It’s About Community, Stupid!

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After watching Jim Groom’s  talk on DS106 and open education, I started to think about all the energy that went into re-thinking what is possible on umw.edu, and all the potential that we now have.

For now, lots of activity is swirling about responding to a stream of complaints, fixing bad links, improving server performance, making navigational adjustments for our internal users, getting folks used to “thinking” in WordPress, documentation, training: essentially housecleaning. These things are important. I’ve learned one thing in the past 11 years at UMW: As much as the institution may want the Web site to be primarily a marketing piece for external audiences, it has become so much more to our internal audiences, and we owe them basic functionality before we move on to the cooler things ahead. Balancing those two things is not a science, and involves a willingness to be flexible and to respond to user need, to keep a cool head, to admit mistakes, and sometimes to kill our darlings. There are a few darlings strewn alongside the road right now, and that’s to be expected.

Jim’s talk brought back to me many reasons why I wanted to do build the foundation of the new UMW Web site in the way we did it: No big corporate vendor-interloper, open source tools, working in ways that people already work and think, paying attention to the Web as an academic space, building a community of ideas. As with any iterative process such as this, spiraling back and forth between the initial idea and its execution, and you see that every decision that you’ve made actually potentiates the next decision, then you know you’re on to something. And complaints and fixes notwithstanding, we are onto something. So, what next?

So much is next that I get giddy just thinking about it. But I’m most excited about building a core piece of the Transparent University environment: showing the world what it is like be a part of the various disciplines at UMW.

Currently, as with most higher education web sites, we have kind of a dry list of academic disciplines that link to the various department sites. From an information perspective, it’s bare bones. It does not communicate a compelling argument for studying THAT discipline at THIS institution. If we are communicating that we are Great Minds, a list doesn’t cut it. We need something more. We need to expose our community of ideas, and invite participation.

The traditional student recruitment model on the Web involves a lot of showmanship: cool design, perhaps some video, twitter, facebook, maybe some student blogs, for the resource-rich, some interactive flashy stuff. The trouble is that this type of thing is largely expository rather than participatory. Playing with a canned “immersive experience” on your own is not quite the same as being in community. Enabling people to ask a question of the admissions office on facebook or twitter is a start. But, the activities and the flavor of the institution cannot be embodied within our admissions office alone, as amazing as those folks are. A simple list of faculty with their areas of expertise (the Media Resource Guide) is a great tool, but again it’s not compelling in and of itself.

We have an embarrassment of riches at UMW with regard to online, easily-accessible, and aggregation-ready academic content. UMW Blogs unchained the higher thinking of this institution from the shackles of the LMS and, on a minute-by-minute basis, exposes our student and faculty activity to the world. What UMW.EDU needs is a way to aggregate all that good stuff, along with data from the Media Resource Guide, maybe some Banner data on courses, catalog information, social media, and all that stuff into a meaningful environment that fosters scholarly discussion and invites the world — of which the prospective student is a part — into the conversation.

Over the years, we have talked about this notion of allowing the prospective student into the UMW experience prior to their actually plunking down the deposit. Our technology, heavily dependent on student system data, was always a stumbling block: Students cannot have access to the portal or any online system until they are in the student system, which doesn’t happen until the deposit is paid. So, if we are going to rely on our systems to allow students into the UMW experience as a recruiting or “yield” tool, it can’t get there from here.

But if there’s anything that UMW Blogs has taught us is that we don’t need to let a little thing like an ERP system stand in the way of letting the world know how cool it is to study with the Great Minds at UMW. We have enough out there right now that we can shape its delivery in such a way that, for instance, a student in New Jersey who is really interested in communications just may join DS106 because they saw it in the mashup “Communications” site on umw.edu. That kind of magical connection can’t be bottled in a costly flash application — it’s real connection with real people where the technology takes a back seat in service to human need, not the other way around.

The branding effort for the new Web site, with all the fancy graphics, was, to me, only a start. The real UMW experience is not one of unlimited resources, a pristine campus, or dazzling residence halls. It’s the people, the Great Minds, students included. Who would not want to belong to this club? It’s where all the cool kids go.

