Oh so much data…
We moved to the current website in 2005 – that’s a staggering (well, in website terms) eight years ago! It’s long overdue for a change, and the University’s “new design” has been waiting for us to adopt it for a couple of years. The problem – and make no mistake, it’s a massive problem – has been the vast amount of content that our website contains.
The fact is that we have a lot of information that we need to get out to our users. Unlike the academic units, we can’t put it on Blackboard – it’s content that needs to be shared across the entire academic spectrum. And there’s also a fair amount of information that needs to be accessed by people not studying on an undergraduate course… think postgrads, University staff, NHS staff, NERC staff, visitors, the general public…
Is our website the biggest in the world? No, clearly not. But we are working within the constraints put on us by the current and new University website designs. And these haven’t (particularly not the new one) been designed for a website like ours.
Transferring content to the new site would require coping each page on an individual basis and in many cases recoding each and every link. When you add in the face that it’s considerably more work to create/edit pages in (new style) SitePublisher than it was in (current style) TeamSite, you begin to understand that the task of migrating to the new website design is monumental.
We’re hoping that it will be much easier to transfer the majority of our content to LibGuides (and maintain it there, too) – meaning that we can then migrate the rest of our website content to the new University design relatively easily. That is the plan – quite what the reality of creating LibGuides pages is, I cannot say at just this moment. Let’s just say that I currently have every possible finger and toe crossed!
Ric.
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