My bias is toward a balance between marketing and usability, but the bias gives more initial credence to usability than to marketing. Why? Because you can market the hell out of a site, a subsection or page, but if people don’t know it exists, then it doesn’t matter. That’s my main criticism of the DU homepage- It looks great (which is valuable in and of itself), but it comes at the expense of visitors (prospective students) getting their tasks completed slower and more inefficiently. The most powerful way to manage this tension is to 1) ensure your basic usability requirements are met and 2) make that basic usable framework as beautiful as possible.

If we look at the Apple and Google examples on this page (you can click them to access full size versions), you see this 1-2 approach put into practice. Google is a usable site. It gives visitors a short overview of the conference, easy to find/use links to additional information and a big button to join. But is it beautiful? Has it leveraged good marketing principles? Well, it does provide user generated content to breathe some life into the page, but I would argue that it’s not an engaging presence. It has leaned too far toward usability by disregarding the power good marketing would provide.

Apple’s page also provides basic information on the conference, links to additional information and a big button to join. The difference is that Apple takes that basic usable form and packages it with more marketing muscle. The page is beautiful. It’s engaging, active and makes me want to go in order to be a part of the energy depicted. This is a page that has found a good balance between marketing an usability.

Both conferences, being as high profile as they are, will undoubtedly sell out (Google’s already has as of this writing) so you could make a counter argument that Google’s lack of marketing didn’t hinder them. In fact, they likely saved money and time by avoiding the marketing point of view. True enough. But which conference do you want to be a part of?Related Posts:

• Tension Between Marketing and Usability: Part 1
• On Apple & Adobe Flash
• Communicating With Students Beyond Email
• Centralization Around Audience
• The New University of Denver Site In A Nutshell

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Before we dive into the details, we need to define marketing and usability. By “marketing” I mean a perspective that exults the intangible- largely subjective areas like branding and visual aesthetics. By “usability” I mean a perspective that exults the tangible- things that are perceived to be objective through testing and measurement like navigation and functionality controls, categorization and flow of information. I realize you may disagree on my definitions, but for the sake of argument, I’m not here to say one is better than the other so feel free to change the definitions in your own mind. I support both as I’ve defined them. You should ensure that your visitors are represented through testing and measurement, but you also need to be a leader sometimes and do what you feel is necessary even if it’s contrary to user’s wishes. The two can work in tandem, but so often fail to do so. However, that is not a recipe for disaster in and of itself.

A higher ed site could go in either direction. DU’s homepage is squarely in the marketing corner while the task of finding degree information is squarely in the usability corner, yet neither truly works as intended for me, not to disrespect Nick’s conclusions. The homepage does indeed have impact and bucks the usual higher ed trend, but does it work? It does if you want to grab attention and differentiate yourself from the pack (I’ll assume a prospective undergrad student audience). But do students want different or do they want ease of use or a sense of what life at DU is like or something else? Is the leadership inherent in publishing such a bold homepage good or bad? I’d argue that the homepage misses the mark.

I don’t see any reason to be bold here when so much of our own research and those of DU’s consultants over the years points to the fact that people researching what college to attend are more interested in getting the four big questions answered as opposed to being “marketed” to:

1. Does the school offer the degree I’m interested in?
2. Am I qualified to attend this school?
3. Will I fit in socially/do I see myself being happy at this school?
4. Can I (and/or my folks) afford it?

How many of these does the DU homepage answer (or how many of these questions can you easily get to if you make your way to an internal page within the DU site)? To varying degrees, there are links and clues for each of them, but they’re overwhelmed by the gigantic photo and audience links. This page is more about DU than it is about DU’s customers.

UPDATE 4/29/2010: I decided to expand on this idea using a non-higher ed example.Related Posts:

• Tension Between Marketing and Usability: Part 2
• Higher Ed Sites Have A Huge Advantage: A Captive Audience
• Marketing ≠ Visitor Experience
• Virtues of “The Site”
• 4 Steps to Determine the Optimal Page Width for New Sites

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Since title tags are an exercise in telling people what they’ll find behind a link before they actually go there, the act of writing it requires you to justify the relevance of the link in the first place. If you’re at Apple’s website on the Macbook page, you might see a link to their Macbook Pro page. Makes logical sense, right? If you’re interested in a Macbook, you might be interested in stepping up to a Pro model. A title tag might say “Step up to a Macbook Pro for added performance, storage, memory and more.” The sentence establishes relevance and a reason why you should click or not click. Job done, move on.

