Lipstick on a pig

Michael Stoner had a great piece in his recent "Intelligence" newsletter about web redesign and redevelopment. It's a good piece that talks about the costmetic tweaks that are redesign projects and the extreme makeovers that are redevelopment projects.

How often does an institution take a good look at its own web guts and decide to do the overhaul? Think of all the franken-code that makes up most sites, the product of one redesign after the next. Perhaps a CMS or two tossed onto the pile and maybe even a few reams of old pages sitting on the server just hoping to get caught by a search engine.

Having gone through a good number of redesigns, I think it's important to avoid the temptation to just put lipstick on a pig -- basically designing a skin for your site that sits on top of a code trainwreck. The problem is that design is so visible and the back end just isn't. Or is it?

In his post, Stoner writes, "most college and university web presences exhibit organic sprawl, reflecting the way they were built. But this is no longer good enough. Today, a university or college web presence needs to be visitor-centric, ensuring that visitors can find what they need and accomplish the tasks that are important to them, while allowing them to move freely across the websites that make up the institution's web presence. This only happens if a team undertaking a project understands that their role is not just to make a website look nice, but to make an institution's web presence welcoming to visitors." Right!

You can pretty up a site with good design, but if your CMS doesn't allow you to edit it on the fly or if you are so limited by the structure that some of your design dreams are sacrificed, it's probably time to look at a code overhaul.

Comments

[Sam Jackson]

mStoner made some very good recommendations to my school when a little audit was done last year. Sadly, I don't think any of them were really taken into consideration too much for the final site.

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