A Survey of UK University Web Management: Staffing, Systems and Issues

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to summarize the findings of a survey of UK universities about how their websites are managed and resourced, which technologies are in use, and what are seen as the main issues and priorities.Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on a web‐based questionnaire distributed in summer 2006, which received 104 usable responses from 87 institutions.Findings – The survey showed that some web teams were based in IT and some in external relations, yet in both cases the site typically served internal and external audiences. The role of web manager is partly management of resources, time and people, partly about marketing and liaison and partly also concerned with more technical aspects including interface design and HTML. But it is a diverse role with a wide spread of responsibilities. On the whole web teams were relatively small. Three‐quarters of responding institutions had a CMS, but specific systems in use were diverse. Sixty per cent had a portal. There was evide...