Intermedia

Stoner asks, "WWGD?"

Michael Stoner is on to something...

mStoner president Michael Stoner's lead in his e-newsletter Intelligence suggests that those of us in the midst of a web design ask the good question, "What would Google do?" How can you keep your organization's website as clutter and noise-free as possible? Clearly no university is going to have a Google-esque page, but isn't it a nice concept to keep in mind?

Stoner writes, "Visitors actually reward simplicity if they can easily find what they want!" Absolutely. I think part of the key here is focus. This is a funny thing about the web, I think. I believe that the power of the web is the one-to-one -- it's great that we can reach everyone with a plug into the Internet, but the real good stuff starts happening when we take what we know about users and what they share with us and customize our delivery based on that information. So, it's kind of odd that we design university homepages to serve everybody who has that plug into the 'Net. Why? Because they might hit the website at some point? Probably not a good reason?

Shouldn't we streamline the content to get to the core of what our institution is about QUICKLY and then provide fast jumping off points that are customized based on audience, then issue, then person? Or somesuch similar hierarchy?

All of this is to say that I think that folks should see the homepage not as the landing place for all information that is valuable to the institution, but rather as the jumping off point to all of that good information.

I print, take thee web...

The marriage of print and web. A topic we've all discussed and, I would think, have come to a similar conclusion. It's not only inevitable, it's necessary. A good question though, is how do we get there? Is it enough just to simply take a print piece and "webify" it? (You can guess what my answer would be.)

Shouldn't we be thinking of communication pieces that will have a web component at the point of concept? Doing so lends the print pieces to new opportunities on the web and makes it less of an afterthought that might or might not be effective. Forget about the efficiency issues that might be solved by this approach.

So, who's doing it right? What are the barriers? IS this just a crazy idea?