Tools for sustainability of decentralized web sites.

[jefbak]

I am the closest thing to a webmaster at Smith College and I am not
very close at all. You see at Smith all the various departments and
offices generally run their own websites that are hosted and the
schools web server.

Attempts to manage the overall look and feel of the sites are handled
by the college relations department because the strongest design
skills exist there. Currently Adobe Contribute is used for this
purpose and has been since 2003.

I was hired in December of 2007 to create a more sustainable web
environment for Smith that promotes the ability for departments to
easily add fresh content and take advantage of various web 2.0
technologies (such as ajax, widgets, and using content from popular
open API's.)

The politics are tricky and many of the various web page maintainers
are very attached to the sites they have created even though web site
design is nowhere in their job descriptions.

So here I am, quietly testing various cms platforms while trying not
to burn any bridges and help this college find a sustainable web
model. Having paid for a core website design in 2002 using BigBad,
they are not very willing to change technologies, especially if it
will cost a lot, so I am sticking to open source for now.

I am in the process of hiring one web specialist position to assist
me. So there will be 2 of us to make this happen with the help of the
IT department for any database or server needs (this is a LAMP
environment).

So what are the odds of this working? Any thoughts or questions would
be much appreciated.

[Jay Collier]

Jeff-

In my experience, online communications in higher education is spread
out among a number of departments, and the structure seems to be
different at each school. One of the reasons for this is that campus
people often feel strongly about their own Web presence and their
group's identity within the school. I think that is a good thing.

For years, the debate raged between whether to centralize or
decentralize a Web presence; and the division of labor was between
content (communications offices) and technology (information
technology).

I'd propose that we turn that debate on its side. Consider the
development of a story or feature in the New York Times. Stringers
conduct research for a story, and reporters pull the research
together. Editors fine-tune the story and determine its placement.
Designers present the story within the context of the entire
publication, press operators print the paper, and the distributions
department get the paper out.

For the Web the distribution is much simpler, but I'd suggest that
gathering story ideas should also be as widely distributed as
possible, and a flexible workflow model should encourage a series of
steps to pare down, craft, and fine-tune content. In addition, sub-
identities within a graphical system should be encouraged, just as the
NYT magazine, book review, and Web site relate to each other visually.

In other words, I believe the conventional campus debates about our
public Web presences can be surmounted by envisioning an integrated
interface system, information architecture, and production workflow.
At least, that's why I'm here!

Once we have a vision in place, we can start building out pieces of it
that are sustainable and scalable as early adopters come on board.

I, too, am the only full-time professional dedicated to our online
communications, and I am soon to be hiring a multimedia producer.
However, even with limited resources, if we have a clear vision, we
may move slowly, but we'll be moving in one direction over time.

-Jay