Within a university, there are often several hundred independent web presences, representing various levels of hierarchy within the organization. "Technology follows organization!" - is the principle according to which a large number of public web presence islands represent the organizational units of the university, which are highly decentralised and frequently to some extent autonomous (as illustrated in fig. 1, Schwickert 2004 a). The organizational, management and task structures within a university are mostly highly decentralized. Consequently the organizational units can make decisions and act with a high degree of autonomy. The result of this is that the layout, design, and navigational and functional concepts of web sites vary greatly within a university. There is no doubt that a patchwork of public web sites can not project a professional image of the university as a whole to the outside world. One problem is, therefore, that a corporate design needs to be integrated into the numerous university public web sites and aggregated information needs to be efficiently accessible.
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