Annual Report of the
UMM Web Group

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• Annual Report 1998
• Annual Report 1997
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From Computing Services annual report, 2000:

Several hundred new pages were added to the UMM Web site in 1999-2000, as it expanded to meet the needs and demands of a diverse group of users. The UMM WWW Advisory Group (WWWAG), which does not submit a separate annual report, managed the site's growth with full technical support from Computing Services. The addition of a new Student One Stop page was an important development pointing to our new strategic focus on providing customized Web services to specific user audiences. Other important new pages on the site included: research and scholarship; UMM Bookstore; Business Office; a full set of majors' 4-year graduation plans on the Advising site; a campus Web cam; and a new GenEdWeb class developed by Jeff Ratliff-Crain. The UMM Student Web Corps rep laced outdated quarter information throughout the site at the beginning of the year, and the new public UMM Web Photo Library was stocked mostly with photos taken by UMM students. At the end of the year, the WWWAG had a wide-ranging disussion with the Ch ancellor about the importance of the UMM Web site in instruction, recruiting, marketing, self-service for students and other users, and sales/e-commerce.

UMM's Web server logs show that usage of the UMM Web site also continues to accelerate rapidly. Using the month of April as an annual data point, the average number of "successful page requests" (i.e., hits to the site that don't produce error messages) was 109,719 per day in April 2000. The comparable number in April 1999 was only about 36,000; in April 1997, the first year we kept log statistics, it was 15,150. Only 45% of the April 2000 requests came from within the UMM campus network (the mrs.umn.e du domain). This is a balance that has made a significant shift over the past couple of years, since just three years ago, in April 1997, 65% of all page hits originated on the campus network. The usage statistics demonstrate how important our site has become for off-campus users seeking information about the campus, most notably including prospective students.

Goal:

Develop and implement an entirely new set of UMM Web pages and online services for prospective students. Pursue the important new strategy of tailoring Web-based services to specific audiences, which was begun this year with the Student O ne Stop site. Our data on Web site use, demonstrating that more than half our hits originate outside the UMM network, indicates that prospective students are by far our biggest audience and the group that needs the most immediate attention. But we ought to improve services for all our site audiences, so development of the Faculty/Staff One Stop site, and improvements to the Student One Stop and Alumni/External pages, need to be in next year's plans as well. We will make effective use of an expanded Stu dent Web Corps next year to implement these new site designs.