasn't well spent, in my opinion, because the community relations ended up writing all the content all over again.

Plus, we are a community college so we had to make sure the reading level of the content should not be like really 12th grade level. This should have been lower.

George Sackett: And, in fact, we're still too strong in that respect. We're probably at 10th to 12th grade level, and we really need to be at the seventh grade level. That is one thing that we are looking at redoing. We have a high number of people that are still ESL, GRE, GED. So, we're looking at rewriting all that content. Again, as we touch all that content, we're going to rewrite it to a more friendly style. That's something that really needs to be done on our website.

Khouloud Hawasli: Actually, some of the pages were measured to a Harvard level reading. Our students are really not equipped to read that level of reading. So, that was a lesson learned. It could have been better done by the English department internally, perhaps.

George Sackett: No. Actually, a lot of it was written by people that were writing press releases and that sort of thing. The level of their writing, they were very proficient in writing. They were too proficient. They really couldn't write at the level that we wanted our readers to get. So, that's something that we really did miss a mark on ourselves as we needed to rewrite that content in a more user-friendly fashion.

The one page that really came out best was the athletics page that was written by a guy that can't spell. He updates daily and every day I'm editing his page, but he writes in a style that is very friendly and works very well for the user, it really does. It's a very popular site, in part because he updates it daily, but he's not an English major by any sense.

Khouloud Hawasli: We talked about the content management system, we had an issue with it, obviously. The vendor could not handle it well. So, we did not really maximize or did the best practice of the content management system.

Also, the Collage was not user-friendly. Like any Windows application, you will use the navigation, the File, the View. The Tools does not have the same feel and look of any Window application. It's a Java-written application so people had to find their way around it, and it was not friendly. So, everybody we trained, they have been struggling using the editors and all the features of that product.

George Sackett: When you create a table that go from cell to cell, you don't hit the Tab key. You hit the arrow keys, little stuff like that, but it's a big deal when the user tries to use that interface.

Khouloud Hawasli: We wanted a content management, thinking we're going to implement a task manager to facilitate the editing, the approval, and the process of pushing content. Task management is not as friendly as possible and it's really cumbersome. We were having a hard time to push it out to our users. So, it's not a good choice.

And this is the most important thing. The Collage people have stopped developing any more service pack for the product. This is the end of the life of the product, and we found out about it a week after we went live, actually. So, we're hoping someone good will buy the product so we'll have continued support. They are going to support the product in the next two years, but we have to make a decision what we're going to do at this point, whether to pursue it or not.

This is another technical challenge. This is a Java application and we are a Banner shop. Banner uses J-Initiator and that conflicts with Banner Java. We cannot put two Java applets on the same desktop. So, we ended up putting a terminal server and put the Java application there, and everybody who wants to update content logs in to the terminal and logs in to the Collage to put it out there. So, that was improvising solution for the users.

We were short-staffed. That's why we went out and outsourced many of the content development and the content, but at the same time we brought in the content and we had to write the whole content again. So, we were juggling too many things at the same time. We were stretched but we were OK.

We did a lot of beta testing but I think we could have done better by talking more to our users and faculty, not just beta testing, do a lot more so when we did the transition, nobody was surprised, "Where is my department site?"

George Sackett: Communication with the non-ad hoc committee members. I think we've had some sort of a public forum on our existing website. This is the wire frame that we're looking at. It would have been more effective in managing the expectations of our internal user group.

Khouloud Hawasli: Because of all these bumps and changes in responsibility, we missed out on some of the content like our department site. A lot of content was static, not dynamic. We hardcoded a lot of codes inside the website. ASP and ASP.NET were not easily integrated with the content management. We had to improvise and that's why we put another additional server, an IES server, but now we're figuring out how to do it, actually. We'll start removing them and putting them into the Collage. So, slowly but surely we'll decommission the other non-Serena Collage.

Our user could have benefited from the training earlier of the product but we were so pulled into the content so we could not provide the training for our end-user for the product.

George Sackett: We tried to rely on that external vendor. And they tried their best but they really missed some things that would have been of benefit to us. I think if we had some internal experience ahead of time or earlier in the process, we could have guided that integration a little bit better.

Khouloud Hawasli: I'm going to elaborate a little bit about the ASP and ASP.NET. In a lot of applications, obviously you have to require some authentications. With the load balancing, sometimes it's hard to keep the cookie sessions sustained, but finally we figured out how to do it. Actually, on the content switch we made it just consistent with one folder and all applications go to it. We just discovered that about two weeks ago, actually. It is nice because we can now eliminate the server and consolidate. So, we don't have to rely on four servers and infrastructure. We're going to go down to three now to support.

We could have identified and done more training earlier of our contributors.

George Sackett: Let me do this. We've got another slide. Go and flip it over. That's it?

Khouloud Hawasli: None.

George Sackett: We did not leave much time for questions. We would certainly be happy to entertain any. I told you that we've got some bribes. When you turn in your evaluation sheet, there are some candy bars that have a wrapper around them that has both the picture of our website and on that is the URL for our presentation. You're certainly welcome to look at that. It also has email context for us and we are more than happy to talk to anybody about some of the pitfalls that we run into. I would be happy to entertain questions afterwards.

Does anybody have any questions right now that they would like to share with the rest of us? Yes?

Audience 2: Is it a bit unconventional, the navigation side? Could you repeat the question?

George Sackett: I would be happy to repeat the question. We're somewhat unconventional that we used some right-side navigation. To focus on that, there's a whole series of answers to that. One is we ran out of room on the left side. We needed more real estate for navigation. We tried to build the frame so that it was only 800 pixels wide so that almost any image, any screen would see at least part of that navigation so they would see that there were some there.

Also, we have an Admissions button. One of our primary links is Admissions. That right-hand navigation then jumps to different groupings within admissions and then it will serve the left-hand navigation for immediate content that would be within, say, Getting Started. So the right hand is a little bit more gross and then the fine navigation then becomes on the left hand side.

Does that help you, sir? I don't know. We did some studies on that and it was acceptable by the students. As long as we're consistent, we can violate some of that just a little bit, and it is consistent across the website that way.

Again, thank you all. It has been a lot of fun. Hopefully, it's helpful.

Khouloud Hawasli: Thank you.

[Applause]

Announcer: For more presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference visit HighEdWeb.org/2008 or sign up for our podcast and feed at HighEdWeb.org/podcast.xml

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