Part II: Are Portals Dead? And More

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Part II: Are Portals Dead? And More

1/28/2004

By Terry Calhoun

Other schools, still under local pressure to develop a portal by administrators who may not realize that the portal craze has largely passed, may seize upon the ambiguity in what makes a portal a portal, and simply rename their existing functional secure administrative Web sites to have a portal-like name, thereby allowing them to declare victory in the portal wars while minimizing the substantial hassles, costs, and risks they might otherwise face.

Web Animations

An area of Web page design that gets some attention is use of animation-having the pictures on the home page change slide-show style, for example, or incorporating the use of Macromedia Flash to increase visual interest or impact or to grab attention, much in the way that many commercial banner ads are animated. (In looking at whether or not a site used animation, we explicitly excluded use of rollovers, e.g., things like pull-down menus or text highlighting that occurs when a mouse is passed over an area of the page.)

With that definition in mind, when we look at our 172 study sites, only 17 sites-less than ten percent of the study sites-made any use of animation on their institutional home pages. Clearly, the perception that everyone is deploying animated images or Macromedia Flash-enabled home pages is not borne out by the empirical data from our study.

A to Z: How to Handle the Laundry List

One problem that virtually all university home pages face is how to handle the laundry list of links to departments, programs, labs, initiatives, functions, and so on, that need linking, a function that is currently handled under the home page Departments link at UO, as it is at some other universities (such as Duke, the University of New Mexico, and the University of North Carolina).

At a growing number of other sites, including 60 of the 172 in this study, the preferred name for that omnibus listing link now appears to be " A-to-Z" or "A-to-Z Index," or a full listing of letters along the lines of "Index A B C D E F G H I [...] X Y Z."

The other alternative to Departments or A-to-Z Index that is commonly seen is for that type of link to be labeled "Site Index," or "Index," or "Directory" (although that last nomenclature will often be confusing to users looking for a phone or e-mail directory).

Verbose News Items

Some universities view their home page as a table of contents, while others view the home page as more akin to a university news magazine. Universities that lean toward that latter role tend to feature verbose news items on the institutional home page. For the purpose of our study, a news item was considered to be verbose if it included a headline and more than a single sentence of accompanying text. A simple headline (with no accompanying text), or a headline with one line of teaser text was not considered to be a verbose news item. Of our 172 sites:

· 136 sites (nearly 80 percent) had no verbose news items on their home page;

· 15 had a single verbose news item;

· 4 had two; and

· 5 had four.

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