Maintaining a website and keeping it current and interesting can take a lot of time. We have some tools to create some of that result by automatically updating the website on a regular (e.g. hourly) basis. Let us know if you think of a module or a feature that would benefit a number of people.
The right-hand column of the design is a great place to put information that changes regularly -- and automatically. You can use dynamic code to rotate through a series of photos, to display an RSS feed from a relevant journal, to display today's lectures at Bryn Mawr or recent news stories or profiles. More information and examples.
Note that you can create your own profiles and put them into the profile format with a specific link destination (and set it up to rotate between those at each page visit). You can also choose which categories of profiles and/or calendar events you want to display (e.g. only lectures).
We are developing a news module that will allow you to create news and to select a set of tags to be used in a custom news feed for your site. For example, the Athletics department will be tagging news stories with the student's major (if known) and faculty can now submit information about their publications. If those share a tag (e.g. the 4 character department code used for courses, e.g. BIOL) the department could pull all news related to their department.
There are also modules that can be used to automatically create content for the body of pages.
You can create a link (on a page or in the left-hand navigation) that pulls from the TriCo Course Guide for just your department and a particular semester (see Chemistry courses for Spring 2010). This would save you from updating locations, times and instructors by always pulling the latest content at the time the user clicks on the link.
Similarly, you can have a link that pulls from the online directory for just your department (this example pulls all members of Biology). Again, the advantage is that when new members join the community their email address and phone number are automatically added. If information is missing you should contact the Help Desk.
We would like to create a module that pulls course descriptions from Virtual Bryn Mawr to save that effort. But that's a little further down the road. In the meantime, you can refer to the course descriptions in the online version of the course catalog. You can link to an entire department site or to a particular course.
Contact Web Services to have these modules added to your site.