Features

Countdown to UB's New Website

After more than a year of research, design, discussion and debate, the University of Baltimore is weeks away from launching its new website. This is UB's third major plunge into the world of the Web, and in the time since the site was reworked and reintroduced in mid-2006, a universe of change has occurred. The new site will not only reflect the revolution of social media, blogs and interactivity that has occurred, but also embrace the idea that a university site must engage all of its users—both current and potential, inside the campus as well as beyond. Simply put, the new site will be presented as an ongoing work in progress, with "progress" as the operative word.

"Above all else, we want the new site to promote the things that are important about UB —the work of students and faculty, the courses that make us stand out in the crowd, those things that say who we are, today and tomorrow," said Peter Toran, vice president for planning and external affairs and head of a cross-campus group that is working on the new site. "There is no single better way to let the world know what UB is about. We have to make the most of that chance to reach out."

Since the beginning of the redesign process, UB has embraced the new reality of the Web: from managing and presenting content, graphic design, photography and social media to the use of the Internet as a tool for teaching, learning and research, nothing has been declared off limits. Today, a campus website is the start of a "virtual tour" of that campus—a first and often lasting impression of what the institution has to offer, not just in terms of classes and majors, but in the potential for a student to imagine having the kind of long-term relationship with a university that continues well beyond graduation.

"Our site will be interesting for everyone who clicks on it, even those first-time visitors who typically will give a site only a minute or two," Toran said. 

Indeed, the University and idfive, the Baltimore-based Web design and communications firm that is serving as UB's collaborative partner in developing the new site and Web strategy, have focused on the idea of "site stickiness" (users sticking with the site because it's interesting and useful) by using the tools of search engine optimization—essentially the phenomenon of a site consistently showing up at or near the top of search results on Google, Bing and other major search sites. They've also introduced a new concept: reverse social media. (Check out the sidebar for more on that.)

The ramped-up potential of UB's site is the result of idfive's extensive research over the past several months. Interacting with campus constituents, including faculty members, students, deans, program directors and department heads across the institution, the firm delved deeply into the "should be's" and "could be's" concerning UB's Web presence and into the perceptions that different audiences—including area high-school students and their parents—have of UB. Various scans of audiences, UB marketing efforts and, of course, the amount of traffic visiting the site, were undertaken. This information, combined with reviews of all the major sectors of the site, formed the basis of a 360-degree overview of the institution. In turn, the overview is driving plans for a new central site for the institution as well as for its four schools and Langsdale Library.

"Everything we're putting together is rooted in the data," Toran said. "We are following best practices across the Web, looking at award-winning sites like American University's and thinking closely about what all of our audiences want and need from the site. If there is a way to describe the end product, I would say it's a much more accurate reflection of the UB experience—it's very real."

Indeed, "real" is a word that has entered the campus lexicon and institutional marketing over the last year, the result of a focus group exercise aimed at distilling UB's message. For UB, differentiated by real-life education taught by faculty with real-world experience, the descriptor is a natural. In its involvement in UB's marketing efforts, idfive has made "real" a key component to understanding the University.

But back to the website: What's it going to look like, anyway?

In one word, it's about UB. The site has always been a showcase of people on campus, and that will continue in bold new ways. It will depict our students, faculty, staff and alumni through colorful, original photography and design and through stories of achievement and involvement. Major portions of the home-page real estate will be highlighted by striking images—photos taken from daily life at UB, but nonetheless designed to stand out in a sea of increasingly sophisticated college sites. The site's navigation will become much more intuitive, with the goal of minimizing clicks and making transactional matters as simple as possible. News and events will continue to be featured in all the right places, but so will stories about student activities, interesting statistics about the University and opportunities for various audiences to engage with the campus.

"Some schools use stock photography to tell their stories, but that's not us," said Gigi Boam, director of UB's Office of University Relations. "We've given each school and Langsdale a budget for original photography taken expressly for the website, and we're going to put a lot of effort into using words and images to increase the awareness and understanding of UB."

