Building a large, successful website efficiently through inquiry-based design and content management tools

n May 1994, the first website for the School of Education at Indiana University Bloomington (IUB) was launched: http://education.indiana.edu. At that time, the home page had two linksone to our Instructional Systems Technology Department, and the other to the IUB home page. A decade later, our site now consists of more than 6,000 web pages, and we have received more than 41.5 million page views in the last three years approximately 38,000 page views per day. Our website is highly ranked in Google searches. Google ranks its search results based on popularity of web pages a particular web page is ranked highly if other very popular web pages point to it. For example, when searching for the terms, "school of education" Google ranked our home page in the top two out of about 268 million pages that contained these terms in luly, 2005. How did we make this kind of progress in the past decade with a relatively small expenditure of resources? (The "we" in this article refers to the authors. The first author is the School of Education web director and a faculty member with a reduced teaching load. He is supported currently by two doctoral students, the co-authors, who are half-time graduate assistants.)