Website Design of Indian Central Universities: Issues and Challenges

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INTRODUCTION
The indigenous and indispensable role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) across the vertical and horizontal horizons has increased.The demand, dependence and availability of web-based information has become a lifeline for many organizations to survive.
The information presented over the web must be reliable, fast, accessible, understandable, and beneficial for the prospective users.The globalization of present era and varying trends in information age has made a common person fully dependent on information available online on websites or portals.The information presented, published and made available to common masses needs to be dealt with caution Apart from ensuring quality of the content issues related to security and reliability need to be addressed keeping in mind the present scenario e-connectivity across the globe.The world wide web (www) has now dramatically shifted the way a common man used to look at the educational institutions and has resulted in most of the educational institutions having their presence on online word with the help of websites.Application of ICT and web hosting in an academic environment has increased dramatically in the recent decade.
At present all the Central, State, Deemed and PrivateUniversities are required to publish information related to their respective institutions of repute available and accessible over internet.The main aim of an educational institution is not to make the content available on internet rather the objective is to reach to masses with the help of internet connectivity.The need to a have a reliable, effective and attractive web presence is increasing as online technology is becoming an important part educational institutions in general and society in particular 1 .
The higher educational institutions play a vital role in the development of a society while higher education websites play a vital role in bridging the gap between the institution and stakeholders 2 .Institutions of higher learning websites provide a platform for efficient communication and access to public information.These websites are a useful tool to enhance transparency and data availability as they enable different stakeholders to interact with different institution of higher learning [3].Web based platforms are only available media wherein instant publication of information is viable to reach out global masses instantly.
There are many interest groups who are visitors to these websites in general and higher educational institutional websites in particular.As far as the academics of any higher educational institute in concerned there is different pragmatic aspects for which a student or any other academician is main visitor.A prospective student or a stake holder explores the website of a university or any institution of higher learning to get information about university's vision, mission and other academic or research related information.The information available on university websites is not only useful for internal users rather the information is very important for external users as well 2,4 .The internal user like a student, faculty or employee who are physically well and those are visually impaired can get information about their daily activities, proformas, university news and other miscellaneous information 4 .Similarly, an external user can get detailed information about the university, courses available, research domains, award & achievements, upcoming events and other related information from the university website the design of the website should be so pleasing that the visitor may attracted by the way the information is being presented with ease of menu item identifiers and search filters provided within the container webpage 5,6,7 9 .At present, the main categories of University/University-level Institutions are:-Central Universities, State Universities, Deemed-to-be Universities and University-level institutions.These are described as follows 10,11 :

Central University
A university established or incorporated by a Central Act.

State University
A university established or incorporated by a Provincial Act or by a State Act.

Institution of National Importance
An Institution established by Act of Parliament and declared as Institution of National Importance.Institution under State Legislature Act

Deemed-to-be University
An Institution Deemed to be University, commonly known as Deemed University, refers to a high-performing institution, which has been so declared by Central Government under Section 3 of the University Grants Commission (UGC) Act, 1956.

Private University
A All the central universities are established and funded by the Central Government of India.In general, universities in India are recognized by the University Grants Commission (UGC), which draws its power from the University Grants Commission Act, 1956 8 .In addition, central universities are covered by the Central Universities Act, 2009, which regulates their purpose, powers governance etc.However, it would not be surprising to see different central universities having different nomenclature, different component management and varying content flow and organization on their respective websites while providing information to different internal and external users/stakeholders.Keeping in mind the similarities in working, governing, managing, monitoring and controlling of central universities, a similar nomenclature, pattern, and design and interference framework of website for all central universities can work as a helping hand in enhancing the information penetration to the masses.It will ease of access among the interest groups to make walk through and walk back among different WebPages of websites to locate access and retrieve information content.

As per the data available on UGC website the existing list of central universities is given table 1 below 9
The need of the hour is to have similar website rather common design framework/ template or pattern for website development and publishing for all institutes of higher learning in general and Indian Central Universities in particular.The similar fashion of presenting the contents in specified and specialized parts provides the visitor with ease in access and efficient content localization with these commonalities in development of websites in mind, the guidelines for the development of the websites in general and customized webpage's in particular

Page elements overview
The main components of a website of any organization in general and central university in particular and their corresponding position on the web portals is shown in figure 1 below.The main complements which are shown in figure 1 above are Masthead, Navigation, page content, page borders and footer.All the components has their respective set of attributes associated with them which play an pivotal role in effectiveness of a website design.

