On an odd note, one of the few (the only) sites in Canada that have a consistent template through their entire site is the Ontario College of Art & Design (but it helps that they only have two faculties to deal with … art, and design).

I don’t think a student run radio station falls under this umbrella. I don’t think they should use the university-wide template. They should, however, make it clear they’re part of the university, but there are other visual ways to accomplish that. I think the template is best for academic/administrative programs and departments.

If you don’t have a central Web team, this gets tricky. And messy. Do you have a campus-wide Web committee of some sort? The academic courseware team would benefit from using common elements – but are likely dependent on the product they use.

I also think that this ‘Reining in the outliers’ could be applied to social networks to ensure consistent messaging and branding is applied to Facebook, Twitter, etc.

My question I would like to pose is this: How to you handle the reining in when the product is considered an academic product (i.e. a student run radio station) and is being developed outside the web team by the academic courseware team?

Great comments by the way and I’ll be passing this on

We presented on this at HighEdWeb 2007, you can find out presentation at: http://wdn.unl.edu/downloads/20071016_hewd07.pdf

Can you think of exceptions to this rule? Sometimes institutions have a much more “edgy” admissions site or the graduate school has its own look and feel. Like Todd mentioned, Art is always one that tends to push back on this because they want it to be a representation of the work they produce. I would definitely have to have my arm twisted hard because I’m not convinced it’s a good approach unless done well…and not by a graduate assistant or whomever who has a knack for HTML and Photoshop.

I also just noticed the stat you posted that “38% using a site to match them to us like Zinch, MyCollegeOptions, College Board.” Do you think it’s because these sites provide consistency and to the point information? Are institutional sites offering too much info that they go elsewhere to get the basics?

Differentiation can be done through content or linking off to student blogs or other types of unofficial (but related to the university somehow) sites.

Also, an art student may never go to the business school’s site (or any other program of study they’re not interested in) so they’d never notice the similarity in layout/colors/etc. And if they did, so what? Does the fact that a a business and art program website are the same going to result in taking that school out of consideration? I doubt it and our research would support that doubt.

Differentiation can be done through content or linking off to student blogs or other types of unofficial (but related to the university somehow) sites.

Also, an art student would ever go to the business school’s site (or any other program of study they’re not interested in) so they’d never notice the similarity in layout/colors/etc.

So, you’ve now inspired a follow-up post to this one I’ll have to work on while flying home tomorrow, to justify why I preach what I said in this post, yet have these two examples not support this theory. Stay tuned.

If I want to get an Art degree I’m looking for a site that could never ever ever be used for a Business Administration program, just sayin.

Plus, by making it confusing, it gives the future student a taste of what’s to come. I kid, sort of.

Our university is about to launch a site that provides a single experience for prospective students. Of course, as you’ve stated, it’s a monumental task. We have many standalone sites (no one has done a full count, but the number easily exceeds 40) so reigning them in will be an ongoing endeavor. For launch, we’ll only have the foundations of this idea in place. After we get the initial bugs solved, we’ll begin to absorb the academic sites and, over the long term, build similar single experiences for our other major audiences.

If you want my take on all of this, you can start with a couple of my blog posts:

Why Decentralization Doesn’t Work
The Case for Centralization
Centralization Around Audience
A New Take on How to Find a Higher Ed Degree- this is a screencast of the mechanism we’ve built for prospects to find their degree program. It’s old at this point and has been tweaked a bit in our launch ready version, but the basics are the same.

Aside from the mechanics, the politics to get it enacted have been immense. Even our own team isn’t 100% convinced that the approach will work. And it won’t be pretty at launch. As you might expect, there are lots of cooks, lots of competing agendas, lots of competing goals and so on. Our new site will have holes, but the basic premise will exist.