Stevens Alumni Association wins achievement award for "best site integration"

The Stevens Alumni Association (SAA) has received a peer-recognition award from Harris Internet Services for "best site integration." The SAA was singled out for seamlessly integrating its new online community and news portal service into its recently revamped alumni website at alumni.stevens.edu. The Harris Internet Services Achievement Awards were announced on August 12, 2002, at the 5th Annual Harris Internet Services Users Conference at Amelia Island Plantation in Amelia Island, Fla.

The Stevens alumni site won out over nominees from the University of Western Ontario, Ithaca College, Yale University, the University of Southern California, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Wharton School of Business.

While developing the new alumni website over the last year, SAA Webmaster Peter Michel visited other university websites that were also using Harris' Internet services. He compared how those institutions had integrated their online communities and news portals into their main alumni websites.

At each of the sites he visited, the online community and portal pages were served up under distinctly different URLs.

"Navigating from the main alumni websites to the online communities and news portals gave me the impression that I had completely left their alumni sites and was visiting several different sites hosted elsewhere," said Michel. "I felt that developing our site in a similar fashion would be extremely confusing to our alumni and would cause a lack of consistency in design and navigation."

To add consistency, Michel incorporated a Web technology called HTML framesets to tie everything together under one URL. In this way, Michel provided a completely uniform look, feel and navigation. The aim was to create the impression for alumni visitors that they were visiting only one site - the Stevens alumni website.

"Our alumni site is actually three sites hosted on three different servers," said Michel, "but it appears as one. As far as I've seen, our site is the only one out of nearly 250 using Harris' online community and/or portal services that takes this approach to improve site integration. It's a simple solution, but it has definitely helped add a much-needed consistency."

Harris Internet Services provides Internet and data services in the form of data-driven online community features to almost 250 clients - mostly academic, alumni and development organizations. Other categories in which organizations were eligible to be nominated were Most Effective Branding, Best Online Newsletter, and Best Offline Promotional Material.

About Stevens Institute of Technology

Founded in 1870, Stevens Institute of Technology is one of the leading technological universities in the world dedicated to learning and research. Through its broad-based curricula, nurturing of creative inventiveness, and cross disciplinary research, the Institute is at the forefront of global challenges in engineering, science, and technology management. Partnerships and collaboration between, and among, business, industry, government and other universities contribute to the enriched environment of the Institute. A new model for technology commercialization in academe, known as Technogenesis®, involves external partners in launching business enterprises to create broad opportunities and shared value.

Stevens offers baccalaureates, master’s and doctoral degrees in engineering, science, computer science and management, in addition to a baccalaureate degree in the humanities and liberal arts, and in business and technology. The university has a total enrollment of 2,150 undergraduate and 3,500 graduate students, with about 250 full-time faculty. Stevens’ graduate programs have attracted international participation from China, India, Southeast Asia, Europe and Latin America. Additional information may be obtained from its web page at www.stevens.edu.  

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