Blah, blah, blah

Where's the fun? At a recent meeting of our on-campus web committe, we were having the age-old web redesign discussion and decided to take a few minutes to browse other sites to help our brainstorming along.

The idea was to break the mold a bit -- providing the most important information in the quickest, easiest way possible while also delivering an engaging interactive experience.  Not much to ask for in 2005, right? Wrong.

We spent almost an hour going from site to site and were hopelessly underwhelmed. What's wrong with all of us higher ed folks? It almost seems as if someone came up with a higher ed template -- architecture and layout and deployed it across the nation. Not good. I'm hoping that someone out there will read this, blood boiling, and call me to the carpet to point out all of the great (and here's the kicker) audience-focused sites that we missed. I won't hold my breath.

I think one of the key problems is sprawl. The larger the institution, the more folks wanting their department, program, school or initiative on the homepage or at least as an anchor in the architecture. That doesn't make for easy design. So, perhaps we simply fall back on the most widely-accepted architecture schemes to keep folks at bay. Helps the day go by, but probably doesn't differentiate us much in the minds of our targets. Seems like a sound argument -- sprawl that is -- but the smaller institutions, presumably with lesser resources, aren't knocking it out of the park either.

We did notice one interesting trend. Some schools seem to have resorted to leaving the sacred cow of the homepage alone, while pushing resources and some pretty cool stuff, to the admission microsite. Usually a complete departure from the primary site's architecture and branding, some of these sites really start to look like something a 16-18 year old would pay attention to. Go figure. Again, this may be a small school/big school argument as the concept of a 16-18 year old prospective student who has the bandwidth and time to poke around a flashy microsite is a reality for a relatively small slice of the higher education marketing landscape.

So, as I ramble on I am still left wondering, who's really going after it? Stretching the borders a bit to really engage their audiences through content and context? Here's to hoping that I get flooded.

Comments

[Ben Riseling]

Glad to hear we're not the only ones uderwhelmed by Highered Web design. Check back in late Jan. 06 for the new Duke home page and newly launched internal news site -- DukeToday. The home page will be targeted to external audiences and DukeToday to Faculty and Staff specifically. We'll also be featuring some nifty client-side personalization on DukeToday. Like to at least hear what you might think about it when it all goes live.

[Charlie]

Ben -

Glad you posted, and included your blog. I stumbled across it, I think after reading one of Karine's posts. Opening the process to the community through the blog is spot on.

Duke really is doing some terrific things, new media wise. It certainly is a place to watch.

Looking forward to your launch.

[Scott Crow]

You hit the nail on the head: too many departments with power want their piece of the home page pie. There are too many decision-makers who are not ready to accept a simple home page with fewer options. There are some good, clean college home pages out there - but many are bogged down by special interest groups. Good post.

[Mario Zepeda]

Great post.. I also noticed that a lot of schools are looking template driven. Do you think that's because a lot of them are now using a CMS system and are limited to what they can do?