Let’s take another example, however. Let’s say you’re on a university’s annual report site, on any page. There’s a global link to the chancellor’s site. You write a link title that says… what? “Go to the website for Chancellor so and so.” No, that’s too obvious. “Get information about Chancellor so and so.” No, that’s not relevant to the annual report as a whole. “Get Chancellor so and so’s impressions on the year’s events.” No, if that information existed, it would be part of the annual report site itself.

The above reasoning hints at the utility of link titles. Writing them forces you to double check your architecture. Why does a link exist on this particular page or in the global nav? Is it relevant to include here versus over there? How does the inclusion of this link in this area on this page help the visitor accomplish their goals or further their aims?

All of these questions should have been asked early in the process, but things slip through or circumstances change. Writing link titles help verify that your user experience goals are kept intact and on track. Try it, it works.Related Posts:

• Centralization Around Audience
• The Step Before Defining A Website’s Goals
• Flickr for Photo Workflow
• How To Turn Around A Problematic Site
• There’s A Happy Medium Between Centralization & Decentralization

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So where does decentralization make sense? The obvious answer is content. Higher ed sites are large, if not huge, relative to many websites and the thought of centralizing that amount of content into a few hands doesn’t seem practical. The sheer workload would jeopardize the distribution of time sensitive information. Plus, no content person wants to work in a sweat shop environment were quality takes a backseat to simply getting the work out. And beyond even those practical concerns, will a content person be as passionate about every subject that comes across their desk as the people who live and breathe it?For those reasons, content ought to be unleashed.

This isn’t anything new Mike

OK, so a decentralized content scheme isn’t a new idea, but my point is that simply because it’s smart to decentralize content creation doesn’t mean ALL aspects of the web effort should go along with it. This includes strategy, information architecture, visual design and functionality. There’s no credible reason that I’m aware of that would cause me to believe that every dean, vice chancellor, and director at the university should control how their part of the website works or functions. That’s not to say they shouldn’t be at the table to discuss matters that affect them, but neither should they be allowed to dictate needs on a per site section basis either. This is how workloads get out of hand.

Give me an example

If group A wants to promote news, group B wants to promote events and group C wants to promote both, what happens in a decentralized world? The web team gives each group exactly what they want. But if information architecture is centralized, then you would look at all groups in totality. You would take all wants and needs into consideration en masse. Only then can you create a solution that can be sustained over the long haul in an efficient manner. In our example, you might come to the conclusion that lots of groups across campus will want to promote news and/or events. So instead of building standalone news and event solutions plus one that handles both, you could merge news and events into a single steam called what’s happening. Any group on campus could then tap into this single solution. Group A doesn’t have events? No problem, no events populate their content, but the “what’s happening” label still makes sense. Same goes for group B in reverse.

Technology folks will of course try to build solutions with modularity in mind, but this only goes so far. News and events is an easy example since we all know those ideas will port across many departments. But what about requests that have limited universal appeal or practicality? Do you build it? The answer lies in your overall strategy. 

You may not have a global strategy precisely because of the decentralized environment. But once centralization occurs, that all changes. You should have a basic understanding of what your site is supposed to achieve and for whom. In that light, a request for a specific feature that is only useful to a certain group or for a particular, somewhat rare occasion should be looked at suspiciously. If your site is supposed to communicate with prospective students and entice them to apply, then there may not be a good case, for example, in building a Blackboard login function. I’m not saying Blackboard doesn’t have utility, but not for your prospective student audience nor to achieve your goal to drive applications . The correct answer in this case would be a polite “no.”

Instead, I see many sites, our own included, take on projects to fulfill any and all requests without much critical thought as to their strategic value. So more projects enter the queue, timelines stretch out, both clients and customers get frustrated over the slow progress, staff morale suffers and the website becomes ever more confused. I would imagine that if you looked at your institution’s workload, you’d find a significant amount to be, at best, tangential to your main goals and, at worst, unrelated at all. Kill those projects and focus. Centralize the high level, strategic functions your group provides while you decentralize the ground level content that gives visitors localized flavor.Related Posts:

• Centralization Around Audience
• Stick To Your Guns
• Why Decentralization Doesn’t Work
• The Speed of Twitter
• Who is Your Client?

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My issue with that argument is that, taken to its logical conclusion, every single department at the university essentially gets a different website. House them all under the www.yourUniversity.edu umbrella and you get the mess that is the modern higher ed website of today. Upper management is glad to see that every department gets individualized marketing attention and department personnel feel good that they have the ability to communicate uniquely.

