redesigning lclark.edu

February 2008

Another site worth a look

Take a look at Bard’s site: http://www.bard.edu/  I enjoy the concept much more than the execution, but it is worth a look.  The pulldown menus at the top too easily get lost and one is left feeling that the only way to navigate (other than the search box) is the Flash people photos.  Having a top banner built in Flash with moving photos is all the rage these days.  I’m not much of a fan, as I think they can be hard to navigate.  Bard’s no exception in my mind.  Why click on this guy or that?  (Why not?)  The concept of emphasizing the “human element” of a college is a good one though.

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Site Architecture

Noah received the following message today — which we thought as indicative of why we are planning a redesign. I’ve posted my response as a comment.

David

—

Good morning, Noah

Since you are the one name I know in association with the College website, you are the one to whom I want to give some feedback—hoping that it will reach the ears of whomever is the “right” person.

Over the years I have spent a lot of time visiting college websites, trying to find various department and faculty information. From these searches, I have come to know what makes a site “friendly” and useful from the start. Alas, our own site fails in that regard.

This morning I tried to find out some specific department information on our site because my own computer (with all my information) is out being repaired, and the information in the printed directory is many years out of date. So I started at the top page, clicked on Academics, hoping to find a list of department names. Not there.

Then I clicked on College of Arts & Sciences, again hoping to find a list of departments. Not there.

This is definitely not “user friendly” and I’m looking from the inside! If I were a secretary at another school who was looking for department information, specifically the name and email address of a department secretary, how am I supposed to find it? When I DO get to a department site (Graduate School of Education) I’m offered a Faculty button, but there’s no Faculty & Staff button.

Many other schools offer department listings right up front, no need to keep digging and digging. On top of that, when I actually did reach one of the departments I wanted, I still couldn’t find out the staffing information, only faculty. This is not good.

At what point do the individual departments control what’s visible/available, and what is determined by a different administrative body? Also, at the uppermost levels (in terms of layers of web pages) who decided that the department listings would be so impossible to find?

Is any of this making sense? Do you understand what is making me so frustrated with our own site?

With great sincerity and a desire to help,

Charlene [Walker]

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The Future Home Page?

While I wouldn’t be so foolish as to say this is definitely the way to go, I am willing to throw myself and a few ideas out there for everyone to think on and consider. (With the hope that the end discussion yields that perfect solution.)

Mike Sexton had recently brought up a point I find compelling (and admittedly, I’m reacting here only to a portion of a recent discussion). That is, our current implementation of the spotlights utilizes three primary sources of content: the Chronicle, the Annual Report, and outside stories written about us by the press. With the outside stories to which we link, there is a potential loss for after reading the story, we may not see our site visitor return (or at least not immediately). Wouldn’t it be better if the content to which we link was on our site?

Certainly yes it would, and because of copyright law, we cannot of course simply duplicate their content, nor would I expect that we wouldn’t link to stories about us in the right context, but perhaps we should be trying to develop additional content streams to the home page that would be housed on our site and therefore, give site visitors more opportunity rather than less, to learn more about us.

With that, in the coming weeks, New Media will be moving spotlight management to a new blog which will give us an easy means of storing stories as well as the spotlight text. As yet, I don’t have a good mind as to from where new content streams will come. However, I have had some thoughts about how best to use this new feature.

My ideas are mostly longer-term (for incorporation into the redesign) as they require some form of home page segmentation by audience, where we open up the ability to funnel writing to each audience, hopefully delivering content originating from a member of that audience. Audience content streams available from the home page could look something like:

  • main > national news, etc. (similar to current content stream)
  • prospective students > highlight recent posts from student blogs, segmented by school of course, with audience-appropriate links, etc.
  • current students > highlight recent posts from student blogs, but links, etc. would be likely different than the prospective…
  • faculty/staff > highlight printed and presented, recent posts from faculty blogs… there are some law faculty members that blog, it would be phenomenal to develop some undergrad facblogs as well, but I personally know what a commitment that is
  • alumni > could do the same for faculty blogs… add chronicle + annual report content
  • donors/friends > donor stories? maybe integrated site to learn about our mission and why it’s important to support Lewis & Clark

Basically, I’d be looking to mine all sources for re-distribution if the writing/ideas/content meets the needs for the audience in question. (So, the writing-level, style, voice, etc. required for current students to prospective students is obviously going to vary from that for alumni or faculty.)

Tapping user-generated-content is really our best hope of telling the stories about L&C that we all hope to tell (and from a much more believable voice) so finding ways to encourage that type of content generation and percolating it up to inclusion is going to be a significant factor in our redesign.

All this is just the germ of an idea and needs lots more development, but is I hope somewhere to start. I just keep asking myself, in a perfect world, how would the home page function? I hope you do too.

Thoughts? Questions?

David

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Reminding ourselves what not to do…

Sometimes it is helpful to remind ourselves what not to do, in web design as well as in life. And while the process of learning these lessons can often be funny for those watching, not repeating the mistakes of others is of great value in a large project like a web redesign. The site Web Pages That Suck nicely illustrates the Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015 (scroll down a little bit, below the fold is where the content starts…). In amongst the snark there are some pearls of wisdom to be found.

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