St. Edward’s University is nearing the completion of a nearly three-year-long effort to condense the current St. Edward’s website and its respective microsites into an internal and external site, according to the Marketing Office.

The sites, which were slated for a January 2011 unveiling, are presently on hold for further information-gathering. Some faculty members had expressed concerns that the information presented on the proposed external site, which is meant to recruit prospective students, misrepresents their academic disciplines.

The new launch date has not yet been announced, but Vice President of Marketing Paige Booth says that the site will go live around late spring or early summer.

Formatting of the website will be different in that every site run by St. Edward’s will be connected through the main http://www.stedwards.edu URL. The external site will be geared toward both prospective students and potential donors. The internal site will be for enrolled students, faculty and staff, but can be viewed by others as it is not password-protected. EdWeb and Blackboard, however, will remain as elements of the site and will be password-protected.

“We wanted to create an interactive site for different audiences,” Booth said.

Although it is unclear how accessible the internal site will be from the external site, Booth said a Google search or a search on the external website will yield results from both the internal and external sites.

For current students and faculty, there will be a new tool called OneStop. Booth said that the OneStop tool will act as a university news home page that users can customize with a variety of content, including Zimbra webmail, calendars and RSS feeds both from St. Edward’s and external sites such as The New York Times.

The incorporation of social media will be emphasized within the infrastructure of the new St. Edward’s website. Links for sharingspecific content on Facebook or other social networking sites will be available on every page of the site, Booth said.

The future St. Edward’s site will also contain “Think” pages.

“These pages are for faculty to customize for their students,” said Marcie Lasseigne, a public relations associate in the Marketing Office. “They can edit content and provide news that is pertinent to their specific departments.”

The “Think” pages will contain much more extensive information on specific schools, departments and courses as opposed to the external site that will have more of a general overview.

Other microsites that exist now will be dissolved into sections on the new site, such as the section for prospective students, which is currently hosted at http://www.gotostedwards.com/. This page will soon be on the St. Edward’s home page and will include more extensive multimedia, video and photos.

In conjunction with the St. Edward’s 2015 Strategic Plan, Booth said that a tab on the home page called “Faith and Service” will lead to a section displaying information on the Congregation of the Holy Cross and Campus ministry.

But the changes haven’t pleased everyone. Behind the scenes, faculty has expressed concerns about the content on the external site, which, at first, was written primarily by the Marketing Office with some direction from Elliance, a Pittsburgh-based Web consulting firm hired to help build the website. Philosophy professor Green Musselman said that the philosophy department is misrepresented in the information provided on the external site.

“The way the pages do reflect on the practice of philosophy at St. Edward’s will do more harm than good and, as a result, have the unintended effect of damaging our reputation in the eyes of potential students,” Green Musselman said.

Mary Rist, president of the Faculty Senate and a professor in the Humanities department, also said she worried that prospective students would consider the website content as a reflection of instructors’ own thoughts.

Some faculty were also worried that some academic minors were not listed on the external site, which could confuse prospective students. However, Booth said the minors will be listed on the recruiting pages.

The issues were brought to the attention of the Marketing Department by both the Faculty Senate and deans in November 2010. Booth said that the deans are now assembling more in-depth and accurate information for Marketing and IT to incorporate into the site. IT will also transfer some of the existing internal content to the new site, Booth said.