Of course, in none of this acclaim and back slapping has the customer — students — had a voice. From their point of view, they experience a hodgepodge of loosely associated websites all claiming to be the same university. They struggle to find information because there’s no single underlying structure. They’re frustrated, but have no recourse because there’s only one university site to go to (it’s not like they can click to a competitor school’s site to get the information they need- they’re a captive audience in this respect). 

A centralized approach to higher ed sites does take away the ability to have unique designs for every department, but I will argue that this is a minor inconvenience at most and a complete red herring at least. A single “look and feel” doesn’t equate to an inability to be unique. All you have to do is look to the Obama presidential campaign to see this in practice (hat tip to the Higher Ed Marketing Blog for the link).

Obama, running for president of the United States, arguably has to speak to many more diverse audiences than does a university. Yet, all of his communications, all of his messages and all of his marketing materials down to the fonts and color palette are all the same regardless of whether he’s talking to a group of senior citizens at a nursing home or to college students at a campus rally.

Any well planned strategy will transcend low level squabbles about “our students are special, give us a custom website.” It doesn’t matter that anthropology students as a group are different from math students. What is important is that they all share the same kinds of needs in terms of wanting academic program information, tuition and financial aid information, social activity information, sports and athletic program information, and so on as your research indicates. Those commonalities should direct how and why your website is the way it is. Obama successfully communicated a single brand to a giant melting pot of diverse people on a national scale. It can surely be done at a university.Related Posts:

• Marketing ≠ Visitor Experience
• The New University of Denver Site In A Nutshell
• Virtues of “The Site”
• A New Take on How to Find a Higher Ed Degree
• The 1-to-1 Relationship

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1. Approach site decisions with visitors in mind instead of the institution. A simple, but powerful stance. This single approach to web building will do wonders for you. For me, it called into question how higher ed sites work — how they reflect the institution’s org chart through their navigation and global structure. You know what I mean, its all of those individual sites for your academic departments, administrative units, colleges, schools, etc. that are loosely associated with one another. Each time you visit one, the design changes, functionality changes, navigation changes, etc. If this is the case with your university, I’d guess you suffer from inefficiency issues brought upon by teh need to maintain all of those standalone sites. You MUST put your visitors at the center of your decision making in order to sidestep all of this additional work. How? Read on…
2. Build sites around audience groups. Higher ed web teams tend to be small compared to the size of the sites they manage. This creates bottlenecks longer than necessary turnaround times. Organizing around your school’s org chart creates this problem. If you can accomplish step one and put visitors at the top of your priority list, then think of your site in terms of the much smaller number of audience groups your visitors fall into. You’ll go from dozens upon dozens of org chart oriented  mini sites to only a handful of audience specific sites. All the discovery, research, architecture, design, content, code and testing work you currently do for all those standalone sites will be (almost) vanish when you only have to deal with a few sites tailored to each audience group. For us, we’ve currently defined a total of six audiences. That’s a much smaller and easier number of sites for our staff to handle and it allows for efficiencies of scale.
3. Fulfill each audience’s basic needs. Before you venture off into social networking and introducing blogs, wikis, tags and other such tools, take care of the basics first. Your first task is to provide the most needed, relevant information for each audience built upon an information architecture foundation that’s flexible enough to accommodate future growth. Once you accomplish that, then add in all the other “cool” stuff. For example, your research may uncover that prospective students want to know the following: does your school offer the program they are interested in learning and does it have information on applying, cost and the social scene. Once you know that, make sure that information is readily available. This is really simple, but we don’t do a good job of it at DU yet. Our research tells us that prospective students (specifically undergraduates) don’t know nor think in terms of academic departments, schools and colleges. So, in our new site (to launch in January 2009), we won’t force prospects to navigate through a series of hierarchies based on the university’s org chart. Instead, they’ll navigate by subject matter, a concept they’re already familiar with from high school.
4. Extend the visitor experience. Once basic needs are met and proven to work through testing, then introduce social networking and other tools. With your visitors in mind (as always), ensure that the new functionality supports their wishes and needs and doesn’t become a distraction. You want to continually judge decisions about visitor experience in terms of your customers, not what the chancellor thinks is cool or what your competition is doing. Those are irrelevant issues (and yes, I realize there are politics involved, but still). It’s not about the chancellor or third parties. It’s about always meeting and eclipsing the expectations of your visitors.
5. Become more sophisticated. Step 3 will take a good amount of time, but along the way, you’ll begin to find that audience specific sites have their limit. I’ll write more on this topic, but suffice it to say for now that in the long term, defining mutually exclusive audience groups is limiting. Categorization is porous as people go in and out of various audience groups. I work at DU, for example, but I’m also a student and will be an alumni after graduation. How should I be treated? Prospective students become current students once they accept an offer. Does that mean their experience of the site should be turned on a dime as the transition occurs? These are important questions and demand a more sophisticated approach. I’ll write about that in the future. In the short term, however, building sites around audiences is beneficial to everyone involved even with the issues I’ve just pointed out. Audience specific sites will allow your team to rally around a central concept, give it direction and provide upper management and decision makers outside your team a point of reference. Armed with this game plan (all tailored to your specific circumstances as research uncovers, of course), decision makers will be hard pressed to create hurdles and obstacles because the strategy will be based on facts, not on people’s subjective opinions.

