 Terence
W. Cavanaugh Ph. D. |
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College
Website Review and Revision
Abstract:
Websites are becoming increasingly important for schools as support for
teachers, administrators, counselors, students, parents, and the community. Jamie Mackenzie (1997) offers four reasons for maintaining
effective school websites: introducing
visitors to the school; pointing students to useful web resources; publishing
student work; and collecting data on curriculum projects. Developing or
redeveloping a school’s website can become a complex process and it requires
careful planning. Investigating who will use the site, what information users
will require or appreciate, and maximizing useful ways to present the
information are important steps. Who
will use the site also brings up the important question of who can use the site?
Any revision of a website must include accessibility issues for their
content. The US government and the
W3C consortium has accessibility guidelines for websites that will assist school
website reviewers and designers in adapting their sites so all users have
equitable access. Need An education college website should have as its mission to recruit, support, and inform current and future students and faculty about the college and the profession, while modeling educational principles. In interactions with users of a local College of Education website, it was determined that the site had become outdated and did not fulfill its mission effectively. The dean assigned the task of revising the website to the college technology committee, and a member was selected as the coordinator for this revision. In a college that has deaf studies and special
education programs, an additional concern was accessibility for disabled users.
To that end the college wanted to make sure that its website would model
proper application of accessibility guidelines as promoted by the W3 Commission
and the US government’s Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act concerning
Electronic and Information Technology. Revision Guidelines directed by the W3 Commission indicate
that to achieve a minimum conformance level of “A,” a site had to meet all
of the priority one elements concerning the following conditions:
From the initial analysis
of our site it was determined that improvement was needed in alternative text
tags, use of framesets, and identification concerning the languages and html
formats on the individual web pages. Research was started to find tools to assist in
evaluating the site to improve accessibility.
There are several tools available, many of which have no cost.
Some of the free tools that were examined were Bobby from CAST, HTML
& CSS Validator from W3C, A-Prompt from the University of Toronto, and the
508 Accessibility Suite for Dreamweaver.
It was decided to use A-Prompt as the evaluation tool because of ease of
use and because of its assistance in identification of problems, as well as
in guiding and assisting in their correction.
An excellent listing of tools to assist in evaluating and repairing sites
for accessibility is the Evaluation, Repair, and Transformation Tools for Web
Content Accessibility from the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative at http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/existingtools.html.
The next step was to find out specific ways that
users felt the site was not fulfilling its mission. The initial part of this investigation included a series of
interviews with faculty members and students to find out what they found useful
about the current site, what problems they had, and how they felt that it could
be improved. This information was
then taken to a professor teaching a course on educational web design.
The professor and her students in that class participated by taking the
information gathered from the interviews, their research on effective web
design, and their own experiences with the college’s website and creating an
evaluation instrument for the site as a class project.
This educational website evaluation instrument contained questions
relating to: the design of the site, including the visual elements, layout and
ease of navigation; usability and readability, ease of use, user satisfaction;
educational value of the appropriateness of the content for its purpose and
audience. Also there were
open-ended questions concerning new needs, organization, and information. The instrument was given to a variety of individuals ranging
from faculty, students within the college, upcoming students, and even high
school students who were visiting campus.
From the analysis of the instrument results, the
following areas needed adjustment or addition.
The college should provide information concerning pre-college
requirements about what to take and do for the first two years as an
undergraduate. There should be
information available about faculty including their teaching and research areas,
contact information, links to their web pages and email accounts.
Navigation needs to be clearer concerning divisions or sections within
the college and their programs and services.
A design component that was found needing was to make sure that all
college pages had descriptive meta-tags, ensuring that they may be found more
easily through search engines. Each phase of the redesign was reviewed and approved
by the college’s technology committee using mock up web pages, navigational
concept maps, survey and interview results, and accessibility needs.
A more efficient method was developed for faculty members to submit
content changes through their department. This format is an accountability
system for the changes, and a method for responding back to the person making
the request. From our college site
review process we feel education college sites should achieve accessibility by
meeting W3C and ADA compliance standards to reach at least the “A” rating
put forth by the W3C commission for accessibility.
Conclusions College sites should provide information not only to
current students, but to prospective and future students.
This information can include the programs that are available and the
number of hours and courses required for programs, images or photographs of
students and facilities spread throughout site, the college mission and vision
statement, course descriptions, and especially pre-college information including
necessary courses to take during the first two years, important forms, dates,
required tests, and any other relative information.
There should also be a notable faculty presence on
the college site. At a minimum
there should be short pages for all faculty that provide information about the
faculty to students and other stakeholders.
The faculty pages should include the faculty members’ teaching areas,
their research areas of interest, how to contact them (including building,
office, phone, e-mail, etc.), a link to faculty members’ personal pages.
Also it is important to include with the faculty the adjuncts that teach
at the college. A committee of the college must direct the
maintenance and structure of the college’s website. Faculty members need to have input and knowledge of
procedures regarding concerns, such as errors on pages, or the possibility of
adding new pages or sections. A
clear set of directions is needed about site changing procedures. The site
committee should include persons who have ongoing interactions concerning the
college; it should not be left totally with people who are not intimately aware
of the climate and concerns of the college. |