Importance of common template in websites of central universities
N o w -a -d ay s t h e m a i n s o u r c e o f communication rather speaking nodes for any higher learning educational institute especially central university are there websites, so to make this communication more effective all the components  The website must be designed keeping in mind the interest of the university which are primarily the sources of presenting their objectives to the end-user in general and those interested in seeking information in particular 2,3,4,7,13 .All the components which are plugged into the different web pages of a website needs to have unambiguous flow in its constituent components so that the exact information can be located and then retrieved in effectively and efficiently 14,15 .
Any educational institute of higher learning in general and central university in particular can be more effective to reach global masses in highly effective and motivational way if following base points are considered while designing and development of websites.

As most popular way of communication and •
disseminating in today's world is web based platform, so it is inevitable for any organization to have their complete information available as a speaking note in form of a website.Every institution of higher learning requires • developing and publishing of all the basic and necessary information as WebPages and deploys the same on internet to reach the prospective audience.Nowadays websites play the most important and • motivational role to forecast better prospects of any educational institute and also helps the academic institute to foster in administrative, academic and research activities.The websites of institutions of higher education • also helps in ensuring quality of education in the institution apart from the development of online communities to discuss various issues on online notice boards and other related platforms.
The website of higher education helps the • regulatory authorities in monitoring and management of academic & research activities to ensure quality of the education system.
Every central university needs to promote usage of online services for managing and monitoring of all activities within the university.The website of a university is a platform which can help in achieving this target.This will result in implementing governance within a university online also known as e-governance which results in bringing transparency in the system.

Guidelines for designing websites for central universities
The basic and fundamental approach for any organization to design web portals is to have deep analysis of their existence and role, more revelatory planning, and compact plan to function as roadmap for developing the practical framework for website.There can be number of procedures, strategies and different criterion for initiating the practical work 16,17,18 .Some of the popular directives are enlisted as under; Identification of target groups so as to find their

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
After deploying more pragmatic approach in collecting the basic similarities, features, quality parameters, content flow, interface design and other static & dynamic attributes to improve the effectiveness of understandability for all stake holders.The list of attributes which needs to be included as the bare minimum requirement for desgning websited of an Institution of higher learning is given in table 2.
In order to develop a template with uniform guidelines for developing websites for central universities the basic architecture is given in figure 1.The main aim and objective of carrying out this particular research was to analysis the websites of Indian Central Universities established post 2004 period to the challenges common visitor had to counter.The focus to given to identifying and to propose some common framework for all central universities to increase readability, accessibility, integrity, persistence and understandability.The main stress was provide to monitor four attributes in particular for all these post 2004 built universities that is Performance Grade, Load Time, Page Size and Requests by using pingdom tool online on https://tools.pingdom.com/website 19 .The results retrieved using the pingdom tool are given in table 3 below.

CONCLUSION
All the central universties established after 2004 have their own respective websites which are not similar in design which increases the burden of understability on the end user which results in demotivating prospective students.The need of the hour is to have common standards and design procedures for designing and publishing the content on a website of any central university.
To overcome these challenges and issues it is recommended to design a common template in order to increase uniformity of the information available for prospective students across all central universities to begin with and the same can be further extended to all the institutions of higher learning.Students generally observe information available on university websites for facilitating them in decision making regarding admissions, results and other related activities as prospective students and enrolled students.The need of the hour is to establish a basic template which will be common to all the central universities which will result in uniformity in the information available on central universities websites across India.However, the design of central university template, website-homepages and website-pages need to be evaluated periodically using established yardstick which will help to improve website according to the end-user's requirements.
clearly describe the following: what elements make up the common website • template what elements are mandatory for every • website what elements can be adapted for individual • websites

Fig. 1 :
Fig. 1: The common elements and their place on generalized webpage of website

Fig. 2 :
Fig. 2: basic architecture for designing and development of educational websites

An Institution established or incorporated by a State Legislature Act.
university established through a State/ Central Act by a sponsoring body viz.A Society registered under the Societies Registration Act 1860, or any other corresponding law for the time being in force in a State or a Public Trust or a Company registered under Section 25 of the Companies Act, 1956.

Most popular and basic design guidelines when content are ready are given below The
basic theme and purpose of any university • should reflect from the very first webpage of any university.All the WebPages and images in line with text should speak the austerity and worthiness of University.