Migration & Centralization

Higher education websites are typically updated by many different people across campus. This practice allows experts within departments to communicate their research, findings, news and general knowledge to the world in a way that is fast, easy and effective. While this is a great way to disperse information in an efficient manner, if not managed correctly, it can look like the Wild Wild West over time. Brand guidelines, standards, clear messaging, and intuitive navigation are sometimes lost in the process of gaining the benefits of decentralization. If this is the case, all that remains is a disjointed mound of web pages.

Separately decentralized and centralized web management strategies certainly have their own benefits, but we are seeing a shift with many of our clients within universities, colleges and community colleges to develop a hybrid strategy that leverages the benefits of both. A few of the benefits of this balanced approach are that it enables the school to put content development into the hands of each department or college, provide a cost savings by centralizing the IT and support infrastructure, provide a consistent user experience in brand and navigation, save time and money in design and application development, and provide a richer, more consistent user experience by incorporating school-wide applications such as centralized faculty and staff directories and event calendars that can be customized for each department.

When transitioning from a decentralized web environment to a more centralized environment, strategy is key. Building a thoughtful governance program and web community is crucial to the success of both the initial migration and also to the long-term success of the website. Administration and marketing will face many political, financial, and technology barriers in the process of shifting your strategy from decentralized to centralized or vice versa.  Because we’ve worked with many institutions on these projects, we understand the various levels of change management that need to be addressed, and we are quite adept at achieving consensus among university stakeholders.