Web Content Initiative

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UB 2020 > Web Content Initiative > Overview > FAQs

FAQ

Planning

Question: What does establishing a standard and visual consistency among the sites mean?

Answer: Sites that are a part of UB will have identifying features that support the UB brand, and the make for a consistent environment through interface, structure and navigation. Those sites within an administrative or academic area will also have features to identify them as part of that area. For example, standard elements within every CIO page will identify the pages as belonging to both CIO and UB. The design challenge is to create a balance between supporting the brand, consistency of interface and navigation with meeting the specific business needs of the academic or administrative unit.

Question: Will the project involve students, student organizations, or personal faculty websites?

Answer: The project is concerned with Official UB websites only. This system is no way intended to replace public web hosting environment for the entire campus.

Question: What are we trying to accomplish with WCI?

Answer: The Web Content Initiative Project has been charged to produce and implement recommendations for improving the coordination and alignment of campus web communications in identified pilot sites. This work will lead to recommendations for the University to implement campus-wide, producing the infrastructure, standards and tools for a branded, message-centric, user-friendly web environment. By combining expertise in their respective areas, project team members will research and identify best practices in web communications and opportunities for the development of new and emerging web communication tools throughout the campus.

Question: What are the 8 pilot sites?

Answer:

Question: How does the WCI Project become Operational post-project?

Answer: The WCI Project is responsible for developing the process by which the WCI will be operational once the project is over. It is then a decision of the sponsors on how to implement the process.

Question: Are there any practical suggestions, and what sort of educational resources does University Communications have to offer?

Answer: A series of communications are planned to help people understand the process involved. We are also planning to produce documentation and training materials.

Discovery and Content Audit

Question: What is the objective of Discovery?

Answer: The primary objective of Discovery is to identify the business needs and user needs of the system. If we do our job right, Discovery will create the framework for decision-making through an analysis of the institution, industry, and audience. Discovery will produce white papers that extract key-findings for each tenant including: defining the business case, identifying current practices and usage, benchmarking industry and competition best practices and evaluating industry-specific research. Additional needs analysis will be done with target audience members for each site.

Question: Will the Discovery process yield a set of requirements?

Answer: Collaboration between the Discovery and CMS teams will be necessary to establish technical requirements. This is collaborative work that the teams will co-share.

Question: Which team is responsible for identifying best practices?

Answer: Much of best practice research, including business needs, user experience and user interface is handled by the Discovery team. The CMS team will identify best practices for functions and utilization of content management systems and investigate content management systems already being used on our campus, as well as other higher education institutions.

Question: Why are we doing a content audit and what will be the outcomes?

Answer: The content audit portion of the discovery phase, conducted by the Content Team, is the process of taking an inventory of the existing content on the pilot sites and forming recommendations for improving the current content. The inventory sizes the sites, details purpose of content as well as specifying the different “types” of content and functionality in the current sites. The audit also takes a first pass at identifying “missing” content. As we work through information architecture, additional unmet content needs will be identified and assessed. The remediation phase immediatley following will show early results in website quality improvement by addressing issues identified by the audit, “cleaning out the closet” through purging, updating, or realigning existing content with a goal to increase the integrity of the current site content, and give a better starting place for the IA team’s work.

Question: Who will have access to the discovery documents?

Answer: The discovery white papers and content inventories will be shared with the CMS team, IA Team, Content Team, Discovery Team and tenant advisors. The discovery team plans to do a workshop open to the campus that will showcase the process and results.

Information Architecture Development

Question: What is Information Architecture?

Answer: Information Architecture is the art and science of structuring, organizing, and labeling information to help people achieve their goals.

Question: What benefit is there to hiring an external Information Architect (IA), when there are in-house IA resources?

Answer: The best information architecture teams are comprised of both outside vendors and an internal team. The external IA will see the site with fresh eyes, is not influenced by internal politics or hierarchies, and takes a user-centric view of the site. The internal IA team has a strong understanding of the organization and its particular goals, has audience expertise and will be around for the long haul sustaining the product.

Question: What is the composition of the Information Architecture Team?

Answer: The internal IA team is made up of UB staff with skills in information architecture, user-interface, usability and content development. The team will be working with a vendor to produce a user needs analysis, needs and function analysis (Mental Model), Information Architecture standards, structure and navigation systems that can be applied globally, decanally and site specific as well as detailing site-specific IA for each pilot site.

CMS Selection and Implementation

Question: What will be your charge to the CMS selection team with regard to technical scalability?

Answer: To consider the needs of the 8 pilot sites, but at all times keep in mind that practices and infrastructure will be scaled for UB enterprise. The team should be seeking to have examples of where a particular product is utilized on the scale of this enterprise and where it is working well.

Question: Will there be vendor demonstrations. How will the campus survey be carried out? Who is responsible for this stage?

Answer: The CMS Selection team will organize a series of vendor demonstrations for the UB campus for the top two or three vendors. The vendors will present their product, and perform specific scenarios at our request, including pre-determined scenarios. We will ask for campus input on these vendors and products as part of the evaluation process.

Question: Will the product selection team actually be selecting the product?

Answer: No. The top-level sponsors select the product. The CMS selection team puts forward the alternatives and reasoning, and its recommendations. The recommendations of the CMS team will be extremely influential in the final decision, and will include input from the campus community.

Question: Who will be the administrators of the CMS?

Answer: This is a large enterprise application and will be administrated by a team with experience with this type of product. That team has not been identified yet.

Question: Will the system be monolithic – a single, central CMS – or a single CMS system that may be installed in multiple places that communicate with each other?

Answer: The management model has yet to be determined but will probably need to be monolithic. While the actual architecture of the system can be a distributed system, its management cannot be. Ultimately, the goal is to select a system that will work for all UB Official Sites.

Question: Do you have any CMS’s you are actually looking at?

Answer: We have made no decisions on any CMS products. We are looking at what product will be the best fit for us. We have purchased two documents that give us a starting point and provide guidance. The CMS selection team is actively reviewing both vendor proprietary and community supported open-source solutions.