Development of the project modern site of the university’s department

One of the ways to change the system of higher education in the Russian Federation was the project of improvement of the competitiveness of the leading Russian universities, “5 -100”, where 15 universities are focused on achieving of high places in international rankings of the universities. Such excellence initiatives are realized by many governments. It leads to a very high level of competition between universities. Therefore, for Russian universities it is necessary to make maximum use of all the available resources to achieve the stated purpose. The current article discusses the work which should be carried out to increase web impact, i.e. representation of the university in the web space. In the Webometrics ranking it is necessary to increase the capacity of the index pages with relevant, popular content for maximizing of visits and citations as well as work with partners to place links to their sites. This indicator includes an assessment not only of the official site of the University, but also the online resources of all the organization units. From there it becomes clear that it is necessary to carry out serious work with each site, including sites of departments. Analysis of domestic and foreign scientific literature on this subject indicates that at present the specifics of the departments’ sites are rather poorly analyzed. There are widely represented works of improvement of various usability aspects and works with separate groups of target audience, there are publications about requirement of the user-based sites. At the same time there are no articles devoted to the allocation of the main features of sites of faculties and their differences from other types of sites. As a rule, business engagements providing such the services are involved in creation of web resources. However, in order to have productive cooperation with them it is obvious to have enough detailed idea of what the site should be. In an idealized situation a web resource is a means of achievement of the targets of department development. The target audience of the departments’ sites has own specifics and also is to be described. This item is one of the most significant features that departments of the University have. We can use the research resources for serious study of the request from the target audience and the subsequent application of the results. These initial ideas underlie the work of design of the site of the Faculty of Psychology of Tomsk State University. In the first phase a there was a number of project meetings with students of different specialties. The results allow to get recommendations for change of the structure, site content and methods of their presentation. Further work will be carried out with the students and their parents, the professional community as well as partners and clients of the department. Key words: web site of the faculty, project of the web site, usability.

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