“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 →
Information Architecture
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 →
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 →
14
Dec 08
Centralization Around Audience
Two of the main ideas I promote for higher ed websites is that a decentralized management approach does not work well, but a centralized one does. But what does this mean in practical terms? That entails a discussion about audiences. Continue reading →
03
Dec 08
The Case for Centralization
I recently wrote about the perils of decentralizing web operations. In this post, I’ll discuss the advantages of doing just the opposite — centralizing. But before I get into it, let me provide context to the discussion.
I have no issue whatsoever with decentralization in terms of content. What I do have an issue with is decentralizing the management of other aspects of the web effort — strategy, IA, design and code. Decentralizing those aspects result in the pitfalls I outlined in my earlier post. Now there’s always an exception to the rule, but those should be few and far between and that mantra holds true in this case. Continue reading →