Technology Advisory Group

Note: In light of some of TAG’s recent discussions about the CMS, we thought it might be useful to have a real live faculty member’s perspective on what it’s like to manage a departmental page.  Many, many thanks to Dave Dzurec for being willing to write up a post about his experiences working on the History Department’s page!

The migration of the History Department’s website to the CMS has not been without its bumps. There have been times when segments of the page have been a complete mess, there have been times when I’ve lost whole folders, there have been times when I’ve inadvertently changed the department chair’s picture to suggest that he is a member of the Italian Communist Party (not really, he did that himself). Migrating the content from the old site to the new was a great deal of work. Part of the challenge was learning the new system. Some of these challenges were ultimately beneficial as the process of migrating the site helped to familiarize me with some of the idiosyncrasies of the CMS (with a great deal of help from Sarah Johnson). Since we’ve manage to get the pages up and running, however, things have been relatively smooth. I try to review the page at least once every couple weeks to make sure everything is functioning and there’s nothing wrong with our links, I update student events (meetings of the Royals Historical Society, calls for applications to the Phi Alpha Theta, the History Honor Society) as they are announced, and once a semester I update the faculty news section, based on reports given to me by members of the department. There are of course still occasional bumps. This past semester, when we realized that our links to the department course offerings were out of date, I spent a good deal of time working with Ann Marie Stamford to correct the issue. On the whole, however, our current CMS software seems to be a reasonable option (at the very least, no better or worse than any of the alternatives available at the institutional level).

In addition to concerns about ease of use, there has been some concern about individual faculty pages. Within the History Department, faculty continue to be responsible for their own pages. I have simply linked to individual pages from our faculty/staff page. When one of our faculty members moved his personal page to a new site, I simply updated the link. As I understand it, the move to the CMS has had no direct impact on individual pages and we continue to have a great degree of autonomy in maintaining our individual sites. [Note: TAG is currently working with PR to set up a protocol for how faculty can request websites. Existing websites will be moved over to a new academic server. See our post on The Straight Dope on Faculty Websites for more details.]

From the consumer side, response to the final product has been generally positive. Over the course of the past couple of years and three job searchers, we have received a number of compliments from various job candidates about the overall appearance and ease of use of our department webpage. While I realize that it’s highly unlikely for a job candidate to insult a potential employer (especially given the realities of the job market in the humanities), the fact that they made special note of the quality of the pages is, I think, illustrative of the quality of our redesigned web presence.

One area of concern I do have is the issue of general responsibility for maintaining these pages. There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of consistency across the University about who is in charge of department sites. The CMS workshops I have attended have included everyone from department secretaries, to faculty, to members of the PR department. I think it would be beneficial to define roles and expectations more clearly. For department secretaries, is the addition of maintaining a department webpage to their already large workload a reasonable expectation? For faculty (and on a personal note) while I don’t find maintaining the department webpage to be terribly onerous and my department has certainly counted the work I have done as service in my annual evaluation, is working on a department site the best use of faculty time?