This is my second weekly blog post. This week, I would like to share some ideas and thoughts on strategies to help make our CityU website even more effective and useful. These are just my initial thoughts, please feel free to comment; I would love to hear from others in the greater CityU community.
This week I would like to talk about our CityU website. Our website is our window to the world. It is an important tool to help others understand who we are and what we do. It is our channel and platform to communicate with the world and to let others know our plans, strategies, and successes. In order to achieve this, our website must be convenient to use and information easy to find.
Our website is divided into two parts - the public Internet website and the private Intranet website - each serving different people with different needs.
Let’s first take a look at our public Internet site. It provides valuable information to parents, prospective/current students, teachers, researchers and the media. Information such as press releases, news articles, university magazine/newsletter articles, staff profiles, research project information, college/department information, programme/major/minor information, etc. In the modern Web 2.0 world of ours, there are 2 important rules. Firstly, content must be searchable by search engines. If search engines cannot find it, no one else will. Secondly, content must be linkable so that they can be quickly shared with potentially hundreds or thousands of other people through various blogs and social networks.
CityU has a lot of valuable data, information and knowledge about who we are and most importantly about our many successes. But some of these contents are currently buried in formats that many search engines cannot read or indexed. For those that are accessible to search engines, we need good linking mechanisms. Some of our pages use frames which make linking impossible. Some pages are just PDF files, so linking to a particular page or article is also impossible.
In order for our public Internet site to be more effective and useful, we need more searchable and linkable content. We need to make it super easy for people to find information. This means when people search for information, our relevant pages do show up in search results. In the coming months, we will work with various departments and administrative units to see how we can further optimize our Internet strategy, so that we can more effectively share information about CityU and our successes with others around the world.
Secondly, our Intranet. Our Intranet is huge with hundreds of thousands of pages of information, documents, spreadsheets, and software applications. Our problem is not a lack of content, but an over abundance of content and Web-based functions/applications. We need a way to easily and conveniently find what we are looking for.
Our one-stop Intranet portal is only the first step to try to create some organization out of our enormous information and application source. But it takes time and experience to understand the structure of our extensive portal and where to find what you are looking for.
A logical next step is to provide an extensive Intranet search capability, so that students/staff need not remember and click long sequences of navigation to get to what they are looking for. Due to search technology that has just been made available to Hong Kong, we might finally be able to provide customized Intranet search for the CityU community.
With Intranet search, it does not matter where pages or documents reside, either on the internal web, on departmental shared disks, or even document management systems. This will add a totally new dimension to the usability of our Intranet. Search results can be displayed in a new contextual knowledge portal - a portal that provides one-stop access to information and applications that are precisely relevant to what you are looking for. This can greatly enhance our overall productivity and the usability and effectiveness of our Intranet. In the coming months, we will investigate the possibility of making our Intranet even easier to use with Intranet search.
What’s New This Week:
- Universities Wifi Network - Student/staff can now use their CityU login/passwords for free wireless access (without prior approval) at HKU, CUHK, PolyU, HKUST, HKBU, LU and HKIEd through the “Universities WiFi” collaborative network offered by the Joint Universities Computer Centre (JUCC). You can check out locations of wifi hotspots.
- Long Term Loan Scheme (LLS) - The popular LLS is back. Registration is now opened to eligible students to apply for a laptop to use during their stay with CityU. More information can be found at the 2009 LLS website.