The first phase of the redesign, an interim site for the Offices of Admission, debuted in August. Other key portions of the site are expected to go live shortly after the start of the spring semester. When they do, you'll know it: The overall design and new photography will definitely catch your attention. So, too, will the redesigned navigation, aimed at making it easier to access the information you need on a regular basis. Of course, for campus users familiar with the current site, there will be the inevitable period of adjustment. And user testing will continually seek to enhance the site's usability for all audiences.  But visitors will definitely learn more about the University of Baltimore and experience the "real" energy that distinguishes the 21st-century UB.

The Mark of a Good Website: It's 'Information-Thick,' But Organized and Nice to Look At Too

What makes a website worth the click? Is it the bells and whistles—the dropdown menus, rich graphics, the things that change when you scroll over them either on purpose or by accident? Is it the simplicity of finding what you want within seconds? Is it the way the site makes you feel—excited and intrigued, relaxed and in tune? For a university site, the answer is all of that, and more.

Any site, whether it's for an e-commerce giant like Amazon or for the flower shop down the street, can and should host a large amount of information.

"We thrive in information-thick worlds because of our marvelous and everyday capacities to select, edit, single out, structure, highlight, group, pair, merge, harmonize, synthesize, focus, organize, condense, reduce, boil down, choose, categorize, catalog, classify, list, abstract, scan, look into, idealize, isolate, discriminate, distinguish, screen, pigeonhole, pick over, sort, integrate, blend, inspect, filter, lump, skip, smooth, chunk, average, approximate, cluster, aggregate, outline, summarize, itemize, review, dip into, flip through, browse, glance into, leaf through, skim, refine, enumerate, glean, synopsize, winnow the wheat from the chaff, and separate the sheep from the goats," wrote Edward R. Tufte, professor emeritus in information design at Yale University, in his book Envisioning Information.

The not-so-secret is that all of this information must be well organized and thoughtfully presented; otherwise, as free-thinking humans, we'll go off in search of better sheep and nicer goats.

UB's new site is being designed to model not only best practices about writing for and presenting on the Web, but from a clear starting point of audience expectations: What do all of the people who stop by our site want, what do they need and how can UB get it to them as efficiently and effectively as possible?

"That's our goal: ease of use," said Peter Toran, UB's vice president for planning and external affairs and head of the multi-unit group that is working on the new site. "UB has a lot to offer, but based on our tracking reports, we know that some things must be especially easy for anybody to access: our bookstore's site, information about our academic programs, class schedules and important news that affects the community every day."

The new site, coming in early 2011, will feature drop-down displays grouped for audiences as well as graphically highlighted cells containing items useful to multiple groups: the University's calendar, Google maps, event descriptions and so on. Student work representing all of UB's schools will be prominently displayed.

And here's a highlight—something so new that it has to be described as a trend-starter: reverse social media. This tool will aggregate what people are saying about UB on major social networking sites like Facebook and present it across UB's pages. The content will be monitored by UB; if someone is having trouble finding something on our site, for example, that person's Facebook post about it will receive a response that anyone can read.

"These conversations are happening anyway, and we should be responsive to them," Toran said. "By revealing the dialogue, we're committing to a new level of openness and honesty."

Over time, Toran said, social media is becoming knitted to the UB brand—a collaborative effort that provides insights more useful than any form of advertising.

"We're embracing the user comments,” he said. "We'll be a voice in that conversation."

Alongside the new social media features will be the remarkably wide range of campus events of interest to alumni and to the general public, much of it free to attend. All of this will be packaged with the goal of retaining the University's compliance with common accessibility standards.

"We've explored hundreds of university sites in the building process," Toran said. "When you do that, you come away with an understanding that sites tend to face either outward or inward. The great ones, the ones that increase awareness and show a school to users who would otherwise not know much about it except maybe the name, are the ones that not only present the excellent things they have to all audiences, but also do it through thoughtful organization and interesting presentations. UB's new site can do that."

And for those at UB who manage the site on a daily basis, life will get easier: A new content management system will encourage a more flexible look and feel for our pages, with a more intuitive set of tools and a better approach to creating pathways for navigating through the site.

