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   Community College  
   Web Site Project      

In the last three years, HCC has changed its web site three times. The second look was very expensive and was not satisfactory. Because of the development cost, the college told each campus, each division, each department, each faculty member that it was their responsibly to create a web presence. The Brandon Campus hired a student/faculty web development team and created a professional web site/uniform look for the campus and each department.

Because the of the wide range of looks, just a year later the college hired another consultant to redevelop the complete web site to give the college a uniform look. Currently, the latest HCC home Page was redesigned

so that uniform templates may be used in a complete WYSIWYG format so that each faculty, each department may input content, while maintaining a consistent look. This product being used is called NOVIS. Since the Brandon Campus produced a great look on its own, the NOVIS team has been contracted to prepare new templates to integrate the Brandon look into the new college format during Spring Term 2004. The bottom line is a college's web presence, once an amateur hobby of someone at the college, is now a critical factor at all colleges. The web site now is a major marketing tool for the college. Therefore, who is our customer? You! What is your opinion? Three years ago, our CGS 1555 class began researching what you, the customer, liked and disliked about college web sites.

U

ntil last semester, the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Searches in the course were to search every community college web site in the nation and recommend to the WWW community (and HCC) the Top 10 Community College Web Sites in the nation. Yahoo had a magazine (no longer published) which devoted an issue once a year to find the 100 best wired colleges in the nation. Only three community colleges made the last published Top 100 list in the last year 2000. Today, no national organization produces a listing of the best college web sites, especially community college web sites. Our project is a major contribution to the web and will count at least 500 points and/or a minimum of 10% of the student's final grade.

Since there are nearly 1250 colleges in the United States, then each student in the class will help search a subset of all the community colleges. The CGS 1555 web site for this project is:
http://www.hccfl.edu/faculty/john_taylor/cgs1555/ccresearch.html

All the students in the current term in all the CGS 1555 classes will divide the 1250 colleges. Each student will be assigned 40-65 colleges. The two methods used are to assign the group of colleges for the student are by alphabetical or by state.

An excellent site for researching by state is the American Association of Community Colleges:
http://www.aacc.nche.edu/Content/NavigationMenu/AboutCommunityColleges/CommunityCollegeFinder1/Community_College_Finder.htm1

also at the University of Texas:
http://www.utexas.edu/world/comcol/state/

A good U.S. Community College lists by alphabetical listing is:
http://www.utexas.edu/world/comcol/alpha/ .

D

uring the summer of 2002, IE3/WC3 deregulated the four year college/university hold on the .edu Top Level Domains. Beginning in the summer of 2002, Community colleges could apply for an .edu domain name. This lead to a rush for all the community colleges to change the: college abbreviation(hcc). community college system abbreviation(cc). state abbreviation(fl). United States abbreviation(us) (hccfl.edu) format to a simpler .edu format. Florida Community College of Jacksonville (FCCJ) hated the: fccj.cc.fl.us format that they used: fccj.org for its college's domain name. Now they have fccj.edu. There are 24 HCC's in the nation. HCC didn't jump like FCCJ, so we are hccfl.edu after several months of discussions. There is an update list for some of these changes:

http://www.utexas.edu/world/comcol/new/
If you get a file 404 error when you click on the list's URL for a college, then check the above update list or put to college's name in a search engine to find their current URL. Not finding a college's web site is not excused from the project. URLs are dynamic. Also many times, especially on the weekend, the college's web site is down/offline. If you can not find a newer URL for the college, then try that URL on another day. You can still type: hccfl.edu into the web address and you will still get HCC's home page. This may not be true of other colleges.

Part One (Reduce the list of sixty to five):

After receiving the list of colleges assigned for the semester, the student will:

  1. review the criteria lists below.


  2. decide on the criteria you will use to research the sites (It is suggested you use a point scale for each catagory in the criteria)


  3. submit a group email with the criteria/methods that he/she will use in the first round to judge the assigned community college web sites by the third week of the term


  4. The student will create a folder in bookmark/favorites menu


  5. The student will enter each site and surf through the college site, making several notes and place a ranking each catagory in the crieria lists. He/she may use a spreadsheet to record the research finding. Al Falkenstein created the below Excel spreadsheet with 10 catagories for ranking with a 1-10 rating for each catagory (You may use thius spreadsheet or modify it to fit your crtieria:
    http://www.hccbrandon.net/cgs1555/spreadsheet/comcol.xls

  6. The student will provide the class with recommendations/rankings in group emails or as an attachment to a group email. The student’s email must include the actual absolute link to the college (beginning with http://), a short statement of opinion about the college, and the list must be ranked order with the 1st choice first. The 45-60 plus site search will be conducted during the first eight weeks of the course.


    7. Some of the questions, which may be addressed in the summary, are:
  7. During the search, the student should also find the absolute worst site and list it as the college to avoid. Please include the link.


  8. The student will also post his choices on his favorites web page.


  9. If a spreadsheet is used, the completed spreadsheet will also be sent in the email as an .xls Excel file as an attachment. The student will also save the spreadsheet as web page and post a link to the spreadsheet from the favorites page.


  10. The instructor will take the student’s file or email and cut/paste the student’s top 5 choices and publish the class’s recommended list of the best 110 community colleges in the nation via the Internet. The student will notify via group email


Part Two (Section of Top 10 from the nominated Top 5):

A

common criteria will be used to during the second part of this project to determine The Top 10 Community College Web Sites in the Nation. This criteria will be either determine by the class and/or instructor.

The student will either reference the instructor's web site for the listings of the top 5 selected by his/her fellow students or use the student's Group email to begin Part 2.

By the 13th week, the student will send his rankings of the nominated sites to the class via group email similar. The instructor or a classmate (for extra credit) will assemble the spreadsheet rankings of each student and prepare a Summary Spreadsheet of the class votes. This Summary will also be posted on the web.

Broken Links-Must Find CC Web Site

You should not report no data for a community college because of a broken link. Go to a search engine and input the college name to find the revised link. Also sometime the web site is down and you must come back if the search engine produces the identical link.

If you Input: "Western Wyoming Community College" or Western Wyoming Community College or (Western Wyoming Community College) which finds the college in the first hit. With community colleges you will probably get the same result with or without. [This link was left off the Wyoming listings of the American Association of Community Colleges seven Wyoming Community Colleges:
http://www2.aacc.nche.edu/aacc/ccfinder_list.asp?state=WY
I notified them of the error June 2, 2004. However, if you click on the Wyoming Community College Commission link:
http://commission.wcc.edu/ , you can find this WWCC link. During the community college project you will find many broken links on the listing state websites as colleges are changing their domain names to .edu top level domain from .cc.(state).us : HCC changed hccfl.edu to hccfl.edu two years ago. You could type either and you got the same result. However, in April 2004 they unmapped some files on the HCC web site so that the former domain name no longer works (however, hccfl.edu will work for you). This has cause many of my quiz/survey/evaulation pages to stop working on my web site. However, some colleges just went 'cold turkey' and did not map the old URL. When you find a broken link in the CCProject on a AACC or U Texas lists, notify the webmaster and send a cc me for a 5 point bonus.]

Links to State Community College District Sites:


This community College Web Site Project Menu Page was last modified by John Taylor:
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