Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Stewart Foss, founder of eduStyle.net, gave a thorough presentation that discussed trends and practices of University and College web sites throughout the United States.
500 college websites were redesigned in 2009, according to eduStyle.net. Key design trends centered around technology, navigation and design.
AJAX and JavaScript frameworks were one of the leading technology trends. Many designs included some type of dropdown, pushdown, or other interactive browser behavior that doesn't involve reloading the page to interact with the site. There has also been a decline in use of Flash, while JavaScript usage has seen a commensurate increase with along with browser capabilities. HTML5 is an emerging standard, and with mobile devices becoming significantly more prominent, and with the iPod and soon to be released iPad (both which do not support Flash), the game is changing for Flash use. Whereas the HTML5 standard supports video tags instead of requiring specialized plug-ins.
There has been some decrease in the prominence of audience-based navigation (Prospective Students, Current Students, Employees, etc.). Some sites have pushed the audience menu into a less prominent position, putting more emphasis on the global navigation for general audiences.
"Popular links" are being used more often. This is not your typical "quick links". This is actually based on analytics or real-time needs, and may change throughout the semester as students' needs change, and as their search patterns change.
Links to social networking has definitely seen an increase. This includes blogs and facebook, integration with remotely hosted Flickr thumbnails, and others sites.
Layout trends included many sites moving toward a fixed-width, center aligned design; and with today's bigger monitors, 950-980 pixel web site widths are common—taking advantage of larger screen real estate.
Big footers, or mega-footers, are also en vogue, and differ vastly from their obscure counterparts of years before.
A couple sites that have really stepped out of the box in design are Washtenaw Community College and Biola University's Undergraduate pages. These are graphically rich sites with hand-drawn illustrations that really give a distinctive appearance. The trend also migrates towards background textures and graphics that have a natural, organic appeal to them.
Large and wide masthead images also populate many home pages. Some even put large photos as a background images to the home page and beyond. In general, the quality and size of photography has improved.
3D elements such as bevels, shadows, gradients and reflections show strong presence in today's educational websites.
All of this, we are reminded, has been presumably decided by each college for their own reasons. Our own audiences and content should drive the reasons for deciding to implement any of these features or trends. Also, our ability to maintain anything that is added to the website is an important consideration. All in all, a very good presentation, and reaffirmed for us the direction we are headed in our redesign.
Ben Riseling of Duke University presented on Wednesday. They underwent a redesign that was completed in October of 2009. They redesigned their primary site in Drupal. The presentation was CMS neutral and focused more on project management and institutional decisions. Their choice in implementing a CMS allows them to generate plenty of content from multiple users, and be able to re-use that throughout the site.
Ben talked about RSS being the magic bullet for content re-use throughout the site, and strong part of mobile content delivery as well.
Their campus alert can be activated easily. They can post an alert to the home page in under 20 seconds, and the home page expands to reveal the alert.
There is no such thing as an "out of the box" solution. Both commercial and open source websites will require customization. They chose an open source CMS because it met their needs.
Duke drafted the functional specs on their own, and just wrote up the RFP for the design portion. They also included a Kill Clause in their contract which could allow them to stop the process at any time if they want to take it over or hand it off to another vendor.
They have 8 news editors, 4 image editors, and 1 event editor. They also have multiple stakeholders contributing subpage content. Some roles have more oversight than others, but all in all, it is working well for them.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Chas Grundy, the Director of Interactive Marketing at Notre-Dame university, presented on Thursday. He has been involved in hundreds of redesigns over the past ten years.
He began by reinforcing the necessity to keep on track with schedule and budget, saying "there's nothing worse than launching your redesign late and over budget only to find it doesn't meet your needs." Common mistakes are:
- a weak strategy (and not keeping to it)
- poor stakeholder management (not all the right people at key meetings, and too many cooks in the kitchen)
- Designing before planning content
- No maintenance plan
A successful redesign will have stated and measurable results, a defined strategy upfront, testing-revision-testing-launch, strong content strategy, and continued maintenance and tweaking. Don't assume it's done once it's done.
A highly simplified flowchart of the redesign process is:
- Research and strategy
- Content planning
- Writing and editing - Content into website
- Design mockups - Build templates
- Testing
- Website launch
Usability: Test Early, Test Often. Usability testing can be cheap, fast, and effective. It doesn't have to be a big project. It can cover small things, single wireframes or sketches. It can be done this afternoon. This early and simple testing helps to avoid the "forehead-slappers" that can sometimes be forgotten while intensely planning a site. Test on a whiteboard, or a wireframe, or a piece of paper. Get the feedback. Testing at the end is too late.
Some good usability resources, listed also at bit.ly/usabilitytoolkit, are:
- For IA: Optimal Sort, TreeJack
- For Design: 5secondtest.com, Silverback, Chalkmark
- For A/B Testing: Google website optimizer
Also mentioned was CrazyEgg.com, which creates a heatmap analysis of your page.
It helps so soften the launch, so people know it is coming, and feedback can also be received. Blogs are a great tool for that.
Have a post-launch plan. And instead of needing to redesign every few years. The right time to redesign is when it no longer meets your needs. If you make continuous and incremental changes and improvements to the site, it can stay fresh and not need an overhaul.
Notre-Dame primarily makes mobile content easily accessible through the use of custom-tailored stylesheets for mobile devices. They will be releasing a mobile-only site soon, however.
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