College Web Guy

The past week has provided a good opportunity for reflection on upcoming web projects. Lots of downtime. Lots of time not facing a monitor.

I give EduWeb in Baltimore a grade of 80%. SXSW Interactive being a 100% and a zero percent would go to, …lets say a conference about Microsoft Office products that opens with a keynote speaker demonstrating new Excel tricks.

I got back from Baltimore and was immediately sequestered away for a Communications Office retreat at Mountain Harbor, in which we laid out our campus communications goals for the upcoming year. Go figure, lots of web goals. No pressure.

So in a way it feels like a fresh start. I’ve been working as a web guy at this college for exactly a year, and during this time I’ve been able to learn the lay of the land. Draw your own interpretations from this analogy, but transitioning from a corporate workplace to a university workplace is kind of like switching from baseball to cricket. Both involve standing in the dirt and using wooden sticks to hit round balls into the grass, but the similarities end there. The rules of the game, the players, and the spectators are different breeds altogether.

Of course, web design is web design, no matter the client or employer, but if you aren’t prepared for the nuances of your environment or the nature of the ball , you’re going to spend many an at-bat swinging at the air. Heck you can still manage to hit that small ball on occasion, only to trip up while running the bases.

Yes I can begin sentences with “heck.” This is Arkansas. The point being that my transition to academia from corporate cube-land wasn’t a smooth one.

It’s been a goal since my first day on the job, but now it’s of even higher priority to reshape/refine/upgrade/expand and yes redesign some major design elements of our college website.The challenge of web design for universities, for me, is rooted in the conflict between flexibility and maintainability. Yes, you want all the pages, everyone’s page, or site, to look good, and to communicate. So the easy answer is to provide EVERYONE with the same look and feel, and identical framework to build on. But within a university are different organizations, different colleges, departments, administrative offices, etc.. many of which have their own marketing goals. They want the ability to differentiate.

The goal I have, the challenge I’m taking on is to expand our online design options, to allow for variety. Sustainable, maintainable, variety. …If there exists such a thing.

It isn’t an easy task. I’m burying myself in different template ideas. And “template” may not even be the operative description. Another way to label this challenge is to think of it as building a “design library” made up of interchangeable elements that fit together as a whole. Website managers will have the ability to select specific options and activate certain content areas from within our content management tool.

The vision for this project is shared by the other members of our web team, and we’re all invested in the idea of providing an ever expanding variety of layout and theming options for websites that carry our university logo.

You should see some of these mockups. A few have potential. Several are catastrophic failures. In a month or so I’ll come up for air and try to make sense of it all.

Design. Redesign. Rinse. Repeat.