We’ve got the barn. Let’s put on a show!

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Charette

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It was 1979 when I first learned the concept of “charette.” It was orientation at my first semester at Parsons, and we were scared straight by the department chair about what design school would be like. All-nighters would be a regular thing, some of us would graduate to make big bucks, most of us would make a living, some of us would struggle. The term “charette” was used at the Beaux Arts to describe this frantic rush to meet a deadline for a “crit” (critique, when they’d tear your work apart in front of everyone). The word apparently means “on the cart,” evoking an image of working while running towards the studio to pin up your drawings. We were told that although this would be physically demanding, it was imperative that, as designers of the environment, we should remain “awake” and focused, no matter how blurry our minds from the sleep deprivation.

After the lecture from the chair, a group of us got into the elevator, and the chair accompanied us. No one pressed the button, and he admonished us that “if we were awake, we would have known to press the button.” This guy was harsh, no doubt about it, but this concept of being awake and aware of the details stuck with me. It kind of gave a purpose to my usual racing thoughts and unending stream of consciousness of seemingly disjointed ideas that always seemed to add up to something, but I wasn’t really sure.

The chair didn’t lie. The next three years were a bit of a blur running all over Manhattan for the late Sunday-night supplies at Sam Flax. Surrounded by tourists with subway maps and kids, you’d be on the R train on a Sunday morning not having slept the night before, heading to Canal street to buy some model plastic and solvent glue, wondering what the parallel universe of “recreation” must be like. I wondered if my life would always find me trudging through crowded trains not having showered that day, with wooden building models,hoping they don’t break on my way to a presentation, hoping my blueprints wouldn’t delaminate from the poster board, hoping that I could afford to pay for the the contact negatives of my pencil drawings.

I wistfully now go through another charette. I’m walking around with that ashy-skin look, dark circles, messy hair, laundry to the ceiling, no spare emotional parts. Back to 4-5 hours per sleep per night (hey, I’ve got little kids, and I’m 52 and that’s as close to an all-nighter as I can get), I’m again in that parallel universe where I watch other folks “go to lunch” or the gym, and it feels like a million years since I’ve done anything remotely resembling that.

There are no more building models, plastic, solvent glue, ammonia-riddled blueprints — I carry only a laptop these days. But the worries, and the process, are the same. Iterate, iterate, iterate through every detail, back up to the concept, back down to the details, like you’re swimming the butterfly stroke to the finish with your eyes open all the way.

Man, We Were Good

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I know we are all looking forward to saying goodbye to our Contribute environment at UMW. But, before its imminent demise, I want to point out a few really good things about it.

Over 7 years ago, we put our hearts and souls into investigating and standing up a web environment that would be easier to manage than our previous environment was. At the time, Macromedia (now Adobe) Contribute was pretty much revolutionary: a low cost content management system that provided users with an easy interface to edit Web pages. It was a barrier remover in its time.

The unfortunate thing throughout the life of our “Contribute” environment was that Contribute wasn’t the amazing part of it. Calling it “in Contribute” is a misnomer. Our Web development team Blaine Donley,  Edward Gray, and myself created a PHP application on the backend that filled in the blanks that Contribute could not. Our application stored all the urls, their relationships, and their structure, in a database. It allowed people to create new pages and arrange them through a Web interface, something that Contribute could not do natively. Something that no one else was doing with Contribute at the time.

Then, the content itself lived within the familiar notion of a “page” which our highly distributed team of Web managers could understand and manipulate.

The result was a really fast-performing CMS that only had to retrieve urls instead of delivering and parsing all the content. Considering the speed of servers at the time, this was a great decision that allowed us to scale up to the creation of over 22,000 Web pages, with 8,000 active at any point in time, and very rarely has there been a performance issue. As a matter of fact, I can’t recall one time when performance was an issue.

But the interwebs have moved on from directory structures and stored collections of html files. I knew this was coming, but I also knew, back then, that the technology to deploy a real CMS was too expensive, immature, clunky, and overpromising. I knew that this system we were building would be an intermediate step while the Web got its act together, Web standards settled in a bit, XML grew up, browsers got a clue, and our folks became more Web savvy.

