THE ANATOMY OF AN EFFECTIVE HIGHER ED SITE

Transcription

1 THE ANATOMY OF AN EFFECTIVE HIGHER ED SITE

2 Higher education institutions are among the most challenging organizational types when attempting to implement a website redesign and redevelopment. Although there is no template to designing the perfect site, there are some common features that solve problems higher ed is often faced with. Based on numerous years of research and experience, we ve created a set of features and functions to creating an effective higher ed website. Content Workflow Content Workflow is used to define the stages that content appear in before being published on a website. Typically, this means a draft state, a needs review state, and a published state. When used with content moderators, it provides a method for reviewing content before publishing. Content Workflow is also commonly used with access control to limit editors to their sections. In Drupal, this is provided by the Workbench suite of modules. News Center So you have a new website, and it drives traffic for a few months, but what really fuels your website visits is how current your information is on your site. 1

3 The news Center for higher education website engages the end-users and organizes information in various relevant methods. Common methods may be the most current, or by category, but it can be as advanced as: Articles Related toyour last search Most Searched Articles Most Read Articles Articles Relevant to a certain topic such as enrollment, or continued education. The news center is one of the most vital sections of a higher ed website; it is a stage where the end-user will know what is new and what is happening around the institution. Event Calendar Events SEP 10 9:30-11: An Event Calendar allows a central location for managing how events are displayed on a website. At the simplest level an event calendar would have a calendar view and individual pages for events (along with various blocks showing related events and archived events). However, an event system in Drupal could allow for far greater functionality. Events could be brought in through an integration of a 3rd party event management system and Drupal could be used only in managing the display of the calendar or Events can be input and managed in Drupal. The advantage of the integration based system is that the 3rd party event management system could also be used for reservation management, logistics planning, or resource management of campus wide events. Things to consider with any integration is the flexibility of the 3rd party s API. The advantage to managing everything in Drupal from start to end is simplicity in design and greater control of specific features. The drawback to 2

4 building whole management system in Drupal is that moreadvanced features (such as logistic planning and reservation management) take resources away from other areas of the site and can add to the total project timeline. Near You 10 SEP This Week 14 SEP Single Sign On (SSO) Single Sign On (SSO) is used to authenticate against an external service that will then log you into a different service, such as Drupal. It typically means that the user only has to type in their username and password once. After that, when they try to log in to a service, it ll automatically log them in. SSO is commonly implemented with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), Central Authentication Service (CAS), OAuth, or OpenID. It can also be used with Facebook or Google authentication to allow the user an easier method of creating an account. SSL LDAP CAS There are times when you need to encrypt the traffic between the webserver and the browser: when you login to the site, purchase or donate money, or send any sort of sensitive information. This is because otherwise someone could intercept the traffic either via physical access to your machine or network, or on the clients computer or network. 3

5 The common method to encrypt this traffic is to use SSL or secure socket layers, where you have a public certificate the browser gets (from the webserver), a private one that is used to validate the traffic (on the webserver) and a certificate authority which vouches for the certificate's authenticity (usually the registrar, like GeoTrust or Symantec). This provides a basic level of protection to the people logging into your site, that will instill a sense of trust in people who visit your website. It is generally recommended to add SSL to your entire site, so you don't end up with mixed sessions which can lead to security vulnerabilities. Menu Structures Menu Structure allows users to navigate to through a site. If a menu structure is set correctly it will make the users experience easy to find a desired page. A poor menu structure can make a user confused and cause the to be frustrated and want them to leave the site. 4

6 Social Media Social media presence has become increasingly popular in university s marketing strategies; however the platforms are becoming dated, less revered by the student population. Demographics and content strategies become crucial. Organic Groups The organic groups module in Drupal allows you place users and content into groups on your site, where members of that group can gain additional privileges to edit, view, or perform additional custom functionality on the content in that group. It is a popular module that is heavily used, well maintained, and has a lot of contributed modules that extend it's functionality. It is useful for sites who need the ability to have multiple admins with special privledges over certain content, such as departments in a university. The downside of being so flexible is that it can be fairly complicated or too complex when you have simpler situations, such as simply organizing your content. 5

7 Admin Wiki Admin Wiki s for your website are small libraries with visual guides and text that help you maintain your website. Each website is tailored to fit our clients needs and requires specific instructions in order to update your site correctly. The wiki always covers general topics of updating and maintaining your website. Usually contained in a tutorial format to guide a site-maintainer through a process. Depending on what features you would like to change frequently, the wiki will contain those elements as well. In the end we want to make this relevant to the maintainers of the site, so the wiki will contain tutorials to answer questions from the actual site maintainers just to ensure all bases are covered. 6

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