Archive for December 2008

Web Survey updates

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The Web Refresh Advisory Task Force provided some excellent suggestions at last week's meeting regarding the survey. Those suggestions have been incorporated into the survey, and we are finishing up the paperwork and approval necessary to issue the survey.

Some of the new questions on the survey relate to how web site visitors prefer to receive information from the University, as well as the frequency of use of Web 2.0 technologies.

For those unfamiliar with the term Web 2.0, it refers to the "read-write web": that is, enabling users to personalize web content more easily and quickly than ever before. Examples of Web 2.0 technologies include wikis, blogs, and social networking web sites.

As adoption of these technologies increases by members of the CSUCI community, it makes sense that the University examine how they can be used to improve communication. The Web Site Use Survey should provide some useful preliminary insights.

Advisory Task Force Meeting tomorrow

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Tomorrow, the Web Refresh Advisory Task Force will be meet for the first time. The group will review and provide feedback on the project plan and outline for Phase I, as well as a number of associated documents, including an upcoming web site survey.

The project is taking off quickly, and it's great to see active participation by such a large group of stakeholders from across the campus.

The project web site went live this afternoon, which includes a link to this blog.

Meeting agendas, notes, and other supporting information will be provided there throughout the project.

Phase 1: Discovery

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Before you start to change things on a web site, you need to know:

  1. what to change; and
  2. why you are changing it.
Unless these issues are both defined, web site changes are doomed to flounder. Hence, the first phase of the Refresh project involves discovering our needs and out goals.

During the 2005 redesign process, the Web Steering Committee addressed discovery via a web based survey, and one-on-one and group fact-finding meetings. This data serves as an initial benchmark which gauged the perceptions of the CSUCI web presence.

The 2009 web refresh will use a similar process and include a web survey and individual + group meetings. In addition, previous benchmarks will be reviewed to determine if they are still meaningful and useful, and new benchmarks will be created.

One new benchmark will include individual feedback from President's Cabinet. Stakeholder meetings with each member of the Cabinet are underway to obtain their feedback on specific concerns, and should be completed by the end of this week.

Another benchmark is the "Rate This Page" feature, which since Fall 2005 has enabled web site visitors to provide individual feedback on specific web pages.

As with all parts of the refresh process, we want to make the discovery phase as open and collaborative as possible. Feel free to share your comments with us on this blog or via email at webmaster@csuci.edu. We'd love to hear from you!