Course Requirements

Begin at the following URL: http://raven.ubalt.edu/departments/ygcla/acadprog_schools.html. Use the links you see at the top of the page to find your division or school's current web presence.

Your goals for this assignment are to determine what the main and subordinate goals for the site might be. You will want to study the current site carefully so that you know what is there, how it is presenting itself to the general public, and what messages it is communicating right now. You will then want to interview the client (generally the chair of the division or school but possibly including directors of all the programs in the school) to discover the chief purposes and goals for that unit's web presence. At some point you will need to inventory the current site and measure its effectiveness against the stated goals and purposes you get from talking to the client(s). You will also need to collect any other print publications that will help you understand what the organizational unit is and does.

Measuring the current site's effectiveness may well involve asking current students for information about their uses of the site. Or you might try to set up a few sessions with students to observe them carrying out two or three tasks that seem appropriate for the site. In other words, model this part of your process on the way you conducted your investigations of other colleges' web sites, but of course on a much smaller scale.

Keep in mind that the sites you are working with are really subsites of two other entities: the general UB Web site and the Yale Gordon College of Liberal Arts Web site. As you will quickly discover, these various entities are all poorly designed from an information architecture perspective and none of them have even the slightest resemblance to each other. Given that you cannot touch either the UB Web site or the Yale Gordon Web site, you will ultimately have to some up with a solution to your own subsite that at least has appropriate linking structures to these other entities and that, as a more-or-less self-contained unit, conveys essential information.

Specifying site requirements means writing a report, not producing a Web site (though the report can be delivered as a Web document). Your group needs to apply the readings -- Reiss, Flemming, and Summers & Summers to decide what type of site this unit needs and what sorts of information and processes should be available. Your report should inform its readers about the goal of the investigation, the methods you used, the conclusions you came to, and what course(s) of action you recommend. You do not have to stick to plain vanilla HTML services but can recommend that a school of division's site could be markedly improved in usefulness and usability if it were to employ more sophisticated technologies. Remember that your planning needs to take maintenance issues and future development into account.

Write up a site requirements report that includes your analysis and your research and specifies the requirements for revamping the site. The tone and focus of the report should be professional. That is, don't treat it as a piece of an assignment but rather as the work-product that fulfills a contract with a client who has hired you to come in to do an assessment and come up with a new plan for a Web presence.

Week Links