Stacey Recarba of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., went surfing on her own. She's been heavily recruited by Division I athletic departments. I only looked at college sites after I had met the coach. It was a lot harder to find application information, and I wanted to apply online. I finally had to get the coaches to help me get to the right pages on the Web sites to apply.
Colleges face many challenges in providing an effective Internet presence.
Their external constituents include potential students, parents, alumni, benefactors, the local community and the media. Internally, there are students, student organizations and activities, administrative and support staff, as well as teaching and research faculty. To prepare any message or set of messages that satisfies the diverse objectives of all those constituents is a communications challenge extraordinaire. Each internal constituent has someone design and maintain a part of the overall college Web site. This scenario is any Webmaster's worst nightmare.