Some days make you realise that there are some old battles that IAs and the like are still fighting, years after you had dared to wish that they had been won.
One of these is the organisation-based website. You know, the ones that reflect the structure of the organisation, the internal politics and turf wars. Sometimes you have a number of sites fighting each other and the needs of the user are completely ignored. Also, there was no thought put into how a user may approach a large and varied instituion's website and make sense of all the little subsites. Five or six years ago a great proportion of sites were structured in this manner and I sometimes believe those days are gone, but alas, they are still with us.
So, a few things to remember when building a site, especially if that site has a relationship to other sites in a large institution:
1. Your users don't know who looks after what
They don't know which site to visit to get specific information, they don't know which department is responsible for the answer, they just want an answer. Quickly.
2. If a user is external to the organisation they usually don't distinguish between different sites in an overall web presence, especially if those sites use a standard template. They view it all as "University of XX's website".
3. The web is not the place to stake a political claim for your part of an organisation.
You will end up not fulfilling your user's needs and looking a little silly.
4. The web is not a change management catalyst for departmental restructures.
Changing the structure of an organisation and using a restructured website to try to introduce and enforce this change is not a good idea. A website should not reflect the structure of your organisation, it should reflect the information needs of your users and the way in which they think about this set of information.
On other matters, I have been seconded to the Marketing and Student Recruitment Unit for six months, this is my last day at Web Services for a while. I'll no doubt still haunt Templatedata like a ghost that just won't give up...