I chose Contribute because, unlike its predecessor Dreamweaver, it could lock out the user from marking up text with font tags, sizes, colors, and other non-standards-compliant markup that was just beginning its deprecation as CSS2 was looming on the horizon. A few people did not like that they couldn’t put big, green, ugly text on their home pages. But, it was a decision that had to be made to ensure the integrity of the markup. Always, in the back of my mind, was some notion of an XML dump of everything in the system, and that had to include standards-compliant markup or we’d be in a world of hurt with manual editing, copying, and pasting.

I think that I was a lot smarter back then than I remember being. Now, folks are able to import their content from our old environment to our new, amazing, beautiful, multi-network WordPress installation, with the click of a button. And only a few error messages in the bunch, which were easily addressed.

It wasn’t simply a script that I wrote that did this, although I wrote a script. It was all the thinking and foresight that we had years ago when we built that now ghastly Contribute system. I’ve always been fond of building and creating systems — it’s why I’m not very good as a one-off designer or Web developer. I like the larger context, the longer view, the seeing what’s around the corner, solving problems on a larger scale. It’s part of my narcissistic grandiosity.

So, before we say goodbye to Contribute, I’m patting myself, and my two former colleagues on the backs. Our system may be on the way out, but by thinking through the larger implications, we created the basis to enable an import thousands of standards-compliant Web pages into a state-of-the-art CMS so painlessly that all folks asked after training is “Now how do I make my site look good.” They are jazzed up, rather than overwhelmed, wanting more rather than less.

Part of that is the power of WordPress. But a big part of getting there is the power of our team back then. Blaine and Edward, we did good.

The Transparent University Gains Support

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So much work on the new UMW Web site has been accomplished in this past academic year that I’ve neglected to continue blogging about the ideas that inspired it, primarily this notion of the Transparent University, the title of this blog. That’s why it has been gratifying to lift my head from the grindstone temporarily to present the idea, now poised for implementation, to those at the University who have not been party to the day-to-day process.

The charge has been a “new UMW Web site,” which, due to our pretty robust collection of content on our main Web server and on UMW Blogs, has been a more complex process than most institutions face with a project of this nature. When your site houses everything from Admissions materials to where to recycle your office waste, and when you now have thousands of student and faculty postings, updated daily, that comprise the online academic life of this institution, this project can’t be a facelift. To take best advantage of this moment in time when we are re-positioning ourself in the marketplace, the new Web presence has had to be a wholesale revisiting of what a higher education web environment means.

In short, unlike many institutions, we HAVE the content, we don’t have to dream it up. And the “upper levels” of the site need not comprise “brochureware” — they can pull from the content we already have, using site architecture to contextualize feeds from multiple areas, giving a rich and deep meaning to what UMW life can be, and indeed is, in these days when core issues like the academic experience rank below the look of a residence hall in the priorities of the incoming student and their families. How does UMW, alongside UVa and William & Mary, deign to put forth academic experience as a main driver in recruitment?

That’s not an easy question to answer. And, surely, the appearance of our campus, the likelihood of post-graduate employment, and quality of non-academic life, are “brand drivers” that will remain in these highly-competitive times with shrinking state budgets, and shrinking family tuition dollars.

The Web site can only play a small part in this effort, but if you hang around Jim Groom enough, you become convinced that perhaps, just perhaps, it may be bigger than you think. I mean, who else but The Bava can elicit a roomful of applause at a UMW Cabinet meeting?

Since May, Jim Groom, Curtiss Grymala (our resident WordPress guru), and myself, have had occasion to present the ideas behind the coming UMW Web site within three contexts: Faculty Academy, University Relations and Advancement’s division meeting, and the UMW Cabinet meeting. These presentations have come at a time when the thinking behind this new Web site has been fleshed out beyond the conceptual, when we are developing, testing, and designing in a real environment with real people. And the responses we have gotten in all three presentations have been overwhelming — this institution gets it, is willing to take a risk, is willing to be out in front of the pack rather than following and imitating what others are doing.

