It takes more than great coding skills to build a website for colleges and universities. Today's higher education institutions present a unique spectrum of challenges, all of which must be met in order to ensure a successful effort.
Colleges and universities have more stakeholders than most privately owned companies of a similar size. In a private company, there is generally a clear hierarchy of responsibilities and, while everyone in that particular company maintains a high level of interest in the functionality and efficacy of that business' website, there are generally just a few individuals that would be considered stakeholders.
On the other hand, in a typical college environment, there are PhD level people, each of whom have such a highly vested interest level that they would be considered stakeholders because they hold central responsibility for the students who are enrolled in their cirriculum or primary area of study. As a result, a college or university could have one hundred or more individuals that would be considered stakeholders. So a typical college or university could be considered more similar in structure to a corporation like YUM!, where each department like Arts & Sciences would have nearly the same level of autonomy as would KFC.
That issue alone makes a college or university website much more challenging from an organizational perspective. Ultimately, you start off with hundreds of critical elements, many of whom operate quite independently from each other, that you, the developer, must unite into a single online tool.
At Lwebg, we are blessed to have the talents of Sande Rawlings, who has the extreme detail needed to keep everything organized and all stakeholders happy about the direction a school's new website is taking. Sande can juggle many different "balls" at the same time without dropping a single one. This is a unique and rare skill.
If you hold administrative responsibility for a web build or rebuild for a college, university or school system, there are a lot of factors you should consider before hiring an outside agency to serve your online needs, but one skill that is often overlooked is the powerful, organizational capabilities that the leadership team at Lwebg brings to the table.
Reach out anytime at (502) 523-0489 if you'd like to learn more about our abilities, experience and capabilities to work with you to improve your school's online position.
