Eight professionals make up a Florida State University (FSU) web committee that is responsible for the redesign of FSU’s Office for Distributed and Distance Learning (ODDL) website. They meet about once each week to make important decisions related to rewriting and reorganizing ODDL’s 11 sub websites, referred to as "nodes," into a unified whole. (See "ODDL’s 11 Nodes.")

The ODDL web committee members gather at a conference room at the FSU campus in Tallahassee, except for one very important member, Janet DuPuy, who is the webmaster of the redesign project, as well as the meeting chair. DuPuy directs these meetings from her home office, about 1,300 miles away, in Boston.

The meetings are conducted with video-conferencing technology, but not the kind that requires a huge investment. Inside her home office, DuPuy has a relatively inexpensive D-Link Broadband Video Phone and web cam that hooks up to a television screen. The seven committee members sit at a meeting table located in an FSU video conference room. DuPuy and the group see each other (and sometimes DuPuy’s cat) on their respective video screens. DuPuy’s computer and a computer in the conference room that is attached to a projector beaming onto a large screen are both running VNC freeware that mediates a two-way remote desktop system. So, in essence, anything that DuPuy does on her computer is seen on the computer in the conference room, and vice versa. The audio of the meeting is conducted through DuPuy’s phone and a speaker phone in the video conference room.

DuPuy has been the webmaster for ODDL for more than four years, half of which was at the FSU campus in Tallahassee. When she moved to Boston, she kept her title and has remained tethered electronically to her responsibilities ever since.

Part of the way she remains effectively connected to the FSU redesign project is by maintaining accurate records of all those vitally important web committee meetings. She does this through a constantly evolving work-related website she created, known as "DuPuy Central," that holds all the agendas, meeting minutes, and resources related to the redesign project, dating back to September 2002. "We have to do it this way in order to keep track of all this information, or we would just flutter away," says DuPuy. "We have to be careful about making sure the communication lines are always open."

Jeren Goldstein, ODDL’s technical editor and web committee member, explains that having DuPuy work at a distance "has actually helped our organization." He compares this Internet-based web committee relationship with DuPuy as having results similar to when new distance education faculty discover that organizing their online courses turns out to benefit the way they manage and organize their on-campus courses.

Taming a Monster

In addition to the web committee, there are 11 content committees (one for each node), each comprised of four to five volunteers who write, revise, and gather information under specific guidelines. Each content committee has a facilitator who is also a web committee member. Content committee members are knowledgeable authorities within the parameters of the nodes, all of whom, DuPuy jokingly says, "are coerced into helping us. We capitalize on the skills they have."

The facilitators liaison with the content committees, who create content, and the web committee, who make decisions about how everything ultimately comes together. Facilitators basically educate the content committees as to how the nodes are organized and maintained and how content should be filtered up to the web committee. So, for instance, "one of the big features of the redesign is to have fresh news on every page," says DuPuy. "You cannot do that without a system in place for collecting news from the people who know it. So, we have created this distributed system in which no one person or group of people is overwhelmed with how much they need to do."

Basically, this underlying structure helps the ODDL web committee maintain its sanity and keep well organized and on task for the entire redesign project, which is a daunting, monstrosity. After all, redesigning 11 fairly complicated websites is not exactly a small undertaking. In fact, even with this well-thought-out system in place, the project has been under development for about 18 months.

The goals of the redesign project are clearly stated as follows:

• Make information easier to find by bringing deeply buried content to the top via index boxes and by providing multiple paths to information.
• Update the sites with new services and functions.
• Make the sites more responsive by implementing technology that allows for quick updates in response to user’s needs, including the dynamic distribution of news.

Creating websites based on user’s (site visitors) needs, instead of ODDL’s organizational structure, is one of the major principles that drives the project in the right direction. "A big thrust of the redesign was to get people away from the idea that we are an organization and here are our departments," says DuPuy. "Essentially, users don’t care how we are organized."

"It’s a basic communication question. What do these people need to know?" adds Goldstein. "From there you start to ask all kinds of communication questions, such as what is the best way to organize information so that users can find it? What do these people know when they visit our website? How adept are they at using a website?"

All nodes are built around what Goldstein and DuPuy refer to as "index boxes," which are segments of the home page that can be mixed, matched, deleted or changed. These index boxes are typically located just below the top quarter of the home page, highlighted by bold text headlines (see links below under "Four Down, Seven To Go").

If, for example, the FSU administration wanted to push a recruitment effort toward international students, an index box related to providing the right information to such students could be easily slipped into a highly visible spot on the Prospective Students home page, as well as on the Online Degrees home page.

Goldstein explains that the redesign project has developed a construction strategy that has moved from building nodes based on a classical structure, with a logical, pyramid-shaped stream of categories and subcategories, to nodes based on usage. By looking at website usage reports and always talking to FSU support staff who have a good sense for the information site visitors typically seek out online, the classical structure was replaced with a structure in which the files and links that people used most were moved to the top of all the nodes inside the aforementioned index boxes.

Goldstein also talks about the notion of website "density," which addresses the question of how much is too much on any given page. "We try to make our pages as dense as possible without overwhelming the user," he says. "Our philosophy has been that it is not how many links you have on a page; it’s how quickly can a user find what they are looking for. So the density is really not a problem if the headings are easy to peruse." Again, he points to the index boxes, where headlines are written and displayed in a way that allows users to find what they need "in a blink of an eye."

On the technical side, the redesign project entails building all 11 nodes on top of the existing ODDL site. "We can’t go offline," DuPuy says, adding that making the transition from the existing site to the new site is a "fascinating process. We are rolling it out gradually, and we start at the top and percolate it down so that eventually everything will be transformed."

Eventually, a site-wide header (which is not yet live on the four redesigned nodes) with well-organized links that touch every area of OODL site will be the primary integration unifier.

"When we complete it, the entire site will be beautifully integrated with a great navigational scheme," says DuPuy. "We are giving ourselves the luxury of trying to be excellent, rather than being adequate. There are a lot of organizations that don’t have the same goals or personnel to do these sorts of things. A modern website is a very sophisticated tool, and it is hard to do this."

FSU Online Website

For more about ODDL, see "About FSU’s Office for Distributed and Distance Learning," in the September 2004 issue of Educational Pathways.