This is a good thing because, as I’ve mentioned in many contexts over this past year, no one institution has a lock on how best to “do” the web. Indeed, most research into higher education Web sites can leave you feeling a bit of despair. You’ll see forays into mobile, video, blogging, social bookmarking, flash, jqueryUI fanciness. Behind many of these, you can almost hear the strategies: “We’ve got to have a mobile presence! We need a Facebook page? Get students who want to blog!” It’s as if the overall thinking is that the purchase of or participation in new technologies somehow makes your site more current and relevant.

I understand it — it can be hard to feel like the Web is passing you by and leaving you to irrelevance. It’s a temptation I’ve resisted, despite the clamouring of many a vendor to get UMW’s attention during this redesign process. I took some heat from a consultant on this recently, but I just don’t see the point in taking precious resources towards developing a confection of interaction like cute little flash or html5 apps just so we “look cool and relevant.” There is no research that tells me that the quality and quantity of admissions applications go up when you spend all your Web development dollars on cute interactive apps and microsites. As a matter of fact, there is research that states that this “microsite” approach works best when it includes quick access to relevant information rather than marketing content.

If there is one lesson I’ve learned from UMW Blogs, from Facebook, and from Twitter, it’s that the technology doesn’t matter. All three of these environments are based on very simple Web-based applications that have grown organically through “crowdsourcing” and iterative improvements, taking advantage of simple technologies coupled with the network effect (i.e., human behavior and ingenuity). It’s one of the reasons why the new Facebook video chat announcement seemed so ham-handed: who cares about video chat technology? The cool stuff that made Facebook work was the simple ability to find that guy you went to the prom with and realize why you broke up afterall. Now I cringe that he could hit that button on the right-hand column and actually ask me to video chat — EWWW!

It seems as if we’ve learned that people respond less to applications than to each other, and that works best when the application is most transparent and usable. We’ll see that heat up once Google+ starts decreasing its nerd:normal people ratio. It’s cool, but my 7 brothers and sisters (ranging in ages from 53 to 71) aren’t going to be on Google+ anytime soon.

What does all this mean for UMW’s Web site? Well, content and relationships are king. So, we’re keeping the app simple and extensible (WordPress), we’re encouraging subscriptions to existing media hosting environments (YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, Picasa), and we’re integrating, through simple RSS, our academic life into the body of the Web site.

On possible scenario: You’re a prospective student looking for a college with a great Study Abroad program. You can visit the catalog page that describes the program, you can go to the Center for International Education program page which goes into more detail. But what if that “institutional” content served also to contextualize a feed of posts by students stationed around the world at that moment in a host of countries, blogging about their experiences, enabling a direct connection between the prospective student and the student abroad? The simplicity of this proposition is at the heart of what we are trying to do: Not bypass the official communications about the university, but allow it to exist side-by-side with the actual work of this institution, enabling direct communications between people with the University acting as one of many hubs.

UMW is in a unique position to accomplish much with this simple idea. In reality, our Web site now is so old anything will look revolutionary, but don’t be fooled by appearances. The shift we are planning on making, if successful, is a bold one, and our Cabinet is to be applauded for its courage and its faith in the folks driving this project. Stay tuned.

The Redesign Begins

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Today was the first meeting of the University’s new Web Advisory Committee. It’s a great group of people. To a person, they are engaged in the conversation about how to make our public Web presence work better as a marketing tool and as a better-organized resource for information the University community needs.

For sure, there is an appetite to change the content management system we are now using. Contribute has run its course, the design is dated, and the servers are huffing and puffing. Jim Groom did an awesome job of extolling the virtues of WordPress, and I believe folks in the room were on board. Jim showed us how Lafayette College used WordPress to re-tool its Web site. We also talked, in earnest, about the possibilities of better use of UMW Blogs content as a tool to market all the cool things that UMW students and faculty are doing. The transparent university lives!

