Institutional Knowledge

When the university gets around to redesigning the campus web presence, it will need to meet the following goals:

• Accessible
• Manageable
• Usable
• Findable
• Flexible

If implemented properly, Web Content Management would be a great tool for making inroads toward achieving the first three: accessibility, web document management, and usability.

By placing the onus for accessible templates in the hands of developers who understand accessibility and how to create standards based solutions, the campus can ensure that all new sites created in the WCMS are accessible.

A WCMS solution will also play a significant role in how manageable documents will be on the web. Centralizing and standardizing the workflow should make it easier for departments across campus to publish content to the web.

How usable the web site is will depend on many factors. One way to ensure good usability is through centralizing the creation of template sets with those who practice design with usability in mind.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of “Able-ity: Chico State’s Web Presence”

The topic came up again on HighEdWeb-L. I wanted to reply, but I also wanted to inject some much needed levity, while keeping in mind that it’s a very serious topic. So, here were my “talking points:”

1. Fight the ‘everything to everyone’ syndrome. Not every CMS has a pony for everybody.
2. Fight the urge to select a product that hits the most checkboxes. Look at the products and see which one you could adapt to the best. The more you try and bend a product to you, the more chance it will bend until it breaks. I’m not saying change your entire workflow around a product, but be willing to meet it halfway, or some other reasonable distance. This is hard because of the way the RFP process is laid out, but just keep it in mind.
3. Depending on how decentralized your website is, the rollout may be as much, if not more, political as it is technical.
4. Do you have enough technical folks to keep the system up and running? Most of them want to use Oracle or SQLServer, so make sure you get a DBA in the discussion in advance of picking a product. You don’t want a grumpy DBA.
5. What are updates to the product like? What do you do if an update goes bad? I know these sound like things to worry about after you deploy, but they’ve been a big part of our post-deployment life and life could be better.
6. If you have to have WYSIWYG keep in mind that sales folks or white papers may “gloss over” some incompatibilities with non-Microsoft browsers, like Firefox or Safari.
7. Speaking of WYSIWYG…the idea that there is a magical tool that allows people with absolutely zero knowledge of html to create semantically rich and highly accessible sites with intelligent architecture is just daft. But if this magical tool does exist, I’ll trade you a unicorn for it.

Again, I was trying to lighten it up while giving some relevant information.