Abstract:

The present work is a case study of an innovative unified approach to the development of websites affiliated to a single educational institution. This approach is characterized by effective resource management and code reusability. Moreover, a very promising for future development set of results, from a focus group using the system, is presented.

Due to the rapid evolution of the internet and the ever-expanding engagement of the public during the last years, it is very important nowadays for educational institutions to have a strong online presence. Young people and students use the internet as their primary source of information and a limited presence of an educational institution on the web will result in a diminishing number of targeted audiences. Having in mind the specific requirements that an academic website must have and the personnel responsible for the content management it may require, a very unique custom environment and set of tools was developed for creating and managing academic and educational websites.

This is a case study of the websites developed within the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece. Through the years, many websites were created for the various departments, services, post-graduate programs, workshops, festivals and many other activities of the university. The unique approach that was adopted in this case was that all these websites operated using the same set of programming libraries developed specifically for this purpose. This resulted in a tremendous economy in time, reusable code and resources. All the websites shared the same basic structure and functionalities. This, however, had no cost to the aesthetic diversity among them. Although they were based on the same aesthetic guidelines, there was a system in place that provided tools to the developers so that each one can significantly differentiate from another in terms of its aesthetic identity.

Moreover, through a designated administration area that was developed, a set of tools was provided in order for the personnel responsible for the content management to also be able to manipulate the aesthetics of each website. Either by inserting custom CSS and HTML code, or inline images the content manager had the ability to modify the aesthetics as well.

In the present study the technical aspects of this special environment are presented, as well as the results of a focus group consisting of content managers that used the application, regarding the overall experience and the amount of aesthetic customization they were able to achieve.

Keywords:

Academic, educational, aesthetics, web design.