Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
Affordable and widespread internet access has made the World Wide Web a significant source of information. Therefore, building a strong online identity has become a key marketing mechanism for any institution. The web presence of an institution can be established through an official website, social media accounts, and other related mediums. Such channels must be meticulously designed, structured, implemented, and managed in order to maintain a good business reputation and catch the attention of many visitors. Based on that, this paper focuses on the best practices to design and develop a high-quality website that is considered a main instrument to strengthen the online identity of the German Jordanian University (GJU).
The GJU website (“GJU Website,”) is regarded the first point of contact for many university stakeholders such as students, faculty, staff, parents, alumni, partners, providers, and employers. Therefore, it should make a strong first impression to attract talented students and staff to GJU, as well as engage other visitors. To accomplish the aforementioned objective, the website must have the following quality attributes: nice appearance, modern design, well defined structure, up to date, content rich, easy to use, consistent, fast, and highly available. Furthermore, it should reflect the university brand, vision, mission, values, and objectives. In addition, it needs to effectively promote the offered degrees and programs, in addition to the ongoing research.
Accordingly, the following measures are required to develop a GJU website (or any similar university website) that meets the desired quality attributes:
- •
Introducing a suitable website development process.
- •
Defining proper content types and structure to make university websites content-rich, easy to use, and intuitive to navigate.
- •
Suggesting graphic design guidelines to enhance the appearance, navigation, usability, responsiveness, and functionality of university websites.
- •
Proposing a development framework and technology stack to build simple and non-interactive websites.
- •
Demonstrating the website development steps needed to construct a website using a Content Management System (CMS) such as Drupal (“Drupal – Open Source CMS,”).
- •
Discussing the adopted tests to verify the website operation, quality, and scalability.
- •
Recommending the needed measures to secure the open-source CMS and the stack it runs on.
- •
Identifying the tasks to administer the host machine, web application, and CMS.
- •
Utilizing google analytics and user survey results to evaluate the website quality attributes.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In section 2, the novelty of this work is highlighted. In section 3, a suitable website development process is introduced. In section 4, the proper university website content types and structure are proposed. In section 5, the website design guidelines are suggested. In section 6, the website development framework and steps are illustrated. In section 7, the needed operations to launch a website are discussed. In section 8, the best practices during the website maintenance phase are explored. In section 9, google analytics and user-survey based methods are utilized to evaluate the quality-attributes of the GJU website. Finally, summary and conclusion are provided in section 10.
Top2. Paper Novelty
It is important to emphasize that the main novelties of this paper are related to the best practices to design and develop a university website rather than a web portal (e.g., student information system (Al‐Hawari, Alufeishat, Alshawabkeh, Barham, & Habahbeh, 2017), help desk system (Al-Hawari & Barham, 2019), and accounting information system (Al-Hawari, 2017)). In that regard, a website is distinguished from a web portal by the following:
- •
It focuses more on content.
- •
It does not require a visitor to login (i.e., anyone can see the website content).
- •
It does not allow a visitor to change content (i.e., non-interactive).
- •
It requires multiple collaborators (i.e., content editors) to manage related content.