redesigning lclark.edu

L&C Search

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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Google Mini

I had recently been in an email conversation with Kim Brodkin regarding the difficulty she was having with the L&C search (specifically related to the Multicultural Symposium). I’ve reprinted part of our conversation here with her permission. First, from Kim:

Until last week, if a visitor to the LC website typed “multicultural symposium” into the “search” box on the home page, the recommended websites did not include the page for the Multicultural Symposium, but the list did include the symposia for International Affairs and Environmental Studies. A quick call to Noah resulted in an immediate correction of this significant problem, and we were grateful to him for fixing this instantly. Because the URL for the symposium is so long and unwieldy, it is vital for people to be able to visit the website and get to the symposium with as few clicks as possible. Because there was no mention of the event anywhere else on the main page, the “search” box serves as important way to locate our site.

This is not a new issue, as part of our search is “hand-done” and we are working on a solution to automate it more easily. But, it occurred to me that frankly, a lot of people probably don’t know this. So, in addition to the “short links” about which I’ve just posted, Lewis & Clark has purchased and installed a Google Mini.

Essentially, a Google Mini is a computer that lives in the server room and spends it’s time both crawling and categorizing your site, and delivering up results to people like you and me doing searches of the site. The difference between it and Google itself is that we (in this case IT, New Media and the libraries) get to help refine it’s search results. The Google Mini is in testing now, so that when we release it, it’s producing results at or better than currently provided, but I have no specific release date yet. (I’m sure I’ll post something here when it comes online if you’re keen on it.)

With the help of the Google Mini and short links, we should be able to better help promote significant events.

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