Insert Catchy Blog Title Here

Re-finding my voice

BulldogSID — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:03:44 +0000

It’s been over a year between postings. That is OK because nobody has read these anyway( except for that really nice Russian bot). In both cases I have no one to blame but myself.

But it is time to get going again. Time to start talking about stuff. Not just Web content. Next blog post will be somewhere between tomorrow and, say, June 2014.

My, aren’t you clever!

BulldogSID — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:31:25 +0000

Just now I had an e-mail pop into my in-box announcing that our campus fitness center was having a free-use week. As an employee we have to pay dues to use the center, and, since the e-mail didn’t have the information, I went to the Web site to see if I could find out what the cost was.

When I got there, I was greeted with really big stock images of people doing things vaguely athletic on some college campus. I can be certain that they aren’t here, because being a west coast institution built in the 1950s, we don’t have ivy-covered halls dotting the backgrounds of our campus shots.

But that wasn’t the biggest problem. What drove me to write this post was the flippant writing on the site. It dripped of marketing, sounding like some overly chipper sales person was blurting it out to the unfortunate Web programmer.

I quote:

“From badminton (real men know shuttlecock) to squash (hey it’s not just a stringy vegetable), UCR’s Student Recreation Center has got game. And hold on to your two front teeth, we even have a full-sized roller hockey court. It’s all included as part of your student membership for $59 a quarter. That’s less than $1 a day (or one enormous cup of $59 coffee).”

Can’t you just picture Rachael Ray or some other unfortunately perky person slipping in a comment about squash not being a stringy vegetable.

Oh, and nowhere on this page is anything about what it costs to join as a staff member. You have to go back to the nav, find the link, scroll down and find it would cost me $70 a quarter. Of course, not before I have to wade through more “cleverness.”

Guys, just get to the point. I didn’t come to the recreation site to see how clever or whimsical a writer you are. You are wasting my time with this babble, and time on the Web is precious.

Why I call them Visitors

BulldogSID — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:53:58 +0000

Users. Customers. Guests. Many names for the people who come to your Web sites. But I call them visitors.Most of the books that I have read are geared towards companies that are selling something, so the authors often use “customers” to describe the people coming to your. And while you can make the argument that we are selling a product (an education, the worth of the university, etc.), I have learned – the hard way, unfortunately – that many academics react badly to using that term. They feel it cheapens and even bastardizes what the university is trying to do.

“Users” seems to be too informal – there are people behind those keyboards. “Guests” just doesn’t ring true to my ears.

But visitors works. I compare it to when I invite someone over to my home. The arrive and I welcome them at the door. I interact with them, inquire as to their needs. If they are there for a long visit, I invite them get comfortable. Perhaps I give them a tour, show them where the bathroom is, etc. If I know they are just coming by for a moment, I minimize the small talk, pass on the invitations and inquiries, get them what they need and help them get on their way.

In much the same way, we are inviting people to the the Web sites that we create. Some are there for leisurely exploration. Others are there for quick hits. Either way, we want to be good hosts, to provide them with exactly what they need.

So why does this matter? Why do I worry about what I call the people who come to our Web sites?

Because I think it makes a difference. It’s about sending a message that you see the people coming to your site as inquisitive human beings and not mindless drones or walking cash machines. It puts their interests first. And putting their interests first is the first step towards providing your visitors with a positive experience at your Web site.

Gerry McGovern Speaks the Truth – But Who Listens?

BulldogSID — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:12:38 +0000

In his latest mailing, Gerry McGovern reminds us that “Nobody Cares About Your Website”. The short version is that users just want the thing to work. They don’t necessarily care about bells and whistles, art and aesthetics, they just want information. So much time is put into redesigns, and so little seems to be spent on thinking about what the end user wants.

(Disclaimer – yes, some people do care about how the site looks. They judge a university, in part on aesthetics. If the site is poorly designed, ugly, or does not supply easy access to information, that can be a black mark. But at the end of the day, most people aren’t going to base their choice of a university on quality of the splash page or the flash animation.)

Here in the university world, we are running into this problem frequently. On the project that I am currently working on, it seems the powers that be are more interested in showing how important and in tune they are with their student’s needs, rather than actually fulfilling those needs by providing answers. Right now, if you go to their site, the first links you see take you to news items about the department. The second most prominent link is a never changing “greeting from the dean” which welcomes you to the site and spends several lines saying nothing.

As I rewrite the site, I have put this information in its place… that is, at the bottom of the page, low in the navigation, where only those who want to find it will be bothered by it. And yet, I will bet that either during the editing process, or shortly after launch, the greeting from the dean will be moved right back up towards the top of the page.

And that is because these leaders have deluded themselves into thinking that they are important – more important than the organization, more important than the product they are offering. When I asked them about it, they told me that they are sure the students want to know about them. They are the leaders, and people will want to know who they are, right? Of course, the analytics say different, but we shouldn’t confuse them with data and facts.

Not the coolest web site ever

BulldogSID — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:18:10 +0000

Andrew Careaga’s blog on Higher Ed marketing had a post today asking if this Web site by Tokyo Zokei University was the coolest Web site ever. Now, I understand that TZU is an arts school, and that this site is a marketing piece – a little video game designed to get people interested in the university. It’s got that retro-8-bit look to it, lots of clickable things, annoying Japanese Nintendo style-music. And while I will admit that it is a great visual site (and makes me wish I could read kanji), the novelty wears off in about five minutes. And at that point you are left with the question “now what?”

