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The Future Home Page?
- 7 February 2008
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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Comments
So who and what is the home page for? You’ve listed six sources of content, but who is it for? Are visitors supposed to read the home page or are they going to use it to find what they’re really interested in?
Your comments imply that the home page will try to deliver content to each audience simultaneously. Being all things to all people is, I think, a mistake. It would be better to have one (maybe two) spotlights on the home page and rotate them in some fashion to take advantage of all the sources. Let the sources live in their respective areas of the website.
Another source: athletics.
Alan Humphrey wrote: “Another source: athletics.”
Yes! For the CAS area in particular, this would be very valuable!
I’m having a hard time getting my head around this. Do you have an example of somewhere that does homepage segmentation like this? Are you talking about something like Brown or Boston University’s websites? (Those are the only two I remember from that big long list someone posted awhile ago.)
Thanks,
Deanna
Alan — you note some important points. I often forget that you all don’t sit on the sidelines of my mind watching the volleys go back and forth (or the debates with Noah and Robb) as I/we work through ideas about the website. Here’s some additional information about how this could be implemented.
Let’s start with for whom is the home page? For an institution the size and complexity of Lewis & Clark, the home page is for all the audiences I noted above, plus athletics (sorry about that, knew I was forgetting something), and perhaps even a few others, but even as that is true, it is also simply a page they mostly pass-thru on their way to get to the information for which they really came to our site to find. (Our data backs this up, with most people moving onto another page within 20 seconds or less — and that isn’t unusual.)
So, I have no illusions that the content on the home page, for whatever audience, is always going to be for the rare time a certain story or element has resonance with a site visitor because that visitor a) already has a predisposition with that topic, and/or b) is coming to us for the first time and trying to get a sense of who we think we are. It is for those cases that these content streams/channels/whatever would be intended.
(Aside: facilitating site visitors finding what they need quickly and with as little thought possible is thus a very significant goal of any home page, as the people that had more an idea of exactly for what they were looking are more likely to enter our site directly at a lower level, via a search engine. I won’t touch on how important the navigation must be — in that the experience of navigating our site for them should be intuitive — that’s a whole ‘nother discussion.)
So as to how we might achieve such segmentation to be all things to all people — and I would never presume that we could achieve that goal, but I think we can make a stab at it as a means to draw people deeper into the site. One of the means of doing that is exactly the one you note. We stock the site with all these content streams and most likely on a chronological basis, rotate new elements in and out on a much more frequent basis than we do now. (In my opinion, whatever we do, we’ll be using some form of this “quicker rotation” with fewer items on a page that our current five-up spotlights.)
There is another element we can add to this as well, and exactly in what form it might take I can’t yet say, but take a look at some of these home pages: on Boston University’s home page, they succinctly give you five streams of theme-based content from which you can self-select to learn more about; or try Haverford and note their audience tabs. Another classic is Brown (although I find their implementation difficult to absorb quickly — too many audiences among other reasons — and therefore not as successful as the others).
I’m not proposing that we simply adopt any of the above designs, their methods or their motifs, but I am simply demonstrating that there are means by which we can give our major audiences like-minded voice from which to connect.
And as you note Alan, the content should really live in the correct location of the website, but with RSS, what we can do is take select bits of the greater content located deeper in the site and elevate it to the home page to (if we’re lucky) catch the eye of someone who might never have found it otherwise. Or in other words, give them a peek and a path to the greater wealth of content located deeper in the site.