For some time now, we have been thinking about the form the Informatics Web presence should take in the future. From this, an Informatics web strategy has evolved, the highlights of which I’d like to cover in this post. The strategy itself can be found here. The main points of the strategy are:

1. The majority of the School’s outward facing web pages will continue to be hosted on the central Polopoly service for the time being.
2. The School will provide a supported WCMS. Ideally, this will be a system which is in widespread use elsewhere in the University maximising community support and lessening the costs of supporting such a system
3. Ideally, all School content would be located on either the School or the central WCMS thus minimising the need for web administrators to learn and support multiple systems. However…
4. Individuals, research groups and research institutes are free to use whatever web technology they prefer for their web content be that raw HTML, an alternative to the School WCMS, a Wiki or some other option. The cost of supporting non School supported technology will have to be met by the individual, group or institute.
5. A mechanism will be provided to allow an easy choice of technology from places such as the individual user’s landing page
6. Ideally all School pages, whatever the supporting technology, should have a similar look and feel and support for this will be provided for School supported services. There are cases where this may not be appropriate such as interdisciplinary research units.
7. Wiki pages, whether on the School or the central service, should not attempt to replicate the School’s web structure. Instead Wiki pages should act as leaf nodes of appropriate web pages.

If you have any comments or questions about this policy, please pass them on to me.

Craig.

Informatics Web Strategy / Computing Systems by is licensed under a