redesigning lclark.edu

David McKelvey

Where’s the old design?

So some of you are probably wondering, what happened to the old design for this site? It didn’t seem so bad… (Or maybe some thought it did.) At any rate, it’s been put aside for now, as the website redesign is in full swing, and for the duration, it seemed appropriate to shake things up a bit.

I’ll post more on the redesign shortly, but as of this Friday, we’ll have the last of our initial getting-to-know-you-sponge-sessions with White Whale on campus to meet with all kinds of people here to get their thoughts about the current website, Trillium and what would make their day for the next website. (If you weren’t consulted, please just drop me a line — or just comment on this post and your thoughts will be there to be added to the discussion.)

So until then…

David

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Starting Monday March 17th, the Redesign

Some History

In mid-January, I sent out a request for proposal (RFP) to about ten different firms, large and small, local and distant, that had come up on our radar as potential companies that would be able and well-suited to help us form the strategy for our website redesign. Two weeks later, after a process of meeting and talking with several companies, six proposals were submitted.

Our small committee of Dan Terrio, Tom Krattenmaker and myself reviewed the proposals and selected two firms to invite to campus for informal two-hour “interviews.” (At this point, it should be noted that both firms were excellent and would clearly be able to handle the job. What we really needed to discover was what the working relationship would be like.)

Both accepted and we met with each of their teams during mid-February. Those sessions gave us lots to think about, and after consulting with members of New Media, PubCom and a few others across campus, it was still very close. (And what really threw helped us solidify our decision was the responses from the references provided.)

With that, I’m pleased to announce that White Whale (WW), a small educationally-focused web design firm from Oakland, Calif. will become our partner in forming the forthcoming web redesign strategy.

What’s Next

A week or so ago, we officially signed the contract and I’m happy to report that beginning tomorrow, March 17th, Jason, Tonya, Donald, and Alex — all of White Whale — will be on campus to meet with select groups over three days to hear from all of you what should become of our web site.

And as of this posting we’re opening up authorship of this blog so that WW can participate in and communicate about the web redesign as we’re all working through the process. (One of the reasons that WW rose to the top was due to their very collaborative process with their client-partners.)

So, if you have some thoughts about the web redesign, be sure to:

  • communicate them with any of us, WW, IT or New Media;
  • stop us if you see us in the Trailroom or elsewhere around campus; and,
  • watch this blog to continue the conversation.

There’s a lot more to come over the next few days in particular; I’ll be posting more soon.

David

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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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How do I get my event in the “On Campus” section of the home page(s)?

Before getting into the details, please note that this policy is simply a portion of a bigger picture regarding the storytelling we do about Lewis & Clark — that we express the themes of academic leadership, global and local engagement, and our being in and of Portland.

Getting on the List

Now that the On Campus section of the home page is starting to take root, it seems only fitting to explain the process of selection/ranking of material is performed. First of all, the content to be included must meet the following criteria:

  1. The event must be of public interest, must be open to the public, and must represent a distinction for Lewis & Clark that connects with one of our key messaging themes.
  2. There must be a web page or site to which we can link so that interested site users have a convenient way to click through for more information. For an event, a simple campus calendar entry alone is not sufficient. We are looking for a more robust page, including a basic prose description of the event and participants and, ideally, photos of the speakers or performers. With enough advance notice, the New Media team can assist you with creating this content.
  3. The event must “beat out the competition,” so to speak. We receive many requests for “On Campus” items; because of limited space and the large number of compelling events, we will not be able to accommodate every request and will have to weigh the external audience’s interest and the event’s relevance to institutional goals.

Decisions about “On Campus” content are usually a group effort involving myself, Public Relations Director Jodi Heintz, and PubCom AVP Tom Krattenmaker. If you would like your event considered for the “On Campus” section make sure you’ve submitted it to the calendar and provided a link to a web page with additional information.

Even if your event does not eventually appear in the On Campus section of the home page, getting the above information organized and into the web calendar at the earliest possible opportunity will greatly help PubCom help you get your event publicity. It may be that the best publicity to meet your goals would be best accomplished through other means, and the shorter the time interval between our hearing from you and the date of the event, the less we can do with you to help meet your goals.

Note: All events that are open to the public and have been posted to the web calendar are automatically included in the weekly events news release distributed to local media.

The Ranking Methodology

As to ranking items once they are added to the rotation, the following rules will be applied via an algorithm. These rules primarily apply when the schedule is full (i.e. more items than the available three spots). When this is not the case, future items may appear on the list earlier than noted below, ranked in order of proximity to start date.

  1. Notice-level “emergency” news, such as closures for weather, trumps everything and will always take precedence. The notices are always of limited time periods, and so will not impact the overall list unless ongoing notices are posted as part of keeping people informed. (Serious emergency news is handled differently.)
  2. Major institutional events (i.e. Commencement) will get higher billing than all other events because of their cross-school, intimate involvement with all facets of the institution and the public.
  3. On average, all items will appear no-earlier than one week before the start date of the item and would generally stay in the list until the start date. (The closer to the start date, the higher in the list the item appears.)
  4. For items that have extended multi-day periods, such as art exhibitions and the like, the item would also re-climb the list as the closing date draws nigh.
  5. If an item also has a spotlight covering the issue, event or news, the On Campus item may be reduced in rank to promote other items without such.

While we are currently performing all the above manually, we will be automating the process soon. Once that occurs, you will also be able to click a “see all” (or similar) link to see and search through all the past and present On Campus items. Further, you will be able to segment the list by various categories or tags, so that you might only see law-related events, arts events, etc.

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