# User Experience, Functionality and Aesthetics Evaluation in an Academic Multi-Site Web Ecosystem
## 5 Results  
### Quantitative Analysis  
The Publish@lonio multi-site ecosystem has been in production usage for the purposes of the Ionian University's Web presence for over 15 years. In the past decade, the ecosystem has been expanded greatly, and at the time of this writing, it included 99 different integrated websites. They include the central website of the institution; websites for every department; websites for a multitude of institutional agencies and services; and websites for numerous postgraduate programs, laboratories, and events such as international conferences, summer schools, seminar courses, festivals, etc. From these 99 websites, 87 are bilingual, serving content in both the Greek and the English language, 11 have multiple versions (for example, yearly versions of a repeating conference), and another 11 support crowd-sourced content generation by allowing their staff members to edit content or submit news items for the consideration of their content managers. Figure 5 presents the expansion of the ecosystem throughout the years, by depicting the number of available websites every year since 2016. The continuous increase observed is a strong indicator of the system's popularity within the institution's community. Offices and teams that would use general-purpose WCMSs 10 years ago are now eager to become integrated into the ecosystem even for smaller endeavors that require an online presence. In a similar fashion, an increase is observed in the actual number of content editors and administrators of the ecosystem. The total number of authenticated users at the time of this writing was 92. Out of these people, 2 had full administrative privileges, while the other 90 had access to specific websites. The number of specific websites varied, with an average value of 6.67 websites per user. The rate of increase in the number of content editors is presented in Figure 6. Although for most of its history, the ecosystem was managed by a smaller content team, in the past few years, with the expansion to more websites and the inclusion of people responsible for these new additions, the number of editors significantly increased, and this growth became the driving force behind the implementation of collaborative content editing features. Figure 5: The number of websites integrated into the Publish@lonio ecosystem every year. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline \hline \# & **Question** & **Group** \\ \hline \multirow{3}{*}{Q9} & Which needs are not addressed by the system and & \\  & what additions or changes would you suggest in terms & \\  & of functionality and presentation? & \\  & What other remarks or feedback do you have to offer & \\  & concerning the ecosystem? & \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 3: _Cont._A major focal point of collaborative content management is the ability to share news items with other websites of the ecosystem. News items are an integral part of the institution's content management strategy and involve announcements about research activities, events, calls, scheduling, etc. These items are often of interest to many people in the wider academic community and need to be disseminated through multiple websites. Figure 7 presents the number of unique news items for every year, as well as the number of total posts on the various websites for each such news item. The number of unique post numbers is 27,421, while the total number of posts reaches 40,080. The number of unique news items displayed an upward trend as expected, but more importantly, a rapid increase was observed in the total number of posts after the implementation of the collaborative sharing request feature in 2019. This implementation, in combination with an increase in the total number of content editors, led to a much larger content footprint for the institution. This extra content is disseminated without additional overhead in digital or human resources and allows individual visitors who only engage with a limited part of the ecosystem to find information about a much wider range of activities.