(opens new window)

Something we have overlooked for a while is the site index on wayne.edu (opens new window). We have been gathering sites and adding them to the list, but frankly it is something we don't use on a daily basis. The list is used as a "suggested search (opens new window)" in the search box on the homepage. When we (internally) are looking for a website we just start typing in name and it quickly pulls it up and you have the ability to jump right to the site.

But others use the index

As we looked at our stats we realized just how many people use the site index. It is linked to from our global header and is the ninth visited page on our site.

Looking at the page and trying to use it a few times we realized it had some serious flaws. We had too many links on the page and there wasn't enough context around them.

School of Medicine

The second largest set of sites were from the School of Medicine. The school is so large is basically has an entire copy of the main campus departments. This is what caused most of the confusion, two Admissions Office's, Computing,  and Research departments to name a few.

Our solution

(opens new window)We decided to keep the full list but have the ability to filter to only the main campus or med campus sites. We also added ", School of Medicine" to the end of all the medicine sites. I have included an initial sketch of our idea on the right.

The site list does need some clean up and we are doing that slowly, it takes some time to go through the hundreds of links to determine which are no longer relevant.

One less feature going forward

The "Suggest a site" feature has hit the cutting room floor. It wasn't hard for us to run a report and realize almost all the recent suggestions were spam. Almost all authoritative sites that have been added in the past year have been by us, only three have been from the campus community. It wasn't worth the time to mark the spam to justify the feature.

Hopefully our users will find this new context and features useful. We are watching the stats and will be modifying the page even more based on how our visitors are using the page.  We hope you find this new layout just a little bit more useful if you do use it.

View the new site index at: http://wayne.edu/siteindex.php (opens new window)