Related Posts:

• Centralization Around Audience
• The New University of Denver Site In A Nutshell
• Marketing ≠ Visitor Experience
• Virtues of “The Site”
• What Higher Ed Sites Could Learn From Barack Obama

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Finding help

You can find lots of advice and information on how to tackle redesign projects already. In fact, you can find information about redesign projects with a higher ed focus. More focused still, you can find information on an individual step, like defining goals, within a higher ed redesign process. But I want to discuss a topic I haven’t seen covered or even brought up: reconciling the goals of a redesign project, say of an academic department, with those of the larger university and the impact of any differences between the two.

An example

A simple example will illustrate this issue. Here at the University of Denver, over a year has been spent redesigning each of the units within our Division of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS). The process is not yet complete since the division houses some two dozen separate schools, departments and institutes. Each unit’s redesign effort is handled like any new project would be with discovery, IA, design, code and testing phases. As you can imagine, this is a whopping amount of work, but mostly unneeded if you ask me. Why? Because the larger goals of the university should inform how each unit’s site looks, acts and works instead of treating each unit’s site as a custom job unrelated to its parent organization.

I’ve already posted about the decentralized nature of the higher ed world which I blame for this state of affairs. I’ve also written about how centralization would be beneficial. This post, then, is an extension of those ideas. Much of the time and effort invested in redesigning any part of a university’s website centers around defining goals and, based on those goals, architecting how the site will be structured, what content will be needed, what visual design would support it and what kind of functionality will need to be programmed. While I champion that kind of rational approach, I champion it in terms of the university’s overall website, not in terms of each individual unit within the larger university’s web presence.

The crux of the problem

The problem for higher ed, as I see it, is treating each unit as a standalone website. Instead, each unit’s goals should be delineated and informed by the university’s overall goals. With this approach, a two dozen website redesign project shrinks into a much more manageable task because the goals are already in place and therefore so are questions of information architecture, content needs, visual design and functionality. Yes, each department will have slight variations on the general themes, but the goals (and consequently, architecture, design and code) should be flexible enough to account for those lower level differences.

Let’s look at another example. When you approach the topic of faculty bio pages on a unit level basis, you’ll get all kinds of differing requests (which you might term requirements, needs and wants, or something similar in your defining goals stage). Some units will want individual pages, while others just want a single page with contact information. Some will want photos, some won’t. Some will want large photos, some small photos. Some will want to list out in HTML format their published papers, books and other such accomplishments while others would rather put that information into a downloadable resume or CV. And the list of differences goes on.

A better approach

If you take a more centralized approach to goal definition, then you’ll note that faculty information is important content to communicate through the website. Once that is established, then you can stipulate a global technique to manage it. You might come to the conclusion from internal input, visitor testing and your own expertise that faculty information should be presented through individual pages with both HTML formatted and downloadable versions (in both Word and PDF formats) of each person’s accomplishments. The bio page will have a single head shot of such and such dimensions placed to the left of text. Copy needs will include contact info, short backgrounder, and links to related classes and degree programs each person is associated with. You can also handle exceptions to the rule in a global fashion. For instance, if a new faculty member is hired, they can have a default photo in place of their actual photo until one is supplied.

