Meeting 11/19/2008

Overview of Midd Process

Information architecture/design

• Homegrown IA
• Outsourced design

Platform

• Considering Drupal

Requirements

• Surveying the community to determine what the community needs from website
• Determine issues with the existing website
• Parallel effort on both campuses

MIIS relationship to Midd Process

Possibilities

• Common design, MIIS I/A, common platform, hosted @ Middlebury
  • no staff to support open-source application such as Drupal @ MIIS, Middlebury or someone else would be hosting & providing support
• Common design, MIIS I/A, common platform, hosted elsewhere
• Common design, MIIS I/A, different platform, hosted elsewhere

Design factors

• Timing - if Midd isn't ready to launch by late summer, MIIS needs to move forward.
  • Target date: next recruiting season
• Cost - an issue. Funds are budgeted (built into academic excellence plan)
• Learning curve - will there be a learning curve for those who have to enter site content?

Plan B

• Retain current design, platform, hosting relationship
• Move content from individual school sites into "portal" site, streamline navigation
• Not a very elegant solution

Tasks

Develop requirements document

• Survey
  • Current students
  • Students who have not yet arrived
• Focus groups
  • Groups for each of our identified audiences
  • One wild card group w/mixed audiences
• Interviews with key stakeholders

Identify audiences

• Prospective students (esp. international students & their parents)
• Current students (expected to increase with implementation of Banner)
• Staff/faculty
• Donors
• Alumni
• Researchers
• Press

Consider Moodle vs. main website

• How will each site be used?
• What content will be contained where?

Aggregate multimedia items

• Provide a space to list all podcasts, videos, etc.
• Serve as a portal for content on Facebook, iTunes U, Yelp, Flickr, etc.
• Support RSS feeds that users can include in 3rd party apps
• Support delivery to mobile devices

Create consistent navigation

• Breadcrumbs?

Implement robust calendar system

• UCBerkeley has a great example
• Allow students to subscribe to event feeds relative to them

Support current students

• Login protected current students section
• Job listings
• Class schedules

Translate key pages

• Offer main page + main admissions page in several languages
• Korean, Japanese, German, Russian, etc.
• Will be welcoming to international students
• Will help show up in more Google search results in various languages