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ORGANIZATIONAL WEB MODELS

This Section attempts to give general guidelines about both the recommended intra-structural and inter-structural models of different web sites (i.e. units) belonging to the kuniv.edu domain and different pages belonging to a single unit web sites respectively. Further, it proceeds by giving different scenarios into how these structural models should be mapped to the current KU web domain.
A strong and unified web presence for different organizational bodies similar in scope and objectives to Kuwait University mandates adopting a clear and well-defined structure, hierarchy, and inter-linking scheme between different parts of the body. Navigation between different parts of the organization will be easy to remember, easy to traverse, and confidently looked at as one unified only when such structural model is enforced. Several best-practices, research conclusions and recommendations, and well established and adopted models are mentioned herein as follows:

  1. Mimicking actual physical structural model among different colleges, departments, units of the universities. It would make a lot of sense that inter-linking between different web sites follows a similar hierarchal structure as actual one. Navigation would be easy to remember and expected when it mimic reality.
  2. Adopting most-frequently visited links model: A list of quick links should be available and dynamically updated to the most frequently visited web pages across the kuniv.edu domain. The list should be automatically extracted from the web server log database and displayed for the visitors. Web administrators can adopt their own restrictions according to their preferences.
  3. Visitors-interest model: Web pages within a web site can be structured according to the categories of the site's expected visitors.  Different visitors have different interest, thus different priorities of what links to see first. A well adopted and internationality recognized categorization among different universities is the following:
    1. Current Students
    2. Prospective Students
    3. Faculty & Staff
    4. Alumni
    5. Business
    6. Visitors
  4. A mixture between all previous models: Our recommendation, similar to many well-recognized universities (e.g. Cornell University, Stanford University, john Hopkins University) is to use a model which is a mixture of all previous ones.

Aside from adopting a structural model or a mixture of different models, several best-practices are recommended here as steps that affect the look and feel of a unity. The following guidelines are given to help website administrators to maintain a good navigation structure:

  1. Every web page within the kuniv.edu domain should contain a link to KU official Home Page http://www.kuniv.edu existing in a clear, visible, and fixed location.
  2. Every website should be interlinked similarly to its hierarchal physical structure currently followed in the KU administration; e.g.  Department of mathematics and computer science website should include a link to the faculty of science web site. In the same time, the faculty of science should link directly to the university web site.(Mandatory requirement)