Ken Knewquist just announced that the Lafayette College redesigned website recently launched as a WordPress multi-site. And I have to say, that did it exactly right. It was created and designed by Viget Labs, which has a kinda markety innocuous post about the site launch, framing brand and all that compromised terminology. But what I’d love to hear about, and what is apparent from just navigating around their site is how they are using various separate subdomain sites (or sites within sites) to allow for various users in different blogs.
For example all the department sites seem to be subdomain sites (not sure if they are separate sites, or simply running this in subdomains) allow for various authors, their own space, and basically the power and convenience of WordPress, while the architecture off the main page treats lafayette.edu as a regular single site. It is similar to some of the thoughts I had here, though seeing their work, I am increasingly thinking we need the whole instance subdomain blogs by department. That is mint!
Kudos to the Lafayette College and Vigent Labs folks, I do believe this is a very intelligent conception and design, and this will indeed “be a vital source of information and will play a new, enhanced role in communicating what is exciting and special about Lafayette to all our audiences.” And this is exactly the example we need to frame ours off of. Now the next step to consider, and Lafayette College is already there given they have faculty and students blogging for courses, is to integrate the teaching and learning going on around that campus through the site. Department sites as aggregation hubs of content, etc. A nice design, bully for Lafayette. And who was it that said WordPress is just a blog again?
Now, Ken, I want to know more about the architecture!!! 
