Kenyon: A strategy for departments

Academic departments at Kenyon form a very clear, cohesive unit. They share a great number of concerns, including the following:

• All the pages look the same. Departments don’t have any way to express individuality.

• Photos are too small. And the photos in some cases have little to do with the departments: for example, the Chemistry home page ideally ought to show chemistry faculty and students, or at least students doing chemistry.

• It should be easy to post audio and video. Most Kenyon staff share this concern, but it came up most forcefully in discussions with departmental stakeholders.

• Keeping content current is a challenge. Some of this is the result of difficulty with the CMS, and some results from individuals not having time to manage content.

• Not enough prospect-directed content on departmental homepages. Most departmental stakeholders recognize that because they’re so busy focusing on the details, there’s not enough big-picture discussion on their homepages of, for example, why a student ought to study in a particular Kenyon department.

• Departmental pages need current information about faculty and resources. It’s easy for this information to become outdated when managed by individuals with tons of other responsibilities. Outdated content can be embarrassing for departments.

It’s clear that there is FAR too much uniformity across Kenyon’s departmental sites, and creating diversity among them is one of our primary goals in this redesign process.

There will have to be a Kenyon family resemblance across all the departmental sites; the layout should be very consistent, and the basic Kenyon color palette that we create for the redesigned site should persist through all the site’s pages.

But departments should be free to make independent choices about some design details to suit their particular needs. Our thinking is that a department will choose from perhaps 3 basic content layouts, and then select accent colors and photography that best represent the department (while fitting in with the overall Kenyon palette and styling).

We can create this design diversity using only CSS. A departmental page (let’s say Classics) might incorporate three separate stylesheets:

common.css (the sitewide primary stylesheet)

departments2.css (departmental layout style #2)

classics.css (specific design details and photo choices)

LBIS maintains a list of library resources and other facilities for each Kenyon department. Human Resources manages job listings for all departments. The Banner system contains the most up-to-date information about departmental faculty. We see no reason why these pages— managed by LBIS and HR— shouldn’t be linked directly from departmental pages in a consistent way.

In other words, the Chemistry site should have navigation links for “Resources and Facilities” and “Job Openings” (assuming there are openings). Those links should point to the corresponding externally managed pages, each of which should have a very clear link back to the originating department. And this basic model should work in a consistent way across all departmental pages.

The same goes for Faculty listings, which should be presented on a page that comes directly from the Banner system, where the most current faculty information is kept. We have been told that this would not be terribly difficult to pull off, and we’ll do our best to shepherd that process; of course, any feed we get from Banner will have to be formatted to work nicely with the design, and link through to faculty profiles or pages if appropriate.

All of this will save departmental administrators the time of entering and managing content that already exists on other pages of the Kenyon site. And for the staff managing the HR and resources content, it’ll increase the visibility and usefulness of that content, and of their own sites as well.

Many of the faculty and dept. administrators we spoke with expressed a concern that there wasn’t enough content on their homepages for prospective students. This sort of content— you might call it “marketing” content— can be hard for department staff to think about, given that they’ve already got very extensive task lists.

With this in mind, we recommend that Patty Burns and Kenyon’s Public Affairs office take a co-management role with all 30-ish departmental homepages (including interdisciplinary programs). Public Affairs can’t supervise ALL departmental site content, but it would be easy for Patty’s staff to make regular checkups on all departmental homepages, and keep them maintained with up-to-date news, fresh photography, and good introductory text about what makes each department special.

This would help achieve one of our other primary goals for departments: to put more dynamic content on departmental homepages. Whether it’s news, features, links to student blogs, research announcements, or even new equipment or facilities, a department’s homepage ought to be a good snapshot of what’s underway in that department in general. This could be a burden if managed solely by departmental admins, who juggle a long list of important jobs; Public Affairs, however, should have no trouble keeping department homepages fairly fresh and dynamic.

As a result of the above recommendations, we believe it should be possible for most departments to have the same set of navigation items, in the same position on the page. This way— even if the designs of departmental pages are fairly diverse, they will in general have a similar layout: we believe many users will “surf” across departments, and thus should be able to intuitively know what is where. Considering the above recommendations, and taking the English site as an example, a site navigation might look like this:

About the Department

Academic Programs

Faculty ( A )

Courses ( A )

Facilities and Resources ( A )

Unique Opportunities

Job Postings ( A )

( A ) Managed by other Kenyon offices

... or thereabouts, with minor variations as needed for each department.

Depending on each department’s desires, other pages in the navigation might include Resources for Students, Recent Faculty Publications, etc. In general, our basic recommendation is that departments be given a reasonable amount of flexibility, but that pages with similar functions be titled identically.

“After Kenyon”

Many departmental sites have a link called “After Kenyon.” In some cases (like Chemistry) this links to a page about career paths that are typical for Kenyon grads; on other sites (like English) it’s mostly a list of alumni.

We think the approach to After Kenyon should be regularized and made consistent across departments. And if possible, management of this content should be shared: Alumni Relations, the Career Development Center, and Public Affairs all should be able to pitch in with the management of this content (ideally from a centralized location, as suggested in #2 above).

If our basic points are agreed upon, this document ought to be circulated among departmental stakeholders as a survey, to see if there’s consensus behind the approaches we’re suggesting here.