If you extrapolate this approach to its logical conclusion, you see that the umbrella website’s goals eclipse any lower level unit’s goals. In my AHSS example, this approach would save months of time as goal defining meetings are streamlined because much of the work has already been done. Goal setting for a lower level unit consists of unique needs and how they will be handled. They do not consist of entertaining permanent exceptions to the rules already laid out. If a unit says we want each bio page to have a blog, multimedia, book excerpts and class assignments, then you’ll either need to rethink how faculty pages are presented for all units or, more likely, you’ll already have a way to handle blogs, multimedia, class assignments, etc. because those sorts of ideas were already brought up in the discussions of universal goals and then refined, in subsequent phases, in universal terms.Related Posts:

• The Case for Centralization
• Why Decentralization Doesn’t Work
• The New University of Denver Site In A Nutshell
• Stick To Your Guns
• Virtues of “The Site”

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What I mean is that any student who is interested in a given school will not drop it for consideration simply because its website doesn’t navigate well or has grainy photos or doesn’t offer RSS subscriptions. Individally, these things don’t matter compared to the high profile decision of what school to attend for the next X number of years. Instead, cost, location, admission requirements, program selection, athletic opportunities, scholarships, etc. are the kinds of information that students will use to narrow their school choice. Once those choices have been narrowed, you’ll essentially have a captive audience. As such, those visitors will put up with a poor overall experience.

This doesn’t mean you have a license to make a mess of your school’s site, however. But you also shouldn’t feel rushed to introduce blogging just because the site feels outdated by not offering it. Today’s potential students expect a lot from websites, but falling short on those expectations does not necessarily equate to lower enrollment numbers. MySpace, Facebook and many other popular websites with potential students are, from an IA perspective, usability nightmares. But clearly this doesn’t hamper their success. For these sites, the benefits outweigh the costs. The same holds true for higher ed sites. Fight the good fight and strive for perfection, but don’t lose perspective of the bigger picture. Your audience is there and will continue to be there because of the relatively few options at their disposal. Make your decisions with that understanding. Instead of tackling what can be a daunting project — social networking, for instance — break it down into smaller pieces and chip away at it. First get the fundamentals right, then build on it. Don’t abuse the captive audience advantage, leverage it.Related Posts:

• Tension Between Marketing and Usability: Part 1
• What Higher Ed Sites Could Learn From Barack Obama
• A New Take on How to Find a Higher Ed Degree
• Tension Between Marketing and Usability: Part 2
• How To Turn Around A Problematic Site

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The answer to those questions revolved around the university’s decentralized management model for the web. It meant, and still means, that each group on campus inherently controls their own website independent from everyone else’s. Similarly, the web team (my team) controlled the core site. To put some context around this, let me state the web team’s two fold function:

1. To market the university through the so called “core pages.”
2. To offer our web expertise, via a client-vendor relationship, to university groups who need help.

The key to this post is the word market. It’s our job to sell the university — to attract new students and then convince them to apply and enroll. In this regard, our audience is prospective students. However, the admissions department is also charged with attracting new students and marketing the university. So too is the brand marketing group. On top of all that, the bigger schools on campus, like law and business, also house a team of marketing types to drive their enrollment. Do you see where this is going? None of these groups are part of the same team nor reporting structure. Only the brand marketing and web groups live under the same vice chancellor, but on a day-to-day basis they are wholly independent from one another. You can see how this decentralized model creates duplication and a potential for groups with the same mission to work at cross purposes.

If you combine the problems of multiple groups doing the same thing independent of one another with the notion of each one managing and controlling their own sites under the university’s umbrella website address, things become even more confused. Finally, add to the mix all the other campus units — the academics departments, administrative departments, etc. — controlling and dictating their own sites and you have the confusion that is a higher ed website.

And so we arrive at the title to this post. If the job of the university’s site is first and foremost to attract and convince prospective students to apply and attend our institution, then shouldn’t the entire site be managed under a single vision and with a single plan? I realize there are other audiences that a higher ed site needs to address, but that can be accomplished through audience segmentation. For our purposes here, the only audience that matters is prospects. In those terms, what’s the difference between the admissions website from the overall website? I don’t think there is a difference either from a website management perspective nor from a prospective student perspective. So I offer up some advice: end the confusion of all these multiple sites and simplify down to one – The Site — with the address www.yourSchoolName.edu. What are the characteristics of The Site?:

