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People think differently  

“The Web Problem” 

Trying to think like everyone. 

James Powell

 

People think differently 

A tenth century Chinese encyclopedia included the following classifications for plants and animals:

 

Then we change our minds 

“The Catholic church once classified, for culinary reasons, the capybara as a fish.”* 

HTML encourages authors to “change their minds.” 

Taxonomies and search engines can help solve this problem, but given the current tools, we should probably restrict ourselves to thinking like broad  categories of users. 

* From: “Darwin’s Ghost” by Steve Jones 
 

 

Inventory our pages 

We can make some broad generalizations.  There are four types of pages we present to the public:

 

Identify our users 

Personalization and customization may not be practical or desirable for IS sites.

But we can let users self-select their role:

 

Eliminate “site fossilization” 

Another problem we face is “site fossilization”: dead links, old information, outdated look and feel.

Ownership and better tools for maintaining content can alleviate this problem.

Periodic updates of the site styles should be considered and can be made easily if we can separate content from presentation (use stylesheets, XML, databases).

 

Introduce interactivity 

Interactive components can further enhance the site since they give end users the opportunity to contribute.

 

Market Online 

Embed descriptive metadata in all documents.

Register with local and remote search engines (if appropriate).

Use the ad server to promote sites and services on other web sites and in the portal.

Register events with the event calendar.

Request a targeted announcement in the portal.

Create a portal channel.

Monitor logs before and after to measure the effectiveness of the marketing strategy.

 

What to do?  

Establish informationsystems.vt.edu on the centralized hosting server

Inventory our content and users

(Maybe) survey our users

Use a methodology to re-engineer our site

Market online