Developing a well-developed framework was thus a high priority. Not only would a good, centralized index of university resources be useful to people seeking information, but done properly, would encourage people to develop resources. Any comprehensive list of organizational units - with only the units providing web pages hyperlinked - would make immediately obvious the groups without web resources. I felt this might goad individuals from laggard organizations to push for development of their own web resources.
It was also clear that some significant resources should be developed to pull people into using the Web, and to act as exemplars of what could be done. I felt that there were several important features for exemplars. They should be items of wide interest and provide a better presentation of the information than the paper version. If the items were visually interesting and/or unavailable on paper, this would also encourage Web usage and thus development.
The resources that I decided to focus on pertained to the registration information that I had already started and those pertaining to navigational aids. Almost everyone on the campus is involved in some way with classes. (It is, after all, the university's stated mission.) As for the navigational aids, the University of Illinois is a geographically very large institution, with ample territory for getting lost. While some navigational resources are available -- for example, a map printed in all the phone books -- more detailed and sophisticated navigational resources were simply not available. Navigational systems have the added benefit of being visually appealing.
This was the motivation behind focusing on my three main objectives:
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