There is simply no bigger challenge for any web team on the planet than that of managing a college or university website. Most college web management strategies rely on the "squeaky-wheel" approach, or employ various textbook triage techniques in an attempt to care for areas of the site that are suffering most. If this sounds like your institution, you're not alone. The web managers at even the most admired university websites are constantly struggling to keep their sites responsive and up to date. If you are planning to purchase a content management system (CMS), you might be surprised to learn that all your problems will not magically go away. Indeed, the real secrets to maintaining a great college or university web presence are leveraging your CMS with careful planning, and using best practices.
There is no shortage of web CMS solutions to choose from today. Assuming you've already gone through the proper evaluation process, you've (hopefully) got the tools you need. The question now becomes how best to use these newfound tools. Ultimately it's up to you to put a framework in place that ensures your website can be leveraged and is scalable and sustainable. If done properly, this framework will not only help manage the madness, but it will also create opportunities unlike any that have come before.
Employing "best practices" means choosing systems and using techniques
that have worked best for others in the unique environment of higher
education.
This framework includes CMS technology, but perhaps more importantly, a process shift that involves the participation of additional stakeholders in the institution. Make no mistake, leveraging the human element is one of the most important success factors of deploying a CMS. Of course, all this must be done in such a way that the technology and framework do not, in and of themselves, become impediments for sustainability or growth. This is where it gets tricky.
To understand the dangers here, it's important to understand a little background on CMS vendors. Most web CMS solutions were designed initially for the complexities of media publishing and e-commerce sites. In the early days of the web, dot-coms drove the development of the CMS, and many of today's CMS vendors are rooted in the development of systems designed to satisfy the needs of transaction-based web businesses. Highly customized multimillion-dollar CMS solutions were all the rage in the late 1990s, and none of them fit the specs or the budgets of higher education. Since then, systems have evolved to be more user-friendly and less "custom," but without some careful planning up front, it's easy for your website architecture (and your content editors themselves) to become prisoners of a CMS that was not designed for the unique complexities of the .edu website.
With these factors in mind, the search for the proper framework of best practices is fairly straightforward. Look at what's working for other institutions that have already cut a path through the jungle. Employing "best practices" means choosing systems and using techniques that have worked best for others in the unique environment of higher education. Stay away from strategies developed by engineers who focused on the needs of e-commerce, news, media, or other highly admired sites. Just because "Google does it that way" doesn't mean it's a good fit for your university.
Whatever framework you settle upon, there are five best practices components that are repeatedly used by colleges and universities:
1. Avoid Building an Empire--One of the most tempting ways to build a CMS framework is to start at the product level and build an empire of resources to support it. This seems very logical. You've invested in a CMS, and it deserves a healthy foundation of resources such as technical personnel and hardware (perhaps some redundant hardware just in case). Yes, it's tempting, but dangerous. Empire building around a product or technology can stifle big-picture thinking and create an unhealthy agenda that includes protection of the very empire itself.
A CMS should be thought of as an enabling framework that's modular and scalable. Rather than hiring more programmers that understand the details of the CMS language of choice or widgets that can be built from its proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs), choose a more standards-based approach, allowing plug-and-play modularity whenever possible. For example, just because a CMS provides an API for building a blogging component doesn't mean you should reinvent the blogging wheel. Talk to the CMS vendor about its ability to publish to blogging standards (XML-RPC and MoveableType). Calendars, scheduling software, RSS, podcasting, and virtually any conceivable web application that's used today has a best-of-breed equivalent that's already been shaken out by numerous other institutions.
Rather than reinventing the wheel, or choosing a structural template
design that would lock them into any given technology, the Dartmouth
team chose a simple approach.