First on our plate is to answer, once and for all, the age old question of internal vs. external content. We’ve talked about portals in the past. What other tools are out there? With the lions share of total Web pages on our site targeting internal users, it seems that this issue needs some major attention if we are going to re-tool it with a focus on marketing. Folks on the committee were charged with finding out how their respective cohorts at other institutions handle this issue. It’s important to ask these questions at the functional area level since each area of the University has different business, regulatory, and communications needs. We may indeed find that one size does NOT fit all, but the only way to begin to tackle that question is to know what’s out there.

Our next meeting will be held on Friday, October 15. If you have feedback for the committee, or would like to know more about the process, please feel free to submit your comments on this blog.

Meanwhile, I’m attaching the Powerpoint that lays out our process for beginning this project, as well as some background information.

Real-World Organic Web Development

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Cell Cleavage and Site DevelopmentAs an initial manifestation of my post on the potential of CSS to open up possibilities for cross-platform institutional Web publishing, I am in the final stages of developing a “skin” for WordPress that is identical to the the UMW Web site. It also allows for two- or three-column layout.

I’m sure to many folks this is a big snooze. The NOT big snooze part of it is that it was so darned easy. With the exception of footer content and some plugin customization I am working on, it was a snap to re-skin a theme called “ET-Starter” and make it look just the way I wanted it to in a few days.

Why would I do this when we are embarking on a new design for the site? There are multiple reasons. First, because it’s a great proof of concept. Second, because I can :) . Third, the SACS Re-Accreditation committee needs a public Web presence right now, and it has to live for about 3 years. I didn’t want to create that in our aging Contribute/PHP environment — we’d have to re-create it when we move to WPMU for the public site. Rather, the idea here is to allow the SACS committee site to appear as another  part of the official UMW Web site, but to live within WordPress Multi-User in a production environment.

This approach will be a great way to protoype functionality that this site is going to need and that our current public Web infrastructure can’t deliver in a scalable way: internal logins for private documents, easy Web publishing without a local client, rss aggregation and consumption, discussion forums, etc. When we are ready with a new graphic design, we simply skin this theme, port the SACS site over to the new server maintaining the same URL, ask IT to update the DNS, and voila!

What “skinning” and CSS allow us to do is to take advantage of the separation between content and presentation allowed by accessible, standards-based Web design. It lets us test, in a real-world application, much of what we will need in the live site without having to re-do tons of code when the institution decides on a look and feel. My fantasy is to have all the kinks so worked out on the backend so it will take a week to get us into full production after a new design has been chosen.

In the long run, and Jim Groom will kill me for blaspheming against the gods of WPMU, I see the possibility to roll this approach out to multiple platforms, not just WordPress. The goal of the Web for communications is to respond quickly as communications needs and goals change. By porting a skin from our home-grown environment to WordPress so quickly, we are proving that anything is possible moving forward.

Hey, I can dream. Even if it’s longer (like a month, probably), this is vastly different from the way we used to do the web with endless, amorphous wish-lists of functionality, creation of non-functioning prototypes, followed by months of development, testing, and then presentation design.

This is the kind of thing that gets me up in the morning, when my kids don’t do it first.

Subdomains vs. Subdirectories

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Well, here’s the deal. There are theories all over the place these days about whether you should organize Web sites using sub-domains (e.g. “http://something.umw.edu”) or sub-directories (e.g. “http://umw.edu/something”). WordPress Multi-User forces you to make a choice of one or the other UPON INSTALLATION. No pressure…

I’m setting up a development environment within the umw.edu domain on a University-owned server. As a result, in order to get the sub-domain functionality going, the network and server administration folks need to get involved, which may constitute more overhead for them in the long run. It’s another line of code to the DNS, but, there are always network implications for things like this. I don’t like doing things that involve having to bring in a multitude of folks to support it, and to respond to what can appear to be idiosncratic requests. So, I feel it’s my duty to research whether or not the bang for the buck of a subdomain structure is worth it.

SEO Consideration

With the acknowledgement of the unfortunate fact that SEO field is more art than science, a moving target, and at any point in time, full of spurious claims, but I digress. There are indeed some ways to help search engines get to your stuff quicker :) Using a subdomain, supposedly, has search engines treat that section as a separate site, with equal importance, or of comparable organizational weight, as the parent site.

