Had a meetings with JBJ and FM about the future of the site. There's a lot that needs to be done. There are a number of problems: finding content can be difficult; documents need to have their titles, keywords, and desciptions updated; alternate language versions need to be improved; the coding of the site needs to be updated;
We're going to develop a site survey to try and get a feel for how people use the site and if they're able to find what they're looking for. I'm pretty ambivalent about surveys, and in the past they haven't proven to be very effective for us. JBJ suggested that maybe we could use a raffle to encourage people to complete the survey. I think that'll probably give us a little bump, but in the end we'll probably still not get very many responses.
JBJ and FM think that we can temporarily improve the ability of finding things by highlighting the AAAS search engine. It's a fairly simple solution to implement. The idea at this point is to develop a help page describing the search and how it works and also provide a few examples. This should be able to be implemented in a couple of weeks (after editing, etc.).
As I see it one of our biggest problems with the site is that we went through the effort to come up with this category structure, but then didn't take the time to fully develop it. As it stands we kind of say "we're working in this area ... here's a few links." This isn't sufficient at all and I had always hoped we would spend some more time developing the content for these categories. It looks like some people on staff are starting to think that the current navigation scheme isn't working and they want to try something else (probably partly due to the complaints of JR).
I don't really have a problem figuring out something new, but at this point I'd rather see us spend some time bringing our current scheme up to par. I feel it still has the ability to suit our and our visitors' needs. Plus moving to a new scheme will require as much, if not more, work than improving our current site. Either way I think I'm going to have to take a more active role in determining the future of our site. I think many of the problems we're having with the site could have been taken care of if I had taken the initiative rather than waiting for others to work on things. I've been too passive in implementation and allowed myself to get distracted by other projects.
I've got some ideas for an intermediate update to the site that should help somewhat with the general inability to find things. I'm going to go ahead and start working on developing the categories, filling them out as I think they need to be. One of the problems I see with the site right now is that it doesn't directly address what we're doing or the finding from our research. I'm going to spend some time filling in some of this information for one of the categories, then work with JBJ to refine the approach. I'll also need to adjust the directory structure and content location in that structure to better reflect it's relation to our research. Up until now I had been working towards more of a document type kind of organization, but I think a content organization will work better (though we'll probably still need indexes of doctype content).
Once that first category is finished I think it'll be easier to set up the rest of the site. This intermediate reorganization should help in development of a more useful site map for our content, which will provide another method of accessing information quickly.
I also need to spend some time figuring out how to improve the home page. The current page is, well, bland and confusing. Too much of the information falls "below the fold." And it really doesn't provide the user much direction or information.
A lot to think about, but it needs to be done and I haven't been doing my part. Nobody else has, either, but if I don't take the lead on something like this no one will.