• The Site is focused on the needs and wishes of potential students. There is no obvious overlap or inclusion of information intended for any of the other audiences. That only confuses what should be a straightforward pitch. Other groups have their own place tailored to their wishes and needs.
• The Site is about presenting the true value of the institution in honest, proactive and engaging terms. It’s not about marketing what the university wishes it could be or hopes people will like. It’s the difference between authenticity and spin.
• The Site is about presenting a single design / a single brand / a single experience for prospective students. It’s not about communicating as many different sites as there are groups on campus. That’s just confusing and divisive.
• The Site engages people in conversation, connects them with the information they want and creates desire within them to act. It does not create hurdles, try to be clever nor put itself ahead of it’s customers.
• The Site is confident in itself. It doesn’t pretend to be 18, doesn’t attempt to sound 18 nor want to be 18. It does have confidence that 18 year olds can speak on its behalf to other 18 year olds. It is confident that site visitors and current students can interact with one another in positive ways. It is confident in providing the necessary tools and platforms for those interactions to take place.

Related Posts:

• The New University of Denver Site In A Nutshell
• Stick To Your Guns
• How To Turn Around A Problematic Site
• What Higher Ed Sites Could Learn From Barack Obama
• Why Decentralization Doesn’t Work

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Two of the main ideas I promote for higher ed websites is that a decentralized management approach does not work well, but a centralized one does. But what does this mean in practical terms? That entails a discussion about audiences.

The Problem

While your mileage may vary, most universities would list the following groups as major audiences their websites need to serve:

• Prospective students
• Current students
• Parents
• Faculty & staff
• Alumni
• News media / press

While I would quibble over the finer points of who is on that list, let’s just go with it for now. As I see it, the major issue with most edu sites is that they are organized around the university’s org chart, not their audiences. That may sound strange given that every edu site offers dedicated audience links, but  those links are just that–links–not the global organizing structure that I propose. To explain this further, look at any edu site’s global set of links. They will include some, all or more of the following:

• Home
• Admissions
• Academics
• Research
• Student Life
• Athletics
• About us
• Alumni
• News
• Calendar or events
• Community

The audience specific links will also be on the page, but are shown to be part of the global navigation system. They tend to be set off as a list of their own. The question then becomes what’s the differnce between the two navigation methods? If all the audiences have a specific area of the site intended just for them, then who and what are the main links for? I guess the answer would be that the main links are for all audiences–a sort of catch all offering or way of browsing the site without any preconceived notions or biases on the part of the university about who has come to the site. But that creates more problems than it solves. In fact, I don’t think it solves anything to have both sets of navigation. Why have an “alumni” link among the main set of links and among the audience specific links? That’s confusing.

You can certainly offer site visitors competing navigational opportunities–search versus browse, tags versus categories–but general audience versus specific audience doesn’t work because they’re the same thing- general audience IS an audience, but not a mutually exclusive one given the other audiences listed. This is fundamentally the issue with a decentralized management/strategic approach to edu websites and why it creates a fundamentally poor visitor experience.

The Solution

Edu site managers need to take a stand by deciding who they serve, then get on with the task of serving them. If it’s prospective students, then the umbrella www.yourSchool.edu site needs to be built for them and only them. That brings clarity, efficiency and rationality to the site’s architecture. There’s no confusion introduced, as in my earlier example, of an “alumni” link existing twice on the same page: once among the global navigation and again among the list of audience links. Links to other audiences should still exist and be universally accessible from any page, but the content and navigation in those areas shouldn’t commingle with the content and navigation for prospective students. So, if you go into the alumni area from the prospect’s area, then the navigation and content there should be tailored for alumni and no one else. That is not the place and time to offer up degree program information- that only exists in the prospective student area.

The intention behind centralizing the site around audiences is that audiences are, more than not, mutually exclusive. You can draw hard lines in the sand about what content should exist, how it should be communicated and how it should be navigated based on that exclusivity. It allows a web team to focus their efforts for each group in terms of that group’s wants and needs without regards to any other audience’s wants and needs. If some content, like news and events, are useful to multiple audiences, then let the CMS dynamically handle when and where to put the information. 

If this approach is taken, you’ll only manage a handful of sites–one for each audience–instead of one for the main site, one for each academic department, one for athletics, one for each administrative department, etc. Also gone will be the need for visitors to declare themselves as prospective students at the main site, then again when they reach an academic department’s site and yet again when they visit a different academic department’s site. All that duplication vanishes because audience becomes the central way the site is architected, not the university’s org chart.

Related Posts:

• The New University of Denver Site In A Nutshell
• There’s A Happy Medium Between Centralization & Decentralization
• How To Turn Around A Problematic Site
• What Higher Ed Sites Could Learn From Barack Obama
• Marketing ≠ Visitor Experience

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