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All universities are equal...

Adriaan Bloem has written a post about university websites. To quote:

Usually, where universities come from is the same: academia was among the early adopters of the nascent technology and many ventured out on the web in the early nineties. With the archipelago of departments, institutes, faculties, over a decade many managed to produce hundreds of thousands or sometimes millions of published web pages. Often using different styles, editors, webservers, then CMS tools -- it's not uncommon to find hundreds of (sub)domains within a single institution.

We've been doing a lot of work with universities over the last year or so, and have observed all of the same issues and challenges. After a while, we worked out that universities are uniquely challenging environments because they are the only place that doesn't have a shared sense of corporate identity. You don't work for the university, you work for the School of Dentistry.

We're now seeing university web strategy projects as a piece of organisational change, not as "create a document" projects. I think there's some valuable progress to be made via this approach, but we're still in the early stages of exploring what it means in practice...

Posted by jamesr on December 04, 2007 05:55 AM
Categories: Content management, Information architecture, Web development