We’ve written a blog post exploring the project and what we’ve learned from it.

I’ll check out Ithica’s site as I’ve yet to see this idea at any higher ed sites so far (I’ve been doing this for a year now). Most .edus don’t come close and I don’t say that in a condescending manner as I know the hurdles and challenges to the idea are huge. Places like bu.edu are beautifully done, but even they end up being a loose confederation of sites once you get into the school, college and department levels. If they can get so far in created a stellar visitor experience only to see it unravel a couple of clicks in is frustrating.

Before, individual schools and departments simply weren’t sufficiently equipped or web-savvy to create the sort of online presence easily integrated into a collective whole.

So we built a series of tiered templates (main site, schools, departments) and applied them across the board. One or two of the more clever offices felt a bit put out, because they’d put some quality work into their web presence, but overall the project has been very well received and has made institution-wide branding, design, and tech updates exponentially easier.

Good luck!

So what’s the idea? Centralize web operations. It’s simple and powerful (and obvious to me), but never and has never happened. I write about this topic a lot at my site, but the jist is to stop making a different website for every department and group on campus. Instead, build a single web experience that all departments can tap into and leverage. That means you plan/strategize a single site, architect a single structure, design a single visual language, and code a single set of tools and functionality.

Once that’s done, all departments stop spending time and effort on re-creating the wheel (i.e. developing a custom site complete with discovery, IA, design and code phases). Instead, all of those phases are essentially done and only minor variations occur, if at all. The timeline for projects shortens immensely, the cost of development falls off a cliff and the people involved can concentrate on content matters and delighting audiences.

To be perfectly honest (and sorry if this sounds patronizing or like I have a huge ego), the idea is so simple, I sometimes feel I’ve missed something really big, but so far so good.

The beginnings of this idea will launch, according to our timeline, this month, so we’ll see how well the idea holds soon enough.