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I just had to share, I was idly reading IU news (the school I currently attend), and came across the web site of the board of trustees. Well . . . it speaks for itself. Loudly.
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What am I looking at? The manure-shoveling icon, or the cheesy animation and ugly web design?
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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I'm the network admin at Edgewood College, and consequently have to support the web infrastructure. We have an actual webmaster for our "official" pages, but most faculty departments -- like the one you've shown here -- just assign an administrative assistant to create their department's page in FrontPage (usually using stock icons and some logos helpfully provided by our webmaster). And they update, if they do at all, about once a year.
*shudder* You can try to get them to present professional pages, but not everyone understands why that's important -- or has the skill to do it.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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'You, kiddin,' sugah? Them icahns are just to diiiie for. Why, I declare, they are just so cute spinnin' 'round like that. Put 'em there myself. Honey, don't lean on the copier like that.'
Posts: 14554 | Registered: Dec 1999
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fugu, we're talking about the same board of trustees who passed the $30 athletics fee (that EVERYONE hated) to make up for athletics department shortfalls on the last day of finals in the spring. Devious, yes. Evil, maybe. Smart? Debatable. I suppose Devious and Evil doesn't necessarily mean good web design.
Posts: 4077 | Registered: Jun 2003
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quote:Avoid any designer who wants to design your web pages before helping you design the site. Equally avoid designers who want to dump your brochure online, suggest you use video for a 10 minute speech, or who don't seem to care about the business processes your site supports.
Run very fast in the opposite direction from any designer who uses the terms "killer" or "cool" to describe web sites he or she thinks are good. No client of mine has ever asked me for a "cool" strategy, so I don't see why they would want a "cool" web site to support that strategy.
Be equally leery of folks who've won design awards. Most of them are given for stunning graphic or technological design. The web is more like the telephone (a simple tool for getting information quickly) than it is like television. Designers who suffer from "TV Envy" are dangerous to you.
Pretend that designers who only show you your site on storyboards or other static displays have a 100% fatal communicable disease that you can catch by listening to them. React the same way if your designer only shows you your site as an outline instead of a diagram.
When my business partner brought in a new sales guy, he insisted on subcontracting out a lot of our design work to an "award-winning" designer. The guy did laborious screen shots duplicating whole web pages in Photoshop. He insisted we get the "look" right before we organized the workflow. He made designs that depended on accurate rendering to the pixel.
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Okay, is this supposed to be surprising? Virtually all internal academic sites out there look like this - I assume because it just doesn't matter that much to make it look better.
I mean, what does the Board of Trustees care if you don't like their webpage? They aren't selling anything. If you don't go to their site they don't lose much.
Posts: 2432 | Registered: Feb 2001
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Cornell has improved, but two years ago it had the most embarassing site you could imagine. THe main navigation was pictures without labels that appeared below the fold on a resolution of 1080 x 7xx.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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First, Tom, this isn't an internal faculty site, this is the board of trustees site proper. The site of the small group of people appointed by the governor of the state to have nigh complete power over the university.
Second, Xap, I am amazed at your lack of knowledge of how universities work. The board of trustees, among other things, sells the university's image to donors. This is one of their most important roles. When a donor interacts with a board of trustees member, which is how many large donors are found, because trustees are in most cases businessmen, he expects a proper comportment, and he expects so in all his dealings with them on the web or off. As the board of trustees help sell the university's image, they must fulfill their proper part of the image, which involves dignity, subdued presence, and the like. Granted, few likely visit this site (at least, so I hope), but those few that do are at best going to have their impression of the board of trustees altered to be inconsistent with a "proper" university, and thus their image of the university as donation-worthy may be altered.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Ah. *grin* Sorry, Russell. I figured this was like the Board of Trustees site we've got here, which is primarily for internal use. If this is indeed their primary contact site, they really need to hire someone to clean it up.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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They don't have any other site, that I can tell. *shudder*
Yep, its pretty dang bad. Hmmm, I bet I could light a fire under them by refining some of the stuff I said to Xap, combining it with slightly more direct implications that an incompetent web site implies incompetence for the organization it represents.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
Oh, and the site is primarily for internal use . . . but its also where anyone who wants minutes for the next meeting, for instance, goes, and major donors love to attend trustees meetings.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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My company sells web-based ordering software, and one of our customers has spent a great deal of time customizing the look and feel. It's pretty easy to do, really, but their webmaster must have gone to hours of effort to create as site as ugly as theirs. Unfortunately, though they are our key reference account, we can't use them for bragging about our web product....man, is their site ugly. Flash on everything, all with a dark gray background. It would be one thing if they sold sex toys or lurid leather products, but they sell office products. It's like looking at a cheesy dungeon for post-it notes.
Posts: 5948 | Registered: Jun 2001
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