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Harvard Gateways, www.haa.harvard.edu, the Harvard Alumni Association's website, has a new design that incorporates improvements suggested by the HAA communications committee and alumni who visit the site.
The home page now provides shortcuts to the on-line features most popular with alumni: changing one's address, locating a classmate, and making a professional connection, among others. A large banner ad at the bottom left of the screen alternately provides a direct link to post.Harvard (an e-mail forwarding service available to all University graduates), routes guests to information about reunions, or informs visitors that the site is unavailable two hours a day. A crimson-colored bar urges viewers to subscribe to the HAA's new newswire service, Harvard Monthly, an electronic newsletter that covers developments at Harvard Gateways, as well as a smattering of current events at the University. Website administrator Celina Rosas, assistant director of communications at the University Development Office, says "tweaking the site," making constant small improvements, demonstrates the HAA's commitment to bringing the Harvard community back to Cambridge via a website tailored to alumni needs.
Terry Shaller '72, Ph.D. '79, the HAA's senior associate director of continuing education, says the chief goal of the new design was to make the site more easily navigable. With a few clicks of a mouse, for instance, visitors can reach the password-protected Harvard Conference Center--a collection of real-time chat rooms and electronic bulletin boards where alumni can post messages (subjects range from classical music, to space exploration, to vegetarianism) or create a venue for their own topics. The Conference Center remains underutilized, but plans to bring the site's server in-house by January 1 will speed up connections and, Rosas hopes, make it more attractive to alumni.
Two other on-line services have recently experienced sizable increases in traffic. More than 11,900 graduates already have a permanent forwarding address for e-mail thanks to post.Harvard. And 2,265 College alumni had added their names to their graduating class's listserv (an electronic mailing list) as of mid March, a 45 percent increase in just over four months. Participants like Shaller, who says his class was one of the first to begin a listserv, are treated to classmates' communiqués on many subjects not exclusively Harvard-related ("Monica Lewinsky was a big issue"). "Naturally, when Harvard is in the news, you'll get a flurry of messages," he notes: a recent New York Times article about current Harvard students' lack of free time provoked debate among alumni about the value of unstructured time during their own Harvard years.
Harvard Gateways currently gets about 70,000 page views a month, from 21,000 discrete users, both healthy statistics. But Rosas and Shaller expect to make those numbers grow even larger. They plan to make the new edition of the Harvard Alumni Directory, slated for publication in 2000, available on-line. Through all the plans and statistics, one aspect of programs at the HAA is longstanding: most efforts depend on alumni initiative. "A lot of what happens depends on alumni push or pull," says Rosas. "We're serious about keeping people happy."