leadership realized website fragmented, so thed decided to fix it. St. Louis Community College. www.stlcc.edu/

Going through some history of the college now, large community college

3 sites, public, internal for faculty sharing and a sharepoint site.

16,000 pages with no navigation standard - yikes!

site wasn't built for the external user, another problem to fix.

Good to see the college realizes the user-centric problems created by inconsistency, non-ADA compliance.

no that problem defined, discovery stage is next

seth is using plurk as a notebook

live-blogging baby!

lot's of great user stats from research. Hope the slides will be online soon.

30% of students couldn't find what they were looking for on the site.

92 different technologies used on their 16,000 pages.

10 minutes into presentation, and speaker concerned he is behind... must have a lot of content to go through

Increased enrollment is goal ... will be interesting to see how they attribute that.

Sounds like the Serena Collage CMS isn't popular with users.

and how do you attribute increased enrollment to the website..?

yeah, exactly.

I just say "the website is responsible for all increased enrollment."

Not sure that you can, but you can report on other metrics... speed of which content was found, decreased friction...

hrmm... we had increased enrollment right about the time we launched the full redesign in '06....

"create an agile development for future-proofing" that is always helpful

Yes; then assumptions can be made on which you can base theories and test them. Surveys of entering students.

Tower 29 worked on development, note for myself.

load-balancing graphic on the screen... This was more than a visual redesign

taxonomy creates navigation - Many areas recreating the wheel and they are trying to change to a more collaborative effort. Sounds familiar?

They seem to have a much more systematic approach to content, though, which I suppose is more possible at a CC level.

Quicklinks convention by the user is that you will jump to another website according to speaker.

Would like to see some research on this point.

Using Active Data Exchange calendaring

Blackboard LMS and other various home-grown applications

and Windows Live student email

Website went live on on March 9, stlcc.edu

they're caught in the Windows Live edu trap also, eh?

QL convention can't jump, IIRC, and be accessible

Ad hoc web committee created to develop phase 1

Did they get their $10M?

looks fairly comprehensive, although i admit that i didn't click really deep. did they say what % of the 16k pages they converted?

"jump" as in leave, not the JS functionality.

I'll ask on the 16k pages.

New positions were created to help, restructure the IT department to be more web-focused.

Content belongs to community relationship/structure support belongs to IT. Great model.

Want to pick their brains on that after.

Politics of it

Phase 2 is the future: more dynamic content.

New focus on enrollment management, new position/department created

CRM to come... intrigued to see what they are looking at.

Smaller = more agile, or so it seems

active involvement by faculty during process, a plus.

successful integration of home-grown applications. Define "successful".

Speaker: "Never outsource content development, this is what you do as an institution." Right on.

"Need to be at seventh-grade reading level."

I think he's talking about the community college audience.

But that's a perspective we could probably use; simplicity and friendliness.

Little things can break the user experience. It's a fragile world.

Vendor stopped working on product one week before going live.

group moan.

they had more hardward than necessary... We'll take your extra servers!

again, if they take questions, ask about the % of pages they flipped. i'm just curious given our own experience

flipped very little content. almost all rewritten - went from 16,000 pages to 1,600 pages