Collegiate Times

Virginia Tech's Web site stands in the top 1 percent of universities worldwide, a January ranking indicated.

The Cybermetrics Lab, an international research group concerned with scholarly Web content, published a January 2009 ranking which placed Tech's Web site (vt.edu) 26th out of 4,000 universities. This ranking is based on four main factors, including the number of pages recovered from popular search engines and the accessibility of academic research information.

"People from all over the world will come to Virginia Tech, vt.edu, to seek out information or resources," said Mark Owczarski university spokesman. "The ranking really refers to how an academic unit will put up information or research data and allow educators from around the world to use it."

Because of the vast number of Web pages Cybernetics analyzes, it is impossible for all factors leading to a great Web site to be taken into account. Tech's Web site is a lot more than just a repository for research documents.

The Web site is used as a means of communication between the university and its many audiences, including students, faculty, staff, parents, alumni and the community, Owczarski said. "We are very proud of our Web site; it is growing in a consistent and well-organized manner. There are a lot of quality pieces of information. It is becoming more and more coherent, which is beneficial to the users."

Director of Web Communication John Jackson said a content management system called Ensemble provides the publishing interface for most of the vt.edu domain. The system is accessible on the VT network by clients who have been granted access. Ensemble works much like a blog in that it uses a Web-based page creation tool. Users login to the content creator and are given an array of features and options, including fonts, colors or the ability to insert a picture.

Behind the scenes, the Web site is run on a popular Web server platform called Apache. The servers are housed in the Corporate Research Center.

Multiple people are involved with the Web site's administration, content and maintenance.

"At the university level, to deal with the content management system effort, there are approximately three and a half people on my team," Jackson said. "On the IT side, there are primarily two people that administrate the content management system."

It is a collaborative group of people working together to keep the whole Web site running.

"There are also IT people and people who are affiliated with Web development throughout the various colleges and departments," Jackson said.

The vt.edu domain is constantly being updated.

"We're certainly getting into the field of more multimedia production. We're also working to get more involved in social media," Jackson said.

For instance, Tech has its own YouTube channel, and VT News now features a Twitter account. Several departments even have their own Facebook pages.

"We also are trying to build out our mobile site, mobile.vt.edu, that primarily pulls in news feeds, calendar feeds, campus notices and a mobile-friendly version of the directory," Jackson said.