In “Night of the Living Dead”, a poor band of outnumbered yet stubbornly resistant occupants of small house courageously attempt to defend said house from stumbling hordes of grotesque zombies.
This is the first metaphor that came to mind when trying to illustrate what it’s like to defend a university homepage against unsavory intruders, and/or things that just don’t belong.
Giving prominence and valuable real estate to content that might only be relevant to a small, select group of internal administration and their comrades, is similar to unsightly zombies getting cozy on your living room couch.
Maybe my tone here is too possessive. This is not “my” couch. The university landing page doesn’t necessarily “belong” to the web team. And those zombies, pale and disfigured as they might be, are special and important at least to some people.
Let’s just go back to having homepages comprised of giant lists of links. The yellow-pages approach. That way everybody wins.
Your homepage is your storefront? Nonsense. It’s your directory!
Avoiding this university website scenario involves realizing that a homepage that tries to be “all things to all people”, will end up being “nothing to nobody”.
It starts back at the critical beginning step of establishing which audience(s) take highest priority (think prospective students), and outlining a core set of “tasks”:
- that YOU want them to perform
- that THEY most often need to perform.
Remembering of course, to provide logical link pathways for all the other stuff. And pathways to the zombies, which should be, well, buried.
August 6th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
GENIUS, hilarious, well written, and unfortunately very accurate.
You just won my weekly gold star and schrute buck!
August 7th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
[...] came across a very amusing and disturbingly accurate post the other day on a blog I frequent. The content of the post deals with how to diplomatically deal [...]
August 8th, 2008 at 10:34 am
I’m printing this and hanging it in my office.
So true.