By John Fritz, Director of New Media Learning and Development
Maybe you're curious about UMBC's latest national news coverage, or you log into myUMBC to add money to your campus ID card or just have your browser's "Home" button set to www.umbc.edu. However you arrive, if you do so on a Friday afternoon, you're likely to witness a metamorphosis quite rare in higher education: a completely different looking home page each week.
During the semester, nearly 10,000 people visit UMBC's Web site every day. Of those, almost half start with the campus home page. That's not terribly surprising, but did you know the home page feature window consistently ranks in the top 15-20 of all pages? Last week, when Newsweek named UMBC a "Hot" school, the accompanying "window" nearly cracked the top 10 for the first time with more than 2,000 page views? This suggests a lot of you are watching (and returning) to the home page, which is exactly what you want with a site. Quite simply, dynamic content like the window feature, daily Campus Life links, Today@UMBC, news headlines and Featured Site help make UMBC's home page "sticky." Users tend to return.
The window concept is simple, but the execution isn't: change the home page photo each week (not so bad) AND write a new, timely and interesting story to match it. That's tough. UCLA, Buffalo and others are also putting a lot of work into home page features. But few schools I know are doing this on a weekly basis. Even if external visitors don't scan the archive that accompanies each feature, its growing length suggests substance.
Of course that's good news for UMBC, but it's also good for all of the department and organization sites connected to it. Since a home page serves as a Web site's primary navigation, it's important that people be able to easily start from and return to it to find what they're looking for. And maybe be surprised by something they aren't.
So, who actually cleans the home page window, and how are stories selected? Typically, the window is part of a Monday morning meeting about online content in the Office of Institutional Advancement. Key sites include Techport, news, campus life, Insights Weekly and the Graduate School site, which is currently being redesigned.
In addition Online News Editor Eleanor Lewis meets with Marketing Director Sara Sommerville every other month to coordinate the Window's long-term schedule with strategic university needs -- graduate recruitment is big right now -- develop future assignments for their OIA colleagues Charlie Melichar, Chip Rose, Miriam Tillman and Dave Daniel, and generally try to anticipate what might be topical.
Many stories come from existing publications the campus might not see often, like the Graduate Admissions view book or the university's annual report edited by Sandra Dzija and Karen Baxter. Associate Director of Creative Services Peggy Boney '94, who designed those publications and the UMBC home page, also designs the window feature page, with occasional backup from Jim Lord and Kristin Brings.
"The window certainly is a collaborative effort that helps market the university to prospective students, parents, businesses and friends," says Lewis. "But I think it's also helped build community."
If you'd like to increase traffic to your site, here are a few tips to consider:
Track your site. UMBC uses WebTrends and can create a profile for your site if it's hosted on the main webserver-sorry, we can't track personal pages. To request a WebTrends profile, send email to webdev@umbc.edu and include the URL of your site.
Tell users when you add content. Provide a "What's New," "Announcements," or "About This Site" section. A pet peeve: Don't make these secondary links users have to click to open. If it's new, it should be important enough to give it space on your home page where people won't miss it.
Don't go it alone. Just as the home page window is collaborative effort within OIA, cultivate the habit and culture of talking about your Web site with colleagues in your department or organization. Nobody has all the answers, and you'll actually learn a lot from each other about how real people use the web. If you don't have someone to talk to, consider joining the UMBC Web Developers group for announcements.
And of course I hope you'll make a link to the UMBC home page. We'd like all your new visitors to know where they can find more cool sites.
Tech Watch appears in Insights the first Wednesday of each month.
