The Purpose Of Your Project Web Site

Background

Before creating a Web site for your project you should give some thought to the purpose of the Web site, including the aims of the Web site, the target audiences, the lifetime, resources available to develop and maintain the Web site and the technical architecture to be used. You should also think about what will happen to the Web site once project funding has finished.

Purposes

Your project Web site could have a number of purposes. For example:

• The Web site could provide information about the project.
• The Web site could provide access to the project deliverables.
• The Web site could be used to support communications with members of the project team.
• The Web site could act as a repository of information about the management of the projects, including minutes of meetings, reports to funders, etc.

Your Web site could, of course, fulfill more than a single role. Alternatively you may choose to provide more than one Web site.

Why You Need To Think About The Different Purposes

You should have an idea of the purposes of your project Web site before creating it for a number of reasons:

• You may wish to have more stringent QA procedures for Web sites which are intended for a broad audience and which is intended to have a longer lifetime.
• You may wish to be proactive in promoting a Web site intended for public use.
• You may wish to be proactive in ensuring that a Web site which is not intended for public use does not become indexing by search engines or is not linked to be mistake.
• You may wish to allow a public Web site to be indexed and archived by third parties.
• You may wish to ensure that a Web site intended for use by project partners or other closed communities is not indexed or archived, especially if there may be confidentiality or data protection issues.

Web Site For Information About The Project

Once funding has been approved for your project Web site you may wish to provide information about the project, often prior to the official launch of the project and before project staff are in post. There is a potential danger that this information will be indexed by search engines or treated as the official project page. You should therefore ensure that the page is updated once an official project Web site is launched so that a link is provided to the official project page. You may also wish to consider stopping search engines from indexing such pages by use of the Standard For Robot Exclusion [1].

Web Site For Access To Project Deliverables

Many projects will have an official project Web site. This is likely to provide information about the project such as details of funding, project timescales and deliverables, contact addresses, etc. The Web site may also provide access to project deliverables, or provide links to project deliverables if they are deployed elsewhere or are available from a repository. Usually you will be proactive in ensuring that the official project Web site is easily found. You may wish to submit the project Web site to search engines.

Web Site To Support Communications With Project Partners

Projects with several partners may have a Web site which is used to support communications with project partners. The Web site may provide access to mailing lists, realtime communications, decision-making support, etc. The JISCMail service may be used or commercial equivalents such as YahooGroups. Alternatively this function may be provided by a Web site which also provides a repository for project resources.

Web Site As Repository For Project Resources

Projects with several partners may have a Web site which is used to provide a repository for project resources. The Web site may contain project plans, specifications, minutes of meetings, reports to funders, financial information, etc. The Web site may be part of the main project Web site, may be a separate Web site (possibly hosted by one of the project partners) or may be provided by a third party. You will need to think about the mechanisms for allowing access to authorised users, especially if the Web site contains confidential or sensitive information.

References

1. robots.txt Robots Exclusion Standard,
   <http://www.robotstxt.org/>