USIS Untangles The Web

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The new academic year brought with it this time round a new-look Sussex website, completely restructured and redesigned to make it easier to find information about the University - wherever and whoever you are.

USIS, the team with responsibility for the University website, commissioned local new-media firm Keymedia to come up with a fresh look and feel for the site. At the same time USIS devised a new system of menus, based on information for different kind of users - potential research collaborators, conference visitors and alumni, for example - and information about different aspects of the University. Coinciding with the new structure and design are a number of new developments on the website:

• An online teaching timetable enables students (and lecturers) to check when and where their classes are.

• Electronic copies of exam papers from the past three years can now be searched online and printed out.

• The phone and email directory has also been updated : and you can now look people up by their first name, job title and even telephone extension.

• This year, for the first time, the postgraduate prospectus on the web includes downloadable application forms for potential students.

The coming academic year will see further developments on the web. The amount of information available - both for internal and external users - will continue to increase. Staffing Services pages are due to go online soon, with details of salary scales and conditions of service. USIS will be developing new ways of putting committee documents and minutes on the web, and also putting together a set of recommended standards for people who "own" web pages at Sussex, to ensure that the content never becomes too old or irrelevant.

Increasingly, if you want to know what's going on at Sussex, the web is the place to look.