So, yes: bells and whistles. But more importantly, a Web strategy that encourages the UB community to treat the site as an essential part of that community. And, in turn, a site that invites new people to join in.

School of Law Goes Top 30

The University of Baltimore School of Law has entered the top 30 nationwide for downloads of scholarly articles by law faculty posted to the Social Sciences Research Network, a gathering place for research in the academic fields of law, business, and the social sciences. As of September, UB was currently ranked just below the Boston University School of Law and the University of Southern California's Gould School of Law, and just ahead of law schools at Saint John's and Temple universities, the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and the American University School of Law.

"Part of the reason for UB Law breaking into the top 30 is our active solicitation of faculty to get them interested, and actively helping to make their articles available," said Bob Pool, reference librarian and faculty liaison in the UB School of Law Library.  "Since the downloads number drives the rankings, some faculty see it as a competition we're in. And of course, the combination of interesting articles and the interest of SSRN users both deserve credit, along with the individual SSRN records being findable via Google."

The network, widely known as the SSRN, is a Web site that makes scholarly research available to all. Anyone can join, and from there you can upload your research papers at no cost to the provider. Most of the articles are free to download, but some do include a charge.

Currently, UB has around 300 total downloaded articles on the network (over the last 12 months), and more than 17,000 downloads for those articles. A school's ranking climbs or falls depending on how many searchers download these articles. There are well over 250 law schools posting to the site, so to be among the top 30 there is a strong indicator that the scholarship by School of Law faculty is respected and highly sought after.

"When we started out in November 2007, we were 108 out of a couple hundred," Pool said. "That wasn't bad, but we're the sixth largest public law school in the country so it seems natural that our faculty's articles would receive many downloads. Given the volume and quality of their work and the number of faculty participating in the network, I would expect us to climb even higher."

The SSRN allows faculty in the social sciences, law and business to post papers in draft form as well as in their final edit. The former is a great way to solicit comments from your peers, and also to get an idea of the level of interest in the paper's topic by the number of downloads it receives. A respectable number of downloads can serve as a selling point for the author when it's time to approach scholarly journals about publishing a paper. The network also allows for much greater and faster dissemination of research than is possible with the traditional model of publishing only in paper publications, a process that often takes a year or more. Even the way the SSRN works—just log in, find the article you're interested in, then click on the "One-Click Download" link to bring up the article as an Adobe Acrobat document—encourages engagement with the research.

According to Pool, the SSRN is important to law schools and others because the number of article downloads can be construed as a rough measure of the importance of an institution's overall scholarship, as well as the importance of each individual faculty member's work. This metric can be thought of as a supplement to other scholarship measures, such as the prestige of the journals or the number of times a paper is cited in other scholarly papers or in court decisions. Occasionally, those who subscribe to an SSRN e-journal on a particular legal topic will find an article related to their topic, and mention it in a related blog. The blog post can then result in a significant increase in SSRN downloads—yet another way that UB faculty are experiencing more interest in their work.

"Our school is not driven by this kind of tally, but the more times your work is cited, the more it says about the kind of scholarship being done at UB, and the relevance that it has to legal issues in our society. I hope we continue to climb in the rankings—it's exciting," Pool said.

CityLit + UB = Stronger Community

At the start of the fall semester, the School of Communications Design announced an alignment with the CityLit Project, a local literary arts organization with close ties to the city's burgeoning community of readers and writers. The arrangement, in which the nonprofit organization serves in residence in the school, allows the group to retains its independence while it collaborates with UB students, faculty and staff on a variety of literary projects, raising awareness of the potential for reading and writing to change lives.

The Latest asked Gregg Wilhelm, CityLit Project's executive director, to talk about the collaboration and how it will resonate across the University—especially in terms of new opportunities for students:

The Latest: You have talked about CityLit Project's alliance with UB as a way to further the aims of both the organization and the University. Can you give an example or two of how it will work?

