Harmonic Diversity and Campus-Centric Web Portal Design

by Albert DeSimone, Jr.

Everything That Rises Must Converge -- Flannery O'Connor

Diversity of culture, intellectual endeavors, and operational practices creates the complex society that is the college campus. Web/IT professionals are faced with the challenging and rewarding task of projecting this multi-faceted society to the even more diverse Internet community. And this community expects more and more from the campus portal: minimal click access to thousands of pages facilitated by a quality search engine, collections of information for particular communities (students, prospective students, visitors, inservice personnel, alumni), and attention to individual needs.

Endeavoring to apply a common look, feel, and navigational pathway amid this diversity is the webmaster team.1 Aware that the same look and links will not be appropriate for the many disparate and independently developed campus websites, aware that any effort to mandate design characteristics and elements will be met with justifiable resistance, the team must lead by example and suggestion. A flexible design, controlled at the primary homepage and secondary levels to issue an institutionally sound and complete message, should smoothly give way to the diverse campus entities issuing their own messages. This is harmonic diversity: institutionally complete top-level design which accommodates and influences levels of difference within the websites which complement the campus portal.

Elements of Harmonic Diversity

A design philosophy which emphasizes function and content is the cornerstone of a harmonically diverse portal. Other elements include a common set of identifying images, a process of consensus for managing change, and unambiguous ethical policies.

Overall Design Philosophy
At the University of Georgia, the Georgia Web Group created the Seven C's of WebService Design to provide a set of guidelines for webmasters at the university. These guidelines emphasize content and comprehensiveness, as well as a sensitivity to portal visitors and their comments.2 We believe that knowers of information should be providers of information.

Content Rich Secondary Pages Based on Community not Organization
Campus webmasters often find it natural to create a link to the university's primary page. However, it is often less natural to create links to secondary pages, even though such links can support and strengthen the institutional message and eliminate duplication of effort. Comprehensive student, inservice, public service, visitor, alumni, and similar community-based pages unencumbered by internal organizational structure encourage a deeper level of cross-linking. Also, a wider group of campus webmasters are more likely to have a stronger identity to community-based pages. This identity creates a reciprocal relationship, influencing webmasters to share links and content to complement the secondary pages.

Individualization Enhancements Accompanied by Focused Push
Ongoing to the development of the campus portal is an ever-increasing requirement to explore and exploit the tools, techniques, and technologies which enhance the individual's experience. Portals deploying "My" features allow visitors to select content and features appropriate to their particular interests. While the diversity of individuals is certainly more difficult to accommodate than the diversity of communities, individualization enhancements will add value to subsequent visits.

Information related to individual-selected areas can be pushed to "My" participants. Encouraging and empowering departmental webmasters to contribute push information specific to their students, personnel, and alumni will insure a more complete flow of information to the individual. 3

Logos and Typography to Promote Visual Identity
A set of images and logos, easily accessible from the Web, encourages campus webmasters to create a visual connection to the university. At the University of Georgia, a page of images and logos serves as a download area for campus webmasters. Graphical elements on this page are provided in a "mix and match" format. These graphical elements can be combined in a way suitable to the page on which they will be used. This flexibility, as opposed to a rigid set of fixed images, can ultimately suggest a "consistent visual hierarchy"4 among the campus portal websites.

Cascading Style Sheets 5extend this visual consistency to the textual elements which make up a Web page. Font styles, sizes, and similar appearance attributes can be distributed throughout an entire portal with globally linked style sheets.

Concentric Process of Consensus to Manage Change
A redesign of the University of Georgia's primary homepage for 1999 began with an analysis of comments and questions from portal visitors.6 This, coupled with supporting statistics for all visitors over a period of time, prompted the redesign.

Reaching consensus on such a change is an iterative process requiring input from three different, and increasingly broader, groups:

  1. The formal webmaster team. At the University of Georgia, this is the Georgia Web Group. An initial design--to which the group should not be strongly attached--is created. Experience has shown that acceptance of a new design "as is" by the next broadest group is unlikely.

  2. The campus webmasters group. This communication is effected through an e-mail discussion group. Suggestions are made for change, reviewed by the webmaster team, and subsequent designs are offered to the campus webmasters group until an acceptable degree of consensus is reached.

  3. Visitors. Off-campus individuals (a sample of about 30) who have sent mail to the Georgia Web Group are requested to review and comment on the page. If significant changes are made by the webmaster team, the campus webmasters group is invited to review the page. The final new design is linked to from the current homepage with a request for comments from all visitors. Again, significant changes are brought to the attention of the campus webmasters group.

Although tedious and lengthy (but typically no more than six weeks), this change management process results in a high degree of consensus among webmasters and visitors.

Sharable Search Database
Providing a quality search service for campus portal visitors has become a requirement. Having the search entry form on the primary homepage is of even greater service to these visitors. In addition, a sharable database, which can be restricted to a single campus website, promotes a consistent search interface throughout the portal. 7

Ethical Policies
An official policy statement on the ethical and legal use of the Internet and the World Wide Web, which is binding to all faculty, staff, and students, is an invaluable resource for the webmaster team. We are fortunate at the University of Georgia to have a very complete document (online) describing this policy and a support team to handle incidents in violation of the policies.

Appropriateness to the Academic Enterprise

A campus portal developed collegially--as opposed to centrally--engenders and supports intellectual and cultural diversity within the academic enterprise. This approach, however, does not discount the need for centralized and cooperative control of the portal's most visible pages and at least a portion of the information pushed to individuals. University administrators and communications officers have a reasonable expectation that the campus portal should be used as a tool to send a sound, positive, and complete institutional message.

Harmonic diversity acknowledges the strength of difference which enhances this institutional message, and the institution.

Endnotes

1 The webmaster team at the University of Georgia is know as the Georgia Web Group, whose members are drawn from a number of university departments and organizations. The more formal Georgia Web Group works with the less formal campus webmasters group. The campus webmasters group volunteers their collective expertise by participation in an online discussion forum on Web-related topics.

2 http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/User_Survey_Home.html. User surveys from the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

3 What is a Portal, Anyway? Archive of a CREN talk by Howard Struass, who stresses the importance of customization and personalization as integral parts of a complete portal.

4 http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual. Yale CAIM Web Style Guide, in particular the section "Page Design" (from which the quoted phrase was taken).

5 http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/. This page from the WWW Consortium includes links for learning more about CSS, CSS specifications, and more.

6 The webmaster e-mail address at UGA is actually a discussion group to which all Georgia Web Group members are subscribed.

7 http://www.htdig.org. The website for ht://Dig, the WWW search engine software used at the University of Georgia. Our instructions for using ht://Dig emphasize sharing the searchable database.

Albert DeSimone, Jr.
January 2000