We have: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk
Or at least, we've tried to. It's very difficult. You meet a lot of
resistance from people who just want to do things Their Way. Our general
policy has been that departments should have a 'corporate' home page at
the very least. Ideally, they should have corporate sub-pages too. Some
of them do, like, e.g. http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/english/
and some of them take our templates and, well, bugger about with them,
e.g. http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/classics/ and then some have done
something totally different, e.g. http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/business/
One school has recently gone to an outside company and had their entire
site redesigned at pretty enormous expense. No one actually okayed this,
they just did it without telling anyone, and now that they've spent so
much money, no one is willing to turn around and tell them they can't use
it. It's meant to be launching today, but it's not up yet
(http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/law/).
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.
Kat
----------------------------------------
Dr Kat Street
Assistant Web Editor (Research)
Learning Support Services
Room 403, Cripps North
University of Nottingham
University Park, NG7 2RD
Tel: 0115 9513222
Fax: 0115 9513353
Mobile: 0774 0345869
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~ulzkls
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On Thu, 1 Nov 2001, Richard Tammar wrote:
| Hello there!
|
| I've been asked by senior management at the University of Sussex to ensure
| that all University web-pages cohere with 'the corporate identity'. To this
| end I've been attempting to compose a policy document delineating a
| (minimum) level of 'branding' that must appear on every page by a certain
| date (likely to be in 2003).
|
| The University's servers hold over 30 000 pages of open-access information,
| and, whilst a proportion of these are managed by the central web team or
| happy-to-cohere information providers, the majority are owned by
| enthusiastic - and often iconoclastic - individuals across well over 100
| separate academic departments and research projects.
|
| 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!
|
| Richard Tammar
| Website Manager
| University of Sussex
|
|