Section 3 question 4 - Other issues
- lack of promotional writing skills among staff maintaining sites
- Lack of overall strategy for the web site. Lack of coordination and cooperation.
- the comments herein reflect only my limited perception of how our website is managed, used, updated etc. A better picture could be obtained from my colleague who does most of the updates.
- Those ultimately responsible for content don't appreciate the value of up-to-date web pages (and damage from out-of-date pages). i.e. they don't use the pages regularly so out of site is out of mind; web pages are not yet considered highly valued media
- Not everyone is a web developer and some staff have been thrown into this responsibility. I think most of us don't have issues determining the structure, etc., however, could use help when we are expected to change the look and navigations of our websites. We have several in the xx, managed by 3 people, one of which is qualified to do this work--the other two struggle with it. This is particularly challenging when a whole site is redone where we work with a test site and then moved to the live site. If one manages to get through one year, it may take several years before it is expected again--by that time, all is forgotten. To do it every year is unrealistic because most people at University of Waterloo and snowed under with work.
- too early still
- Target audience too varied to focus on specifics
- I find the template Left side navigation bar difficult to use
- There is some reluctance to allow user-generated content and the need to control content submitted hinders real-time and face-book style interaction.
- Time means staff resources.
- Lack of a talented resource to maintain site
- Staffing/resources: I'm the only one who can update templates, etc. and there are limited other people who can update/maintain content. Unfortunately, web work is barely even in my job description. My further/bigger issue is that there are many sites managed by other units in our faculty that I would like to see vastly enhanced - in terms of content and navigation/organization; however, I don't have resources/personnel to assign to helping those units make these improvements. And, few if any of those units have dedicated web managers.
- Common Look and Feel Dreamweaver Templates are difficult to maintain and not very flexible.
- Our Undergraduate website is relatively simple and normally involves linking information.
- People throughout the department need to communicate changes to the web maintainers. This is starting to happen but there are still cases where information is old because nobody has thought to update the web site.
- lack of time and support to implement the strategies target audience needs - blogs, IM, a portal style site, videos, forums and other forms of electronic outreach
- Dreamweaver templates are too complex and not flexible enough - we are considering a rewrite using PHP instead.
- The current navigation structure is not audience-centric making it difficult to provide the right content at the right level in the site
- It would be most helpful to have a qualified web developer and content writer to handle all international website updates