There’s no shortage of criticism about the University of Denver website. As its web designer, I get grief about it from colleagues, students, parents and friends. Even I think its pretty bad, but the challenge to improve it is enticing. When I accepted my job a year ago, I didn’t fully appreciate how ingrained the status quo was in terms of the existing website. I figured I could ride into town, inject my outsider’s perspective and years of experience and get things turned around. Well, as you might imagine, I was naive. It’s been difficult, time consuming and just plain draining to steer the website toward a new course — one that, to me, is a slam dunk generally speaking. That said, I wanted to outline the steps I saw that needed to be accomplished when I joined the team in order to turn criticism into praise. It’s a short list and could use more detail, but here are the major milestones. Continue reading →
December, 2008
24
Dec 08
The Step Before Defining A Website’s Goals
“Redesign the (fill in the blank)’s website,” upper management directs you. “No problem,” you obligingly respond, “I’ll get right on it.” But then what? How do you undertake something seemingly innocuous, but in reality big, complex and fraught with politics? Continue reading →
21
Dec 08
Higher Ed Sites Have A Huge Advantage: A Captive Audience
A fundamental tenet of information architecture is the belief that if your site isn’t easy to navigate, doesn’t have great content or simply falls flat compared to a competitor, people will abandon it. While I subscribe to this belief, it does have exceptions and higher ed sites are one of those exceptions. Why? Because higher ed sites have a captive audience. Continue reading →
18
Dec 08
Stick To Your Guns
When you talk about a site oriented for prospective students (which is likely your main www.yourSchool.edu address), who are your clients? The academic department that has made a request for added functionality? Or the student life group’s request for an online survey? How about the chancellor’s request to create an updated look for his office’s pages? I say none of the above. The client is the university at large and, more specifically, the web’s governing documents whether you call them your goals, mission, web strategy or all of the above. Any web related request should be compared against these guiding documents. If the request fits the larger strategy, then put it into the queue and get it done. Otherwise, you should respond with a polite “no.” Continue reading →
16
Dec 08
Virtues of “The Site”
I began my higher ed career in early 2008. From the outset, colleagues talked about the “core” site and how we would re-design it that year. I had no idea what core site meant so I asked (in my interviews, the term core was not used, just the generic “site”). They told me it was the homepage, the landing pages for each of the global navigation areas, a couple of pages below those landing pages and all the featured news stories (not to be confused with regular news). After a short while, I came to realize that the core site was, essentially, all the pages left over once you took out all of the other sites — the academic departments, administrative departments, athletics, clubs and orgs, etc. The core consisted of maybe three dozen pages, if that. It was those three dozen pages that were to be re-designed by the team during the course of 2008. This struck me as odd given that I came from an agency where a three dozen page site with nearly no functionality would take maybe two months to complete even with other projects on my plate. How could such a small portion of the site take so long to re-design? And, why did the re-design project only include the “core” pages? What about the rest of it? Why did everyone talk about the site as a loose confederation of smaller sites instead of as a comprehensive, cohesive whole? Continue reading →
