Report to University Committee on Information Systems and Technology (UCIST)

October 5, 2007

At the direction of UCIST, the Web Advisory Committee was formed during the summer months of 2007. Membership was established, a committee Web site created and the first meeting was held on August 15.

Members of the committee discussed its organization and mandate followed by a wide ranging discussion of Web-related issues. The objective was to identify and prioritize a set of topics that would form the agenda of future meetings.

This discussion and prioritization of topics continued with the second meeting on September 18. The committee identified the following general topic areas:

  1.  Audience Research - We need to establish best practice research methods to better understand and then target our audience.
  2.  Refreshing the Definition of the Common Look and Feel (CLF) - Members of the committee felt that the CLF was becoming stale and that issues related to navigation and a lack of clarity in its definition were an encumbrance to Web site developers.
  3. Enhancing our Implementation of the CLF - While the use of central Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and templates had simplified work for developers, the task of maintaining Web content is still too time consuming and implementing changes in the CLF was to complex.
  4. Other Issues - Issues such as governance (how do we deal with non-compliant Web sites), segmented Web spaces, intranets were also discussed.

The committee agreed that audience research and the CLF should be given priority. It then established three subcommittees with the following goals:

  1.  Audience Research – define what our diverse user groups want from our web presences. The group will begin by identifying usability and user research and the use of web analytics on campus to lead to some best practices for audience research methods.
  2. CLF Navigational Issues – review the navigation description in the current CLF documentation, identify areas in which the description needs to be enhanced, develop a set of recommendations for enhancements in the CLF navigation.
  3. CLF Definition - identify areas in which the CLF is unclear and provide a set of recommendations for areas that should be covered by the CLF.

The committee will continue with monthly meetings throughout the fall.