To blog or not to blog

After the brief presentation to the class last week I have been dwelling on one of the points raised by both the students and Graham, "to blog or not to blog". CBS for a number of years has been using what they call the CBS Staff Blog as somewhat of an intranet for CBS staff to access university information. This "blog" contains various pieces of information relevant to staff and also an ongoing series of "posts". But as you can probably determine, the CBS Staff Blog is not actually a blog in the true sense. The blog instead is used a a tool for reposting information already found on the Curtin University homepage or other departmental homepages. So why do you ask is there a need for a CBS Staff Blog? Good question!


During the presentation in class I described to the students how the blog was used as a information hub and how more often than not the information was being replicated in an effort to provide staff with a "one stop shop". Now as one of very few staff members who actually read the blog I did start to wonder why on earth we are just replicating the information in an effort to make things easier for staff, why not just make all the other information sources across the University more user friendly? Now that's tough to answer as we as general staff members don't have control over where or how information is distributed to us, but why not start at home and at least attempt to make the CBS homepage a little more user friendly for both staff and students?!

So looking at the current CBS homepage there are clearly a number of issues in terms of basic navigation, you'll have to forgive me as I step into objective mode and pretend I haven't been working for the organisation for 5 years and studying there for 3 years. Teaching areas as a starting point, what does a teaching area mean? Are these the only areas in which we teach? Well they are some interesting questions. The teaching areas are basically the schools that fall under the CBS banner, however there are many teaching areas that fall under those schools. Perhaps a starting point improvements would be to modify the teaching areas and make them a little easier to understand.


Another noticeable improvement could be the location of the News Feed. If you scroll further down the page you can access a number of articles about CBS, these include student and staff achievements, CBS in the media, appointments of prestigious industry representatives to the CBS staff cohort and many other articles of interest. As most of these are positive articles wouldn't these be better placed perhaps say on the right hand side of the page instead of industry ready?


What are some other recommendations for improvement to the page? These are vital recommendations that will be passed on to the CBS internal marketing team...whether they like it or not!