Joe's "State of the Web sites" Address, Part I

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Joe's "State of the Web sites" Address, Part I

1/21/2004

By Terry Calhoun

Visitors to the Web sites are typically presented with a choice of Web sites "views," often via a link explicitly titled, "Information for..." The site visitor's page choice is sometimes remembered via a session cookie (or a persistent cookie). At other times, the visitor's choice is not saved, and merely serves to determine the next page shown. (Saving audience state via persistent cookies can lead to bizarre usability problems when done on lab computers or other shared systems employed by diverse audiences.)

Sometimes the decision to segment reflects a desire to accommodate more direct links than could reasonably be crammed into a single integrated page; segmentation obviously makes more real estate available, and reduces the need for a Web page designer or a Web oversight committee to tell some folks no, their pages won't be getting directly linked. In other cases, segmentation appears to have been done simply because other sites were doing it, with no discernible substantive rationale and largely undifferentiated page versions for each of the "different" audiences!

That lack of differentiation at some segmented sites is not surprising: it can be quite difficult to keep half a dozen or more different home pages in sync and updated. For example, consider the relatively straightforward issues associated with creating just three or four fresh news items that are uniquely relevant to each "carved-off" audience! That is quite a task, and thus it isn't surprising that sites appear to have quickly begun using common news items across all their "different" segments.

So what about the Web sites that don't segment? The 37 university Web sites we studied that don't explicitly segment include the University of Oregon itself, Berkeley, Cal Tech, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Washington, and Yale. The approach the current UO home page takes is typical of this group. Rather than explicitly asking users to categorize themselves, we take a more subtle approach toward guiding users where they need to go. For example, if you look at the UO's current home page, you'll notice that we carve off some audience segments via direct links (Alumni, Sports, The Arts, Visitors), while offering other links that are important to particular audience segments directly from the home page.

We believe this sort of hybrid design, as used at the UO and a number of Ivy League institutions and regional competitors, will eventually be seen in virtually all university home pages because it improves the transparency and navigability of the site, and because it reduces the user's click count when trying to access crucial data.

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So, no real surprises. Most people use Apache, but few get creative with extensions; our screens are getting larger; and we're segmenting, either at the top level or one click down, to reduce user clicks. Next week, we get to portals. How many institutions really have one? Is it a trend that's already seen its peak?

About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.

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Terry Calhoun, "Joe's "State of the Web sites" Address, Part I," Campus Technology, 1/21/2004, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=39652

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