Content author requests

From April 25, 2007 Web Roundtable meeting

Vision and strategy

• Marketing goals and techniques for external audiences
• Support for clearly-defined and prioritized key messages
• Translating key messages through site-wide content
• Escalating the arts at Bates to be a key message
• Integrate the Web as a key element in general communications goals
• Online marketing (integrated e-mail campaigns)
• Using the Web to make Bates business transactions more effiicient (ex. interactive forms, surveys, transactions, database query)

Research and monitoring

• Competitive research (by constituency)
• Being competitive when constituents have Web experiences built with more resources
• Analyzing user statistics

Information design and architecture

• Improving findability
• Improving effectiveness of search engine
• [Developing content that will rank higher in search engine results
• Improving consistency in navigation
• Improving global architecture and optimal methods for organizing content
• Knowing what content should go where, not necessarily by owner
• Presenting all the arts at Bates within an umbrella context (music, theater, dance)

Interface and interaction design

• Defining appealing, leading edge graphic design
• Distinctive graphic design for departments alongside Bates identity elements (multi-tiered identity systems)
• Simple method for updating appearance in CMS
• Personalizing content for audiences, groups, individuals (myBates)

Content development

• Ground rules for who owns what pages
• Support for areas that need a Web presence, but can't (or won't) support their own site
• Better documentation for content development
• Creating content that can be sustained with less technical resources
• Making content more reusable (single sourcing)
• Coaching on optimal Web writing techniques, including casual, personal voice writing
• Developing non-textual (less bookish) content (images, sounds, video)
• Publishing tabular content on the core site
• Ability to restrict content to targeted audiences [(individuals, groups, or Bates domain)

Production and workflow

• Decentralized authoring which supports basic standards for best practices
• Improve timeliness and accuracy; automated prompts to update stale content (i.e., prune out stale content)
• Simpler authoring and publishing workflows for CMS
• More user-friendly, more WYSIWYG iCMS editor
• Getting more images on the site [More efficient and user-friendly support for image storage and upload]
• Web media support (podcasts, audio, video, dynamic animation/images)
• Publishing adminstrative data to the Web

Community, networking, and support

• Using the Web to communicate with on-campus folks
• Support for collaborative communities: wikis and blogging
• Improve opportunites for collaboration among Web contributors
• Better understand who does what

Infrastructure and systems

• Single publishing system that can cover the needs now served by iCMS, Dreamweaver, Drupal (less training)
  • Too restrictive, one tool isn’t best for all jobs. Our goal might be to have transitions among systems appear seamless to the viewer. [jah]
• Hardening iCMS (less crashing of publisher)
• Online events calendar to replace e-mail notification via staff-messages
• Subscription to topic-oriented e-mails
• [Is there a need for a Bates intranet, and what would it look like?]
• Area to publish and archive agenda and minutes of key committees
• Limit access to a page or section of pages (mustn’t use clear text passwords)
• Integration with externally-hosted services and systems [secure and encrypted
• Extend and integrate the features of multiple systems for multiple audiences (Moodle, Garnet Gateway, the Alumni online community