Academic department web content

[nina....@snc.edu]

UWebD friends,

We have just undergone a website redesign at St. Norbert College. Like any website redesign, our goal was to significantly enhance the quality of our web content, reduce the number of web content managers to create more accountability and greater commitment, and reduce the number of pages that lacked meeting or were abandoned.

Most of our academic discipline websites have these core set of pages: home, major requirements, minor requirements, course offerings, faculty and mission (not my idea, the faculty was insistent). Most disciplines like it this way because content management doesn't fall on them. However, some disciplines want to introduce additional pages that are not necessarily of value to our intended external audiences (prospective students, their parents, prospective faculty members ...). How are others dealing with the issue of preserving the high quality of your discipline websites but allowing faculty some autonomy at the same time?

We are thinking a couple things:

1. We could use workflow to ensure that we see and approve what goes out. (Could lead to wrestling back and forth, though)

2. We could introduce a more internally-facing site for each discipline that would allow faculty to maintain additional content separate from our public site for the benefit of current students. With this option it could be password protected or not.

Thoughts or recommendations?

Nina