College Web Guy

In the next few years I predict a glut of University Advancement jobs going to new-media types who are masters of their tools and not much else.  With the prevalence of content management, web-templates, and social media tools, the recurring weakness of most any web project is content creation.

Writers.  Communicators. Storytellers.

Without these people, the designers, the developers, the usability experts, and the webmaster server types are useless. In the absence of substance, our tools mean nothing.  It’s packaging without product; A concert without music.

So don’t hire a web designer.  Don’t hire a “Social Media Expert”.  First and foremost, hire a communicator who also happens to specialize in one of those areas.  Your decision will pay dividends.

(saw that great little cartoon in IABC’s latest CW magazine) It struck a nerve.

It sings to the same tune as “The Discipline of Content Strategy” from A List Apart:

until we commit to treating content as a critical asset worthy of strategic planning and meaningful investment, we’ll continue to churn out worthless content in reaction to unmeasured requests. We’ll keep trying to fit words, audio, graphics, and video into page templates that weren’t truly designed with our business’s real-world content requirements in mind. Our customers still won’t find what they’re looking for. And we’ll keep failing to publish useful, usable content that people actually care about. Stop pretending content is somebody else’s problem. Take up the torch for content strategy. Learn it. Practice it. Promote it. It’s time to make content matter.

For the few E-Newsletters and fancy html email invites that I’m called on to design/code/send, there is a mountain of pain and suffering that nobody else in my office could even begin to understand.  So I suffer in silence.

The first day of my vacation. And what am I doing? Reading posts about web standards for html email.

Microsoft’s Lame attempt at explaining their decision to AGAIN use the Word rendering engine for Outlook 2010, ..has solicited some great/entertaining comments:

Tim Dawson says:

“[click here to] Read this issue online if you can’t see the images or are using Outlook 2007.”

- Quoted from the official Microsoft Xbox newsletter.

Even your company’s own marketing teams cant send out appealing newsletters using the tools you are providing.

Jamie Newman says:

Outlook is the only client that seems to purposely cripple industry-recognized HTML standards in order to allow Word (a Word Processor NOT an email message composer!) to build emails of a poor standard and limited by yesterdays technolgoies.

And before some misguided argument about ensuring a safe experience for the user - the rendering engine should be no different to a web browser which also gives the user the same security preferences and lets them make an informed choice.

What I and thousands of developers want to know is - why should Outlook go against what all other email clients are doing and make our lives a living hell?!

Robert Burke says:

You say your users can make professional grade emails without having to be HTML experts. I have yet to see one person in any place I work use Outlook to generate tables and graphs, they use Word Docs (if they know how, which most people don’t), and attach them to the email.

Outlook’s, and thusly, Word’s capabilities are so far outside what the majority of everyday business people can comprehend. You rarely see anyone capable of using Word/Excel/Powerpoint to their fullest extent because most people aren’t Office literate enough to make use of it all.

You are obviously only thinking from an internal business point of view and not the whole world.

David Kaneda says:

Apologies if this is a bit of a flame comment, but come on — it’s Outlook 2010. One would think it could render HTML emails better than Netscape Navigator 4. Like I said, this is just absurd.

Too often, a designer will design and/or judge a piece of communication based on how it looks, on how it pleases his or her design sensibilities. The single-factor measuring stick of style. I’m picturing a horse with blinders who only sees the pretty.

And I surmise that in the PRINT world, this was semi-sustainable. Enter web. With the advent of analytics and TASK measurement, the same way of “looking at things” doesn’t cut the mustard.

The web designers you WANT TO WORK WITH will hand-off a design and withhold judgment until they get feedback on how well it PERFORMS.

And this involves both a commitment to design AND content.

It’s an old and well-worn conversation.  But a rehashed conversation that took place in my head while reading this great post:

Writing Microcopy
“The fastest way to improve your interface is to improve your copy-writing.”

Microcopy is small yet powerful copy. It’s fast, light, and deadly. It’s a short sentence, a phrase, a few words. A single word. It’s the small copy that has the biggest impact. Don’t judge it on its size…judge it on its effectiveness.

The layouts, the grids, the fancy background images, and the elegant typography are meaningless without effective messaging and meaning.

So two goals for myself as a designer.

• Push back the demand for style when there is a lack of substance.
• Do a better job of crafting and promoting effective content when opportunities arise.

See also:

eduGuru: Content is more important than design
Zeldman: Content precedes design..

Also see also:

Where’s the Beef?

Often times the creation of a site, in a client’s eyes, is about making the juiciest-looking hamburger around, one that customers cannot resist. The conversations in process are about what toppings are going onto this thing, a la sweet javascript functions, glossy buttons and calls-to-action in every nook and cranny. But; and I hesitate to push this metaphor and former Wendy’s slogan too far; where’s the beef? How do you know that what you’re offering your audience even has any value?

I enjoyed the following link from Karine Joly’s most recent HigherEdExperts newsletter.

Noteworthy bits from each speaker at the Suny Cuad Advancement Conference, as cataloged by TimsHead.

“Social media is not a tool to blow your horn, jump up and down and say ‘look at me!’ It’s a place to have conversations.”

“We are all content designers. Whatever you do in communications or design is content management. Content is king.”

“Looking at college Web sites, you can feel the pull of a committee. Too many sites designed to please committees when they should instead focus on what users want.”

many many more here:
http://insidetimshead.wordpress.com/2009/06/14/suny-cuad-web-roundup/

Do yourself a favor. Check out Soul of Athens.

It’s an innovative online publication produced by students at Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication and E.W. Scripps School of Journalism.

Quick stats:

• 41 projects
• more than 50 photographers, designers, Web developers and writers.

My thoughts
If I could go back in time and have a do-over, I’d like to attend a university where I could participate in projects like this. The pitfall of the traditional university visual arts program is a lack of connection to storytelling. To often you’ll find art for art’s sake and design for design’s sake. ..and ultimately a poverty of meaning. I love these stories and their strong community connection.

See Also:

• Nice post about the project at Innovative Interactivity
• Soul of Athens on Twitter
• ..and on Vimeo