Things I would have liked to have started/finished
As I effectively wrap up my position as the ‘keeper of the home page’ here at UW I can’t help but reflect on a few projects I would have liked to have started as well as those that I am in the middle of and would have liked to have finished. I will leave you to guess which ones were started, just being planned, or only far off ideas. Here is the list in no particular order:
- redesign the UW home page for a more external audience focus
- create specialist internal sites for the faculty, staff, and students
- get UW Chatter off the ground as a web communication hub
- see MMNP achieve its vision
- identify what content people actually use in the UW web space, figure out what is missing
- enhance the UW Search application; integrate mapping, more detailed information on people searches, better tagging of keywords, study search patterns, provide people with quick links to popular searches
- apply microformats where possible
- integrate a testing, development, and production server environments with a slick web GUI that integrates with Subversion and Capistrano
- document things
- podcasting, my goodness its easy, there should be more audio/video/etc
- accessibility of campus sites through testing, education, and community
- usability study swat team
On to the next thing! It will be interesting to look back at the above list and see what I think 6, 12, 18 months from now. Some things may come true, others may be less important.
The biggest challenge I see higher education web folks facing (it’s not just UW) is the ability to clearly define their target audiences and then build to suit. There is far too much ownership of the public facing web by internal audiences—not sure if that is the cause or the result of the lacking identity. Perhaps that is what makes higher education sites unique?
I wish the best of luck to Communications and Public Affairs as continue to tell the story of Waterloo to the world. For the next person in my role the best bit of advice I can give you: do not take this stuff personally and join the uwebd community. Great people.
This blog now switches it’s focus to that of a ‘Web Technology Specialist’ or I move over to my own blog that I never use. I will think about that this week, promise.