meJoe.com

What kind of people do you have behind your Website? Who do these people report too?

The battles for control over the Web still wage on as Universities and other organizations stumble across various methods for handling Web production. The problem lies in the variety of different personel needed for a good Website. At UTSA, there appears to have been an unusually strong Communications Department which has been able to keep the Web despite the technical challenges.

I've noticed that a lot of universities have handed the Web to IT, though to a group of individuals that are less technical and more communication savvy. I would be very interested to see a study of Web pages and their political connections within an organization. Seeing what kinds of people they have behind the scenes would be helpful too.

What is the best combination of content and design for a universities home page?

We have been mulling over this topic now for quite sometime. What's funny is that you can never be sure until you actually see your ideas come to life. I have been complaining a lot about the new design for our home page, which I previously thought did not contain enough substance. Now that I have seen it though, my opinion has changed greatly.

In my political battles over what to put on the home page, I often find myself fighting for more news/textual information that updates often. The opposing views centered around the need for "presentation" and a "hip" design (we target the traditional college prospect). The opposing teams however provided samples that took a very broad implementation to such specific vocabulary. We saw pages content heavy in photos (which ultimately won over) to pages that were highly stylized and design centric. Luckly the design that was chosen is very unstylized and content focused (and image heavy-but with good images).

But more specifically, I think that a good home page should consist of the following:

• Images of campus, activities, and people.
• Fresh textual material like recent news, bulletins, calendar events, featured Web site and other features
• Design that focuses on usability and branding instead of over-stylization.
• Solid navigation with common used links.

There is probably much more but I don't want to get to specific.

Simon Fraser University recently took a very intersting approach to redesign by actually consulting the public for ideas and suggestions. Their Relaunch site contains a forum, design notes, and much more. I think that while this information is probably skewed (those likely to contribute are heavy users rather than occasional), the public would be very likely to reinforce my list.

The University of Texas Austin also has their design notes online from their redesign in 2001. Much can be learned from such a large institution.

Isn't it easier to avoid entering the “www.” part of a url? How many people actually visit “www.google.com” over “google.com”?

The private sector caught on very quickly. Removing the “www” from the front of your URL is easier to remember and less cluttered to market.

Where does the “www”come from anyhow?

The dots that you see in a URL typically seperate different units on a network. A unit can be one computer or the equivalent of a network of computers. Take http://altamira.arts.utsa.edu/ (Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at San Antonio) as an example. The “.edu” refers to a network of education sites (these are technically refered to as “top level domain names). The “utsa” part refers to the entire school known as The University of Texas at San Antonio. The “arts” part refers to the network that belongs to the Department of Art and Art History. Finally, the “altamira” is the name of the computer where you can find their Web page.

Why is it that way? The internet and domain names existed before the Web (you mean the Web is not the internet?). Because of this, organizations added World Wide Web servers to their networks. They simply called these servers “WWW”. To access their Web servers you needed to add the name of the Web server (in most cases “www” to the front of the organizations domain name.

Help me fix the problem! You can fix this by making a simple modification to your Domain Name Server (DNS). Your domain name server has control over the naming of your domain. Please remember though to make both versions active because the “www” is still very popular.

Did you know that the top level domain names (.com, .edu, .org, .mil, .gov, and .net) are controled by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)?

Home page changes in large organizations are big political campaigns. Take a break and try something fresh.

I was recently approached by my sister Angie about setting up a Web site for her and her triathlon team. Fresh — the chance to take on a site that would let me be more creative and break out of compliance issues and political battles of major sites. It's like standing to run after sitting far too long.

Jeffrey Zeldman gives us some great methods for coding an XHTML list into a horizontal menu bar.

Today's daily report gives us a great tutorial about a good accessibility technique while at the same time showing off some of his star packed surf picks. How does this guy find such great work?

The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio's home page is a strong example of powerful content enticing users to enter the site.

Despite all of the literature that you might pass on to your superiors, there exists a misnomer about presentation / design being more important than showcasing interesting and informative information contained inside.

The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio's home page has done a great job of enticing users to go beyond the front page, and return for more. While UTSA.edu's marketing focus is clearly different (ours is on 18 year olds, theirs on Medical industry), I do not believe that our users are different in their information demands/persuasions. A quick look at MTV.com proves my point.

Because my department works in communications, over emphasis seems to be placed on design. A good design works well in professionaly presenting the meat and potatoes inside the site and organization in general.

Think of a retail store. It is designed as a third party that is used to facilitate the sale of a product.

What would you do with a book that had no binding and no page numbers? The same thing you would do with a Website with no common navigation or design.

We take for granted the fact that our books have developed over thousands of years into predictable systems. Ones that open from left to right, number pages in the margins, provide you with a friendly table of contents and index to boot, and even provide you with a helpful review on the back cover.

These proven systems took hundreds of years to develop. While we do not have 300 years to design a good Web page, why should we ignore the lesson?

Pay attention to the successful ones. What is Amazon, Yahoo, MSN, ESPN doing that makes them so successful (besides raising big advertising budgets)? Are they creating one column pages which are all individually designed and contain no navigation? No. Common branding, navigation, visual design, and that dependable up-side-down "L".

Would you tout the comfort of sitting down to a good scroll? Why should your Web page be any different?

The title Webmaster has eluded us recently on the Web. Is it an effective title?

According to Bryan Zmijewski's article, "Webmaster" — It's Cool Again, the title of Webmaster is making a comeback. At least for the smaller organizations.

Although a small business might believe they need a Web designer, what they truly need is a Webmaster.

Zmijewski makes some very valid points, see his article.

Zeldman gives us some links to some handy CSS image tricks and other helpful bits for CSS.

Tasty tutorials and network effects.

Howard Dean, upstart Democratic candidate is now the top fundraiser thanks to his online efforts.

Thanks to his Blog and online efforts, Howard Dean has propelled himself into the political spotlight.