5 min survey: State of the university Web department

15 Oct 2009

Last week myself, Michael Fienen and Karlyn Morissette had the privilege of speaking at the HighEdWeb 2009 Conference. I can’t explain how great it was to see so many higher education web professionals, I feel humbled being around so many awesome people doing great things.

In all the discussions I realized how similar but yet very different all the web offices are. They range from large and centralized to small 1-2 person teams. I summed it up in this tweet:

“Major theme from #heweb09: There are a lot of great people underfunded, understaffed and underappreciated doing some great stuff!“

I wanted to try and get an understanding of the landscape of higher education web environments to see what works, what doesn’t and how we can all improve. I created a survey for anyone who’s primary job is working on any part of an institution’s Web site. It should not take more than 5 minutes to complete.

The survey will be open until October 25th so spread the word to any higher ed web professionals. The more responses the better the results and analysis.

Survey closed. Stay tuned for results.

About the author

Nick is the Associate Director of Web Communications at Wayne State University by day. By night he hosts the video blog EDU Checkup where he reviews higher education web sites live. Nick is an active member of the higher education web community and is an officer of Refresh Detroit, a group of web professionals whose goal is to promote web standards, usability, and accessibility.

This post was written by Nick DeNardis - who has written 31 posts on .eduGuru

Susan

Quick comment on the question about which office controls home page. Many schools’ Public Affairs and Marketing are together. I used the ‘other’ option rather than choose one over the other (Public Affairs vs Marketing/Communications).
http://nickdenardis.com/ Nick DeNardis

That is fine, I’ll be going through all the data to group things as necessary.
http://www.mc.edu Justin

This survey is a great idea Nick. I’m really looking forward to seeing the results.
http://www.tjkwebdesign.com TJ Kelly

I’m looking forward to the results. I wrote a blog post about the evolution of UMass Amherst’s website (http://www.tjkwebdesign.com/2009/05/evolution-of-umass-amherst-website/). I worked for UMass’ web team in 2004-2005 as an undergrad.

Thanks for doing this!
Kraig

How will you announce the results? I was looking for a link to check on the Google docs version as it is updated, but didn’t see one.

http://nickdenardis.com/ Nick DeNardis

Kraig,
Survey entries are still pouring in, the survey closes on October 25th. That week I will writeup a report on the results and post it to http://doteduguru.com/ I intend to give out the raw data to anyone who requests it.

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Kelly

I’m not certain how to answer the survey. My section of my university is the Libraries. So, the University’s web development is decentralized but within my part, the Libraries, it is centralized. I started to answer based on my University (=institution) but the rest of the questions I want to answer for my unit on campus. What are you looking for?

http://nickdenardis.com/ Nick DeNardis

Kelly,
Good question. Answer it based on the university but put a comment in the open ended question about your role and how it functions.

Kelly

okay – I did that but turns out I don’t know enough about the university’s site so I also did it for my sub-site.

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