redesigning lclark.edu

November 2007

CMS — What it should be? (Or, should it be?)

In a site the scale of any major college/university, the real difficulty for new media is helping people connect the dots to different kinds of information that already exists on the site. Often, the left hand in one area of the institution doesn’t have the time to keep up with and know that there might be valuable information for them in another’s site (the right hand), and they end up duplicating the work, if it’s that important to have it available.

And, while we in new media can help connect some of those dots, and often do, it would be far faster and more robust if there were a more automated method of doing this. So, Noah and I were just talking about this and some other issues — thinking out loud about ways to see the website (and management of it) work better — and I was particularly enamored with the following idea.

What if the future CMS allowed people to tag (in exactly that Web 2.0 methodology) certain types of content (images, audio, video, text blocks, RSS feeds, etc.) or whole pages with tags, perhaps from a defined set. Further, they could set a scope of availability that might include academic-only, or select portion of the site only, or, available anywhere on lclark.edu.

Website editors could then sign up to follow certain tags with email notification or by RSS feed to be alerted when new content appears that is relevant to their site’s mission. (They would also be able to search on the tags at any time.) Other types of information would be automatically built into this system, such as alerts regarding news stream by tag and events by tag.

If the tagged element is a bit of content, as in a audio file, the site editor could then choose to absorb the material into their site (not by duplicating the original content, but merely distributing it to an additional location). In this manner, if that content changes in the future, like the tuition numbers which change annually, any page absorbing that content would automatically be using the most updated and accurate version.

While talking about this, Noah did remind me that Trillium does actually use a good base for this methodology. In Trillium, blocks of content are assembled to make pages, and within an account/site, you can re-use a block as many times as you like. What I’ve outlined above would require an extension of that methodology, so that accounts/sites could share their blocks (and a notification system to help manage that process).

Thoughts?

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2 people have already made the whale happy; but who couldn’t be happier?(Go ahead, make a comment…)

Interesting Navigation

Occasionally we may link to sites that have elements that we find interesting, or address a common design concern in a way that seems particularly new or notable. This is not an endorsement of the particular design, and it’s not an indication of how our own design will turn out. Just a little, “huh, you seen this?”

I ran across the recently redesigned homepage for Haverford College and they have some interesting ways of handling front page navigation and search:

Federated search [top right corner]: returns results in different categories like we have, but changes the orientation to use columns of various sizes and colors. Also adds student groups and profiles. Also they have their primary results be web pages, which for us is an additional click away.

Quick access [link on the right side]: as opposed to using flyout nav I guess, this puts a bunch of common or high priorty links all on the same high profile page page right off the front page.

Helpful hints: little boxes that pop up to highlight links/features/etc., is something I haven’t seen on a college site before. Too see them try refreshing the page a few times and they will pop up and go away in what seems to be a semi-random fashion.

I initially stumbled upon this site when browsing the higher education focused web design gallery over at eduStyle which is a neat site chock-full of the latest college and university web designs.

One last thing: If you ever run across an element on a web site that you either love or don’t love, we’d be interested in hearing from you. Post a comment on this blog or shoot us an email!

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5 people have already made the whale happy; but who couldn’t be happier?(Go ahead, make a comment…)