Let’s look deeper for some actual differences between these two platforms.

Caveats: not all mobile platforms support advanced HTML5 features, like GPS, so mobile Web pages should include basic “backup plans” to serve html-only content without relying on javascript.

Stay mobile and agile, and don’t code yourself into a corner by creating a native iPhone app. To drive the point home, I’ll leave you with a personal anecdote. A vendor called me the other day offering to create an iPhone app for Elon University. I asked him what features and benefits could be offered and he replied with the usual list: GPS walking tour, news headlines, campus map, latest athletics scores, quick access to phone numbers and email addresses of faculty and staff on campus, and a launch icon on the iPhone’s home screen. I had to break the bad news to him that our mobile site already did all of those things, for free, while working on many other mobile devices, being indexed by Google, and remaining easy to update by other developers on campus should new features be required.

The Web itself is a one-to-many system of distribution. One source of content is consumed by many consumers. Your strategy for disseminating campus news across your own site should be a microcosm of The Web, operating under the same principles. For example, Elon University has a central news site that uses a single database to store all news articles.

Our news site provides RSS and XML feeds for consumption, including consumption by our content management system (CMS). For our Web Team of three, this makes setting up dynamic home pages for individual departments a breeze compared to maintaining static content for every department and program. When anyone on campus posts a new story to our news site, it instantly appears on all relevant department and program sites also.

We use an in-house CMS which uses XSLT to transform raw XML data into HTML. XSLT is the method we use to repackage the news feed into a variety of different HTML outcomes. Your CMS likely has similar capabilities for consuming XML, even if it doesn’t use XSLT.

This forced funnel all content must flow through ensures our main news site never misses a story. If a department wants to put content on their home page, they have to put it into the central repository of all campus news. From there, that same content can be displayed on our main news site, the department’s home page, other departments’ home pages (should they choose to include it), our mobile page, Facebook app and anywhere else that will parse the XML feed. Below is a diagram of a few of the uses of all this data, and how other databases can contribute to dynamic, information-rich Web pages that are always up to date, and that manage themselves automatically. Pages in our CMS have a blue background, while those in orange are separate applications that also consume these XML feeds.