Heavywinter

One of the main arguments I hear against my mantra of centrally maintained websites for higher ed is that a decentralized approach allows academic departments the flexibility to market their programs based on their students’ specific characteristics and needs. Academic department’s tell me that their particular students are special and different from all other departments’ students. Therefore, their website has to have a custom design in order to stand out. Continue reading “What Higher Ed Sites Could Learn From Barack Obama”

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 “How To Turn Around A Problematic Site”

“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 “The Step Before Defining A Website’s Goals”

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 “Higher Ed Sites Have A Huge Advantage: A Captive Audience”

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 “Virtues of “The Site””