Ohio University is about to release its revamped homepage - an unashamed attempt to attract new students.
I think this is a great idea but I am wary of it becoming the only homepage of the University. I am becoming more and more of the opinion that a university needs several homepages complete with accompanying separate domains that reflect the targetted audience of each. The homepage of any university site attempts to do so much for so many that it is impossible to keep all happy. The philosophy of our front page is for it to act as a launching point only. Audiences are channelled off into their own 'subsites'. When the site was designed we found that this was the only way to deal with the huge amount of information we had to cover and the incredibly diverse audiences who would be visiting the site.
If dedicated homepages were built for each major audience and promoted with their own domains this may reinforce the idea that the University website has become much larger than a single site, it is a group of sites. A central homepage could still exist but it would act as a launching point only.
In terms of information architecture and navigational tools this makes sense too. Different audiences may need different architectures. There would be an overall architecture that ensured that all sites fit together but individually the architectures of each site would operate alone. A 'one-size-fits-all approach to architecture is not the optimal way to do it. Content could still be reused across sites through the CMS, as we do now.
Anyway, just an idea.
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