University Revamps Website

Students surfing the Harvard University web page may notice some substantial changes, including a sleeker presentation and a more powerful search engine.

The new page, located at http: //www.harvard.edu, is the result of a month-long project involving a University-wide group of deans, faculty members and administrators.

"It was a project to come to a consensus of what we needed in a web page," said Elaine Benfatto, the page's webmaster. Benfatto, who works in the Office of Information Services, was primarily responsible for the coding and implementation of the changes.

Based on research that showed 80 percent of the site users were non-Harvard affiliates trying to fund out information about the University, the new site seeks to organize and present information in a more efficient manner.

"The University web page is a gateway, a table of contents to all of Harvard's resources," Benfatto said.

The new page uses a more powerful search engine to index about 7,500 documents from more than 400 web servers throughout the University. Benfatto anticipates the number of indexed documents will eventually grow to over 10,000.

"We want to let people easily find what they want," she said. "It's mind-boggling how much stuff is out there."

In addition to the enhanced search engine, there is also a new alphabetized list of all Harvard-affiliated web sites.

According to Dean of the College Harvary R. Lewis '68, "[presenting] the entire University is a challenge because of organizational complexity and the number of different units of different sizes."

"[The page] certainly is effective and a major improvement of what there was before," he said in an e-mail message.

Harvard Computer Society Business Manager David B. Alpert '99 agreed. "The page is a giant improvement from the old one," he said. "The new page looks nice and does a good job of organizing information. It presents a stately image of Harvard."

In the future, Benfatto said she expects to work closely with the News Office to present more current information on the web page.

"Overall, this has been quite an amazing process," She said.