You, the college web content manager, are the hardest working web content manager on the planet today.
Your efforts are significant, extraordinary, and in many ways downright heroic.
Consider this. According to Google, there are approximately 8 billion web pages on the World Wide Web today. Those pages are served by about 50 million different web sites. That’s an average of 160 web pages per web site.
Now, consider only higher education sites. According to Google, there are about 200 million web pages representing approximately 5,000 higher educational web sites (.edu sites). That’s an astonishing 40,000 web pages, on average, per higher education site, or approximately 250 times more pages than the average site on the World Wide Web.
Using these facts and figures, and excluding only the largest e-commerce and media related web sites, it’s clear that there are no harder working web content managers than those at colleges and universities today!
But the measure of the volume of content managed by higher educational institutions only tells a part of the story. It’s critical to note that the content being maintained is vital to those who visit the higher education web site, to the institution itself, and quite possibly, to the world.
How so? Think of it this way. When you exclude the largest news and ecommerce sites you're left with a vast variety of Web sites ranging from small businesses “brochureware” to Jimmy's Unusual Pets dot com – and of course, your institutional site.
While visitors to “Jimmy’s Unusual Pets” dot com are looking for pictures of Jimmy’s famous three-legged rabbit, your visitors are:
- Looking for an institution and an education that will affect their entire life and allow them to change the world,
- Researching findings published by your faculty that will lead them to discover the next medical miracle,
- Investigating the process by which they might make a contribution to the college from which they graduated 30 years earlier.
The information visitors find on your web site, will change their lives and, quite possibly, the world.
But the Web is more than just a collection of information; it offers transaction services as well. Visitors to the Web expect on-line services for transactions of all types, just as much as they expect information for research and discovery. Indeed, the Web has become an important supplement, and in many cases a complete replacement, for information dissemination, research, and transactions. College web sites, and those who manage them, are expected to offer an unprecedented volume and variety of information and services. Unlike even the largest transactional sites such as Amazon and eBay, college and university web sites are also expected to provide virtually every kind of communication method and transactional system Web has to offer, and many that are completely unique to the higher education environment.
The key word here is “expected”. Your web site is ever increasingly expected to market, persuade, sell, teach, inform, and provide transactional services for everything from online teaching and learning to secure online alumni giving systems. It is expected by both the visitors of your site, and the board of trustees. It is expected by the parents of new students who are helping evaluate educational options as much as it’s expected of your own admissions staff who are trying to communicate the right messages to those same prospective students. It is expected by your students looking for course descriptions, grades, and financial aid information as much as it is by your faculty and staff who are trying to reach those students.
The expectations of all the stakeholders in this little monster your institution unleashed (with the first web page probably over 10 years ago) are enormous. Your site has become the most critical institutional communication channel, period! Whether you know it or not, your site is the first place your students look to find information, and the last place your prospective students look when they click away because they didn’t find what they needed to know. Whether you like it or not, your web site is being compared to the very best, most accurate, most up to date, most informative sites your students visit daily. And, it’s expected to be just as good.
Without argument, the stakes are high. If the institution is to succeed in fulfilling its basic mission of providing opportunities, inspiring research and learning, creating and communicating knowledge, and reaching out to alumni and the community, then the web site must be an accurate reflection of that mission. If the web site fails to meet the expectations and demands of those who visit its contents, then the institution itself is failing. Unless your institution was present during the advent of paper, or the introduction of the printing press, there has never been a more significant communication revolution in its history.
The quantity of content and services provided by your institution’s web site, and the unparalleled importance of the role it plays, add up to an unprecedented responsibility to those who are tasked with its maintenance. You, and your colleagues who are responsible for your institution’s web site, are indeed the heroes of the web.
Without the proper tools, your institution cannot hold web content managers (heroes as they are) responsible for sustaining the level of excellence expected by an ever increasingly savvy population of visitors to the Web site. The maelstrom you see around you today is literally “the perfect storm” in the making. Colliding forces include 1) a surging proliferation of new services and innovative technologies for teaching and learning, 2) an exploding population of young adults who have actually grown-up on the Web and expect accurate, timely information at their finger tips, and 3) let’s just call it a “mountain of content” to manage. This is a storm that could actually leave institutions broken in its wake. Fortunately there are tools available today that allow institutions to capture the power of this perfect storm, and turn it into the perfect opportunity – and many college have already figured this out!
