templatedata

Templatedata and Sydney Life have been around for a while but now a full blog service for staff at the University is open for business. Staff can now obtain a university-hosted Movable Type blog for work-related blogging.

Get blogging.

So we think it's hard to design a university homepage? Imagine if your potential audience included the entire country plus quite a large chunk of the rest of the world? And you had plenty of good content to showcase?

You may remember we mentioned the new online strategy of the BBC and the accompanying competition being run to redesign their homepage. Entries have started coming in and you can check them out in a gallery. It is interesting the different approaches taken by people (I was particularly tickled with one person's idea that people should search for things, not be given content up-front. I think s/he needs to put a little more thought into this design...)

More at currybetdotnet.

If you've ever designed anything for