So to answer Andrew’s question: No, this isn’t the coolest site ever. It is a novelty to be certain, and some judgment must be withheld inasmuch as I am not the audience it is trying to reach. But this is a site made by marketers for the express purpose of marketing. And as such, it isn’t the coolest site ever. Bells and whistles, music and old-school graphics do not a great Web site make. The coolest site ever gets me in, gets me out, and gets me to my next task. Everything else is just noise.

How Not to Make an Major Announcement

BulldogSID — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:13:31 +0000

So, the major university system I work for - let’s just call it the “UC” for lack of a better bit of ambiguity – had a big announcement to make on Friday. It was pretty significant, because it was going to tell all the employees of the university about the plan for furloughs and salary cuts to be presented to the regents next week. In short, it was going to reveal just how much money they were going to lose from their paychecks in the next 12 months due to the state’s dramatic budget mismanagement.

So Friday morning, with all the dithering that goes on in the world of higher ed administration, the Office of the President sent out the link. The message went throughout the 10 campus system and people began clicking to see what the plan held for their futures.

And to their great surprise, apparently, the Office of the President’s servers overloaded and crashed. And so OP responded by begging the individual universities to put up PDF copies of the announcements on their Web sites, and to make the links go there instead. So, with some grumbling about incompetence, we did just that. Soon, the slammed servers got enough breathing room so that the back-up server message could be read. The message? The servers are down. Thank you, that is very helpful.

The things that the “big office” did wrong in this case are simple.

Not enough infrastructure to carry the message. Why are you surprised that thousands of people are going to want to access this potentially life-changing content in the minutes and hours after you announce its existence?
Not enough diffusion of the messages (PDF, HTML, YouTube video) to enable the multitudes of people to get to them. The only links to all this content were through one site. They didn’t need to embed the YouTube video on their site, but they did it anyway.
Total lack of planning for asking the individual institutions to post the content themselves in the first place. With a little planning and advanced warning, this could have been easily avoided.
Using PDFs at all. How hard would it have been to copy the word document into HTML?

Sense of Satisfaction

BulldogSID — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:39:21 +0000

Today I shipped off 140-something pages of content to a client for their site for it’s second and, hopefully, final review prior to going into design. I also put some finishing corrections on another site that has been sort of a personal project for me, and we hope to launch it in the next few days. (Among those corrections was the deletion of some content that was written just last week that absolutely had to be included. Then, the professor leaves and the program gets dropped. C’est la vie.)

Regardless of the challenges and frustrations of the writing process, I love the feeling of sending off a word file to a client, knowing the work I put into it. And further, I love looking at a nearly completed site, knowing my content is the heart and soul of the site – that it will succeed or fail based upon, in part, what I have helped to create.

Why I Believe MySpace is Failing

BulldogSID — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:51:52 +0000

So MySpace is cutting jobs and suffering declining revenues as Twitter and, more significantly, Facebook are growing. I think there is a simple reason for it. MySpace’s greatest perk, its ability to customize and make each page unique, is also its biggest fault. As a whole, MySpace is simply way to chaotic.

Take a look at your average MySpace page. Then look at another one, and another one. In the name of personalization, the sites become a mess. It seems that no two pages look the same. The layout can be pretty straightforward, but it is often buried under layers of “personalization.” Crazy fonts, photos, backgrounds, noise.

Being able to personalize your web presence is great, but it has to have limits. The human mind craves simplicity, patterns, consistency. We like organization. This is especially true on the Web. If I go to your Web page, I want to find something out about you, whether it is your name, your favorite band, where you were hanging out Friday night, whatever. But as with any other Web site, I want to get that information quickly. If I can’t, I’ll probably get frustrated and bail out.

And I think that is what we are seeing. Facebook isn’t perfect, but it does have a nice, consistent feel to it. It’s on a nice, clean, white background. I know where to find pictures of friends, their status updates, etc. (Except when they change everything around, irritating all their users).

I doubt that MySpace will die anytime soon, but perhaps there is a message here that we can apply to the Web as a larger entity. “Simpler is better.”

Sending Mixed Messages

BulldogSID — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:05:03 +0000

So the first thing that this Web writer is going to write about is… a photo. After all, photos are a significant part of the content on any Web site. They can add to the message, or they can detract from it.

Our Web Dev team has been working for the last several months on a site for an administrative organization here on campus. Last week, I got a call from some of the folks in that organization, telling me that they wanted to post some photos that were taken at an awards reception. These were your standard party-ish photos, six or eight smiling mugs staring at the camera, half underexposed, their faces mottled in shade, half overexposed, their faces and clothes bleached to the point of ambiguity.

I explained, via phone and e-mail, that a photo like this has no real place on a major administrative site, as it sends the wrong message to the audience. We had discussed this very concept during the design phase, and at that time I suggested creating a flickr account and having the photos posted there. I reminded the assistant of that, she agreed and took the recommendation to the head.

The response? “I do think there might be some value, illustrating the people side of (organizational) functions. The (organization) is not just about endless committee meetings.”

From a content perspective, that’s wrong. This site is an administrative site. It is not frivolous. It is all about meetings, committees and administrative functions. It is not a social club and should not be treated as such.

The compromise was to create a news article and add one photo there. It made the powers that be happy, got the image online, but didn’t make it so prominent that it took away from the look and feel of the site. Not perfect for everybody, but solves the problem for the moment.