Since their breakthrough in the mid 1990's, web sites have become one of the most important channels for communication at Swedish universities. Drawing upon the analytical framework of "the production of culture perspective", the thesis investigates how the form and content of Swedish university web sites are influenced by the production milieu in which they are produced.

Based on quantitative content analysis of the home pages of university web sites, the thesis documents changes in the form and content, such as links, headings, and body matter becoming more focused on marketing, as well as an increasing need for different kinds of navigation aids on the web sites. In addition to this, the thesis presents the results of fifteen in-depth interviews with informants working at various levels of the web organizations at Swedish universities. Using the production of culture perspective, together with previous research on media production in general, and literature on more specific areas, such as organization theory and communication, and media and technology, this presentation is followed by a discussion and analysis of structural, production related, factors, and their influence on the form and content of the web sites.

The overall conclusion of the thesis is that the production of university web sites - their form and content - is about much more than available technology, web development processes, and different programming languages, to mention but a few examples. It is also about organizational routines, about the ways decisions are made, about policies for web publishing within the overall organization, about different stakeholders being put against each other, and it is about strategic choices about what to publish on the web and not. Furthermore, the thesis shows that structural factors function as constraints, as well as facilitators of web site production. For example, the width of web pages increases in correspondence with the increasing number of larger, high-resolution, displays used by the user; local policies and strategies decides the content to be focused; and a consistent form and layout of the university web sites are inhibited by the organizational structures and lines of command.