The World Wide Web was conceived, from the start, as a social medium: as a space for virtual collaboration. Although it was dominated, during its early years, by the one-to-many broadcast model which preceded it, the Web has been evolving toward its potential as a social space for meaningful interaction.
Here is my update to our domain architecture. I’ve added realms of online communication to the map. See, also, how this relates to Bates and the Social Web.
We’ve only gathered two weeks of integrated data for our new home site — and we’re still fine-tuning, so caveat emptor — but already we can see some interesting trends on our two primary subdomains, www.bates.edu (home page and subsites) and home.bates.edu (the top levels and news site).
I’ve been receiving inquiries about the deployment of our new home site, so I thought I’d post some background in case you’re interested. Thanks to David Kelly of Dickinson College for giving me permission to share his excellent questions.
Question: What was your motivation to move to an open source CMS?
We were charged with a very targeted task, to improve the first impressions presented to visitors when they arrive at the top levels of www.bates.edu. Read More »
Now that Home 4 is launched and undergoing continuous improvement, I’m wrapping up the launch project and preparing for our next program initiative: implementing a new content platform to support the renovation of official Web sites for academic departments and administrative offices. I’ll have a scope statement and draft plan to share next week.
In the meantime, here is the final Home 4 launch project documentation. Thanks to the folks who helped evaluate program collaboration software packages; ActiveCollab made it possible to keep Home 4 on track.
By Gardiner Nardini, managing news editor, The Bates Student.
After eight months of extensive research and development, the Bates OMG (Online Media Group) released a fourth version of Bates’ Internet homepage on September 8, 2009. The Web site, which offers vibrant new features alongside helpful infrastructure from its previous model, is designed to showcase Bates’ rich and multifarious story. Read More »
Bates College goes beyond the usual homepage redesign with Home 4…
From Karine Joly at College Web Editor
Have you seen Bates College’s new homepage? You should check it out. It is really different and innovative.
Not because it uses fancy graphics or animations, but because Jay Collier and his team at Bates College have decided to make this redesigned homepage more than just a collection of the usual navigation scheme, useful links and beautiful campus photos.
So, what makes it so different? Among other things:
- The way stories – real stories about students, faculty and staff told through blog posts, photos and news in a section called Bates Views – are featured on this homepage
- The navigation scheme
- The dynamic information architecture
- The use of photo galleries including shots with short captions telling the full story Read More »
Welcome to Bates’ new Home site!
This our new front door, the place to learn what Bates is all about and to explore our common interests. We call this Home 4 because it is the fourth version of Bates’ home page … but this version is different. Here’s why. Read More »
As we prepare to release our new Home site — which presents the essence of Bates’ approach to liberal arts and sciences education — I’m sharing the current draft of a vision paper on ways such an education might be expanded through online collaboration.
It’s 12-pages long, so here is a PDF version (2.1 MB download). It’s an evolving draft, so please send comments and suggestions for improvements.
Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this paper over the past 18 months!
[Updated 9/2/09]
What a year! Here’s our list of online media accomplishments from July 2008 to June 2009.
Jay Collier