> | My question is this: have any colleagues at UK universities implemented
> | visual identity or branding policies across a large, distributed site such
> | as this... and if so, how successful have they been? I would absolutely love
> | to hear from you!
To a certain extent, we've done something like this. Last year we
initiated a project to "corporatify" some web pages. The idea was that
information like staff members, contact details, course details, maps and
addresses, etc, was all "corporate" information owned by the University as
a whole, and should be published centrally. One set of pages was to be
created for every major academic unit (faculty, department, institute,
etc) by the corporate web team, based on a set of templates (modified for
each unit), along with a new home page front end and better search
facilities etc.
We haven't attempted to impose a corporate brand on the original sites
that departments had created, although there are suggestions we should do
that. I'm not sure about it myself to be honest, for reasons others have
voiced in this thread. However I would expect that departments have the
University crest featured on at least their top level page, and it is nice
if they have a design that complements that of the University. For those
departments that get domains not within strath.ac.uk for their
site/project/whatever, we require the crest and a link to the University,
so that it is clear they are affiliated with us.
Below is more information about our exercise which might be useful, but
is perhaps slightly straying from the point.
Jethro.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Jethro R Binks Computing Officer, IT Services
Mailmaster, Listmaster, Webmaster, University Of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
Cachemaster [log in to unmask]
Whereas departments had up to that point had URLs like the ugly:
http://www.strath.ac.uk/Departments/Chemistry/
the lists of departments/etc accessed from the new home page were changed
to point to the new corporate sites:
http://www.strath.ac.uk/chemistry/
There are still other remnants of the "previous" site around though, they
keep popping up from time to time!
The information collection and page design took half a year roughly
(although I personally have a lot of problems with the design, but at
least because it is DreamWeaver template based it should be relatively
simple to change it in the future. My involvement was mostly in a
technical advisory capacity, and as manager of the servers involved).
Departments/etc were given previews of their sites, and asked to check for
errors.
A folder is reserved for departments to supply additional information
within their corporate site, in the same style (although we haven't openly
pushed departments to do this yet). In the long run, the intention was to
have departmental pages phased out for the smaller ones who provided
little above things like simple staff lists etc, and have any extra pages
of information they had subsumed into the corporate site. That helps out
those departments who have limited or inexperienced staff for dealing with
their web presence: the information they are most likely to want to
provide is now done for them. Also, since most of the 'corporate'
information is stored in extant MIS databases (or could be), we could look
at autogenerating the pages. That's still to happen, but we'll probably
go down that path eventually to a greater or lesser extent.
During the design/information gathering phase, we didn't really get much
feedback from departments, despite lots of requests to them. When we went
live with the site in January, it all kicked off! We got a lot of
complaints from the departments that had a strong web presence and felt
that now the links from the home page pointed to their corporate site page
rather than the one they paid many thousands to an agency to design (but
typically, we find, not to maintain!), no-one would be able to find
"their" web sites. However there was a link from the corporate page to
the department's own pages, if they had them, and their original URLs
hadn't changed or been 'intercepted'.
We also got positive feedback: gathering and corporatifying a lot of the
information meant we could apply metadata etc and this made generating
different searches much much easier. We could never have done this under
the old rather anarchic system. And the original home page was very
dismal and depressing (by common agreement), so that in itself was a
worthwhile improvement!
The change was really about unifying information about academic units so
that there was a uniform method of finding maps, staff lists, courses
offered, and so on for each, and it was especially aimed at people new to
the University. However I find it mighty convenient now, if looking for a
member of staff in a department (to check a spelling, role or phone number
or whatever), just to stick http://www.strath.ac.uk/deptname/staff/ in my
browser and bingo there is the staff list ...
We also created the concept of the "web team", which was something we
hadn't had as an advertised entity at that point. There's a form for
people (staff) to make corrections to phone numbers (a thorny subject),
room numbers, titles, etc, and an advertised email address to which other
comments/corrections should go. This diverts such from the individuals
who people previously dealt with directly and lets the team (of more or
less the same individuals) allocate tasks around as necessary. I deal
with technical issues, other members deal with content, and we all offer
advice to questions as befits our experience.
There's still a long way to go I think, but we're making steady progress
behind the scenes in certain respects.
> We're still working on it. The best advice I can give you is to be
> prepared for a -long- haul, and, get as much back up as you possibly
> can. The more significant people behind you on this, the better.
Absolutely. In our case, we had support from the Principal's Office and
one of the senior officers was guiding the project, which was undertaken
by our External Affairs and Development department, so we had political
clout (all HoDs were invited to a meeting at the start to tell them what
was going on).
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