Using this rationale, it is easy to see why UMWBlogs uses sub-domains. Blogs by individuals within the domain are of equal weight, and each constitute, essentially, their own web environment, deserving to be crawled as a “root” site unto its own. Interlinking, and crawls between blogs that lead to the “network effect” of the social web, would arise from the individual choices made by the bloggers. If your blog is relevant, it gets linked to, and its ranking goes up because the quality of the content is compelling. So, rather than a top-down measure of your blog’s importance, you have a more organic measure of your blogs relevance. In essence, the information architecture is 3-dimensional and always changing.

With a large-scale university site, this type of status may not apply to each area of content. For instance, I would not consider the Web site for, say, the EagleOne card office (e.g. eagleone.umw.edu) to be on the same level of importance as the College of Education (e.g., education.umw.edu). That is because, within an organization, although there are ongoing shifts and reorgs, at any point in time there is a certain fixed and hierarchical relationship between organizational units, and certain areas of information that will always be more important to external audiences requiring predictable, easy pathways. Hard-linking within a directory structure, supplemented by the more organic linking that occurs over time, may be a better way to go in that instance.

But, here’s the rub…

With WPMU, my understanding is that it’s one or the other: Subdomains or subdirectories. Upon installing the app. Sigh…

Ideally, a combination of the two would be best. That is, chunking the site into its major organizational (or content) areas, and then having a sub-directory structure beneath each one. This could, for example, play out as follows:

  • umw.edu
  • umw.edu/admissions
  • umw.edu/about
  • umw.edu/directory
  • etc.

AND

  • education.umw.edu
  • education.umw.edu/advising
  • education.umw.edu/dean
  • etc.

At this point in time, if we were to set the sub-domains in stone, we may regret it down the road — cgps.umw.edu anyone?

To get to the combination of sub-domain and sub-directory, my understanding is that we’d need a SEPARATE WPMU INSTALL FOR EACH SUB-DOMAIN. Can you spell maintenance headache? (Of course you can — we ARE at a University, afterall).

I found a plug-in that purports to do this:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mu-domain-mapping/

I’m always hesitant to use a plug-in for what seems to be core application functionality, but, hey, it’s a development environment! Still are there folks out there who have tried this plugin, and what kind of success have you had?

Incremental Process for Eventual Web Re-Design: Start with the Data

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In the process of the site redesign for UMW, we will go through the usual committee process. However, I’m wondering if the project itself that this committee will be charged with could be a more iterative one.

Many folks who came into Web design in the early 2000s, and today, are from a print communications background. This has led, I believe, to a notion that a “Web site” is like a piece: You plan it, edit it, publish it, go home.

But we all know that a Web site is like a shark: It has to keep swimming or it dies (Yes, I’ve seen “Annie Hall”). To that end, is there any reason why we can’t test drive ideas live, read analytics over a period, then make adjustments as we go along?

UMW Blogs is, by it’s nature, incremental and organic in growth. It comes from the content up, not from the home page down. It’s nice that folks redesign the home page now and then, and I love those little flippy things in the primary navigation, but the little flippy things are not what’s cool about it.

We have a unique opportunity in that the current site is so stale that any change to the home page would be seen as a welcome sign. I’m proposing that, based on the following data over the past year, maybe the committee would want to test drive a few before a wholesale change:

  1. Visits to “Featured Faculty” encompass 0.8% of the home page traffic.
  2. Get Recognized gets 1.0% of the home page traffic.
  3. The home page links to only 6 of the pages that are in the UMW Top 20 for the year (measured by page views since we have many repeat customers internally). Not included is a link to the library, which is a consistent #3 in terms of site traffic.
  4. The most visited page linked to from the home page is the “Student/Faculty/Staff” page.

What does all this tell us? First of all, I’m using Google Analytics data here in the broadest sense, settling on a single piece of data over a period of one fiscal year (6/30/2009 through 7/1/2010). But, at first blush, we can conclude:

  1. The majority of site users are internal.
  2. Of the links we provide that are geared towards external users, the two least popular features take up a majority of the real estate.