Wilhelm: Indeed, where does "Knowledge That Works," UB's tagline, intersect with the "culture of literature"? On a practical note, a small organization like CityLit needs infrastructure like office space, computer lab space, and programming space, and human resources in the form of interns. Meanwhile, UB students need opportunities to apply their  knowledge in real-life situations.  From a more mission-oriented perspective, CityLit was looking to make a broader impact in the community while UB was looking for new ways to engage the community, making the campus a destination, especially through partnerships with cultural organizations.

One example would be to offer some of CityLit's non-credit writers' workshops on campus, which would introduce writers who might be interested in pursuing a degree to the School of Communication Design. Another would be to host public programs, say in the Student Center's theater or the new Barnes & Noble on campus, that would draw the community here. Last year, our signature event, CityLit Festival at the Pratt Library, was dubbed a "Best of Baltimore" by Baltimore magazine. It is that level of quality programming we want to present at UB.

TL: Prior to the agreement, how would you describe your awareness of UB and the School of Communication Design?

Wilhelm: As a native Baltimorean, my awareness of UB was very high. As a career-long literary arts professional, several UB School of Communication Design faculty have been featured as part of CityLit programming. And since I read trade magazines like Poets & Writers, I was aware of the M.F.A. program being named one of the 10 most unique programs in the country. When CityLit's board of directors asked itself where we could go with the idea of an organization-university collaboration, the University of Baltimore topped the list.

TL: Can you see ways that students in UB's Merrick School of Business, College of Public Affairs and School of Law could get involved with CityLit?

Wilhelm: Both School of Communication Design executive director Jon Shorr and I envision CityLit's in-residence partnership with UB as serving as a "real life" lab right here on campus. First and foremost, that "lab" is designed to benefit students in the school most: editors for manuscripts, designers of books, and generally learning what makes for good literary arts programming for the general public and youth. But managing a nonprofit is a business, one in which the stakeholders are the public, and one which navigates a unique subset of legal parameters. We believe there is significant potential for interdisciplinary collaborative learning between CityLit and all of UB's schools.

TL: CityLit Project is labeled as Baltimore's only comprehensive nonprofit literary arts organization. How would you describe "literary arts," and how does that benefit the city?

Wilhelm: We use the term "literary arts" very deliberately, to set CityLit Project apart as an arts organization rather than a literacy organization, such as Baltimore Reads. We are not educators who teach people how to read and write so that they can apply for jobs, earn their G.E.D., or improve their English as a second language—all of which are vital services. We serve three sets of constituents: readers who seek dynamic literary arts programming; writers who want to improve their craft and engage in professional development; and youth who need to be excited by literature.

Regarding our youth programs, CityLit Kids and CityLit Teens, we do consider our work to be the opposite side of the same coin as literacy. Sure, one must know how to read, but if one does not get jazzed about reading broadly and writing creatively, especially during those teenage years, the chances he or she will  be a life-long reader greatly diminish. Furthermore, to quote the National Endowment for the Arts, "declines in reading have civic, social, and economic implications, [whereas] advanced readers accrue personal, professional, and social advantages." At this point, the connection between what we do and benefits to the city begin to emerge.

Lastly, within our free public programming, we present panels on topics of importance to people living in and around the city. For example, at the Baltimore Book Festival we have explored the effectiveness of No Child Left Behind with Baltimore City Public Schools CEO Andres Alonso, NPR education correspondent Larry Abramson, and Linda Perlstein, author of Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade. We have also examined African-American culture and criticism in the arts with PEN/Beyond Margins award-winner Ernest Hardy, author of Blood Beats: Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, and journalist and BET critic Esther Iverem, author of We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies, 1986-2006. And at the fair we've also hosted a talk on keeping creative later in life that included two School of Communication Design representatives on the panel: M.F.A. Program Director Kendra Kopelke and adjunct professor Dudley Clendinen.

TL: How can UB students, whether they're in the School of Communication Design or not, get involved with your organization?

Wilhelm: We're still in the process of describing what internship opportunities there will be at CityLit, now that the organization is in residence on campus. But the success of the organization has always depended on the skills of volunteers, so getting involved is as simple as e-mailing me at gregg@citylitproject.org.