Several months ago I was approached to design a Capitol Campaign website for my University. This was a problem.

Usually I can at least attempt to imagine myself as the intended audience of a site; put myself in their shoes, and design a site based on what (I think) they expect.  But people inclined to give away large sums of money?  I haven’t the slightest understanding of this audience, and probably never will.

So I spent several hours looking around.  Who seems to be doing this well?  Linked screenshots are below.  And for higher resolution, here’s the original pdf I put together containing all the examples.

The criteria in my short search weren’t that lofty, just find University Campaign websites done moderately well.  …not just in terms of design, but compelling copy, user-experience, etc.  Anybody know of additional examples worthy of emulation?

“There’s nothing wrong with Flash, provided you don’t use it to construct web sites where people want to find information, navigate easily or do anything beyond passively consume exactly what you choose to give them in exactly the way you’ve decided.”

Annoying Software : A Rogue’s Gallery put together a list of annoying internet-related software.

High on their list:
Adobe Reader
RealPlayer,
and Flash.

Related:

Flash’s Weaknesses: Then and Now
Does Flash Irk Me?
6 Places that Flash Does Not Belong

So Monday my wife gave birth to our second child.  See our lives unravel on the flickr account.

In my downtime I’ve been updating my web design portfolio in hopes of finding more freelance work.  ….an expanding family it turns out, is an amazing motivator.

www.drewtube.com/portfolio 

Using wordpress to power a design portfolio seems to work well.   Most graphic artists I’ve been around go to exhaustive lengths to build/produce their portfolio every 3 or 4 years.  Floor to ceiling, they completely revisit it.  With wordpress, I can treat mine as a blog, and simply add to it whenever I’ve got something new.

So in between pacifying a screaming newborn, consoling a jealous two-year-old, and reading Indiana Jones movie reviews, I’ve been updating that portfolio and cruising craigslist for freelance/contract web development work.  Of course, one of the nice things about working at a University is the generous amount of vacation time I’ve been able to accrue.  That really helps out with a new kid.  With this amount of sleep, there’s really no way I’d be able to work anyway.

Newborns work the night shift.

We use google to power our university search.  We assumed that our important PDF documents were being searched or indexed.  Until yesterday, when my illustrious colleague alerted the web team that most of our PDF Course Catalogs weren’t, in fact, being being noticed.  More like ignored. In fact, google was only aware of ONE of our catalogs.

continuing from his email:

All the other (catalogs), while linked to from the Academics pages and therefore scannable by Google, don’t seem to be indexed by Google like the illustrious 2003-2004 catalog.

I found this on Google webmaster forums from 2006:

“I suspect that Google simply won’t index documents of that size.  Traditionally, their recommended limit on HTML documents has been 100K, although they’ve certainly relaxed that in recent years to more than twice that size.  But I don’t think you can expect multi-megabyte files to be indexed.”

So I checked our file sizes:

2002-2003 catalog: 7.907 MB
2003-2004 catalog: 2.387 MB
2004-2005 catalog: 4.361 MB
2005-2006 catalog: 12.535 MB
2006-2007 catalog: 4.634 MB

Looks like if a PDF file is larger than ~3 MB, it won’t be indexed by Google for searches.

So thats something of a revelation.  If you’ve got important content and you need google to know about it, reconsider depending on large PDF files.  It’s worth someone’s time to convert/provide that content in web-text form.

In fact, according to this source:

Large web pages are far less likely to be relevant to your query than smaller pages. For the sake of efficiency, Google searches only the first 101 kilobytes (approximately 17,000 words) of a web page and the first 120 kilobytes of a pdf file. Assuming 15 words per line and 50 lines per page, Google searches the first 22 pages of a web page and the first 26 pages of a pdf file. If a page is larger, Google will list the page as being 101 kilobytes or 120 kilobytes for a pdf file. This means that Google’s results won’t reference any part of a web page beyond its first 101 kilobytes or any part of a pdf file beyond the first 120 kilobytes.

So now I don’t know what to believe.  Anybody have additional insight on this?

I’d file this somewhere under “Best Slide Presentation about University Web Development, Ever.”

Found via Future Endeavour:

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You can also download the slides.

The creator of the presentation is Louis Rosenfeld, an independent information architecture consultant, and founder and publisher of Rosenfeld Media, a publishing house focused on user experience books. You can find 5 more of his presentations here.