This is not to say that the perennial argument about who is the primary audience for the site should be questioned. We should strive for a more externally-facing site. And, although the click-throughs to the “Resources” page indicate that folks are using the site internally, that should not really affect the real estate on the home page all that much.

So, I’m going to propose that some adjustments be made to the current home page to see if it can be made more efficient for external users. The externally focused links in the top 20, in decreasing order of traffic, (factoring out the home page and the resources page), are:

  1. Admissions (22.8%)
  2. Directory (17.3%)
  3. Academics (14.9%)
  4. About UMW (9.1%)
  5. News Release (with photo and teaser at bottom) (5.4%)
  6. Student Life (4.8%)

In addition, if you simply compare by site visits for the year, UMWBlogs site visits amount to 17.4% of the UMW Web site visits. That’s popularity we can “leverage” (I used that term to make Jim Groom happy). That would put them just under Admissions for popularity.

Are you sensing something here?

Here is my proposal for an interim change to the Home Page (which, of course, would need to go through the proper channels). I submit the following suggestions for your comment:

  1. Replace the “Featured Faculty” section with an RSS feed of faculty blogs on UMW Blogs. This would give more Faculty home page exposure, and eliminate the overhead of writing a story and producing a single web page for faculty. Faculty members could opt-in,  or, we could settle on a taxonomy of tags to select for home page inclusoin. It would end any resentment about who gets to be on the home page, too :) Added bonus: The content always changes.
  2. End the “Get Recognized” Campaign on the home page and replace with a navigational Flash animation that shows our campus, people, and mission, and links to Admissions, Academics, Athetics, About UMW, and Student Life prominently.
  3. Upgrade and standardize the look and feel of the primary pages linked to from this graphic.
  4. Re-work the text navigation to put all internal links in one place, and clean up the navigation on the right.
  5. Since most home page traffic goes to the Admissions site, and not to the “application” site (which has an “apply now” button prominently displayed), I’d take that button out. It’s kinda cheesy anyway (I have no data to back that up).

Do you think these adjustments would be a good idea? Do you have any other thoughts? I’m all ears.

Well, Here We Go Again!

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Old UMW Site Going AwayNew fiscal year, new job, new office, new Web site! I stopped posting to this blog over a year ago out of fear — of what, I’m not sure at this point, but let’s just say I didn’t feel I was organizationally positioned to have an opinion on anything. And me, without an opinion, is simply an unreasonable request :)

So here I am, back as the University Webmaster and in fighting form. Once again, we will embark on a much-needed re-design of our now woefully out-of-date, tired, and increasingly unsightly Web design and technology. I designed all of it, so I’m entitled to say when it isn’t working anymore and — whoa! It isn’t working anymore. Ripe tomatoes come my way on a daily basis, and thank goodness I have low self-esteem — otherwise, it would really get to me ;)

The web has come a long way since I first began working on the UMW Web site in 2001. More folks have a very critical stake in what happens with the site, and our process needs to be transparent. To that end, the requisite committees and workgroups are in the planning stages, dedicated to wrangling this now enormous sprawling site (18,000+ active pages) into a coherent, compelling and differentiating communications tool. And no site design would be complete without consideration of the magnitude of the Tsunami-like UMW Blogs environment that is sweeping the country, capturing hearts, curing diseases, and finding lost puppies nationwide. A richness of  mashup opportunities awaits us all, no doubt.

For now, I am examining years of Google Analytics reports to see how the site has been used to date, where we are falling short (in quantitative terms), where we need to devote more attention, where well-intentioned content may need to be jettisoned, and other things you can learn only from real-world numbers.

If any of you have used Google Analytics, you know how overwhelming it can be. Also, it lends itself to an SEO model that cannot be applied easily to a site so broad as UMW’s. So, after a discussion and some awesome advice from the brilliant Martha Burtis, I’m going to wrangle the data to narrow down the site’s success (or lack thereof) in achieving specific institutional goals, starting with Admissions activity. Recruiting the best and brightest prospective students, afterall, will be a key driver for the new site architecture and design.

In this space, I will be posting my progress in this regard. I also welcome input from everyone (polite input, of course!). I am particularly interested in how others have applied Google Analytics data, or site metrics in general, to changes in Web design or content organization. There will be a new poll here weekly asking you to weigh in on issues regarding the existing Web site. See this week’s poll to the left.

I hope that this design effort will reflect our growing culture at UMW of open discussion, transparent process, customer service, and high-quality work. See you all along the road!

The Unfulfilled Promise of CSS at Universities

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I made a suggestion at a meeting the other day that was met with “That’s impossible!” That’s when I know I’m on to something good.

CSS (Cascading Stylesheets) has the ability to separate presentation from content. At a University, with the multiplicity of content providers (PR folks, faculty, administrators), and the heterogeneity of content and Web missions (teaching, information, transactions, development, etc.), you’d think that the current more favorable state of the browser world would have everyone clamouring for Web standards. And, to a certain extent, they clamour. However, the notion of what Web standards can do is frequently discussed within the realm of a chosen technology environment.

Here’s how it goes: We want to purchase Ingeniux, or Sharepoint, or Documentum, or fill-in-the-blank CMS, or we are adopting Drupal, or WordPress, or SAKAI or some other open source tool. One of the ways that we evaluate them is adherence to Web standards. We go in and edit our style.css, home.css, main.css, or the other standard stylesheets and we are using CSS to control the environment.

But, I’m here to tell you, that is SO February 2009.

CSS gives us quick ability to manipulate presentation without touching the code that actually displays the content. Heck, you can point to a CSS file on another server, which means a central pool of designers doesn’t even have to touch the systems themselves. Add to this the democratization of content management through the open source movement, and lots of faculty members using WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and the like, why, oh WHY do we ask them to use a central system?

The “It’s impossible!” comment I got was from a mindset rooted within that old framework. “We’d have to support multiple systems!” Yet, resistance is, over the long haul, increasingly futile.

Well, branding is important to recruitment, and University Relations folks need not be viewed as the long arm of the law if they are willing to think long-term. It’s the at times coercive and inelegant way that PR and IT folks (myself among them) go about standardizing the brand on the Web that I have a beef with. How about, rather than proposing that folks to come to YOUR party where you may not be serving what they need, you meet them where they are already comfortable. Creating and managing CSS files centrally for disparate systems solves many problems in terms of branding, and allows for systems to scale on their own.

There are only so many technologies that a single University employs on the public Web. And there are only so many pages or sub-sites that are critical to branding. So, if a Webmaster needs to skin WordPress, Drupal, Django, Joomla, Moodle, Ingeniux, even Web-enabled ERPs like Banner*, or any other system that our users want, they are now empowered to do that freely. The technology chops come in how to get that accomplished on the backend in terms of possible Web services, chron jobs, and scripts to ensure availability of central design elements and sharing of CSS elements across systems, keeping up with upgrades. The need to be an application administrator (SO September 2008) goes away, freeing up time for this new cooler stuff. That’s the Webmaster. Then, the design chops come in how to make it all look good, look the same, and support that brand. That’s the Web designer. Outsource the occasional “cool” stuff to crack Flash and multimedia developers rather than keeping them on the payroll until they find something that pays better which they will — trust me.

This would take out of the Web shop all other geeky skills like managing applications and developing content at the same time, and trying to recruit folks with a ridiculous range of skills that never occur in one organism (I saw a job post the other day that had Flex, Flash, Multimedia Design, Adobe CS, and UNIX :)

This notion of a centralized CSS control across disparate systems fundamentally changes the role of the Web communications office and the Webmaster. Now, their role is to figure out how to “skin” multiple systems, how to give folks the ability to link to the institutional stylesheets, how to structure the presentation of multiple systems. It gives central University Relations folks the ability to reach into systems heretofore unavailable to them, but not have to manage multiple technologies. It accepts that the current democratization of technology comprises a horse that has left the barn.

In short, it encompasses how to use CSS as it was meant to be used: the way to definitively separate design (one set of competencies within University Relations) from content and functionality (multiple sets of competencies across the institution).

Impossible ;)

* I’ve skinned 3 of the above systems so I know what I’m talking about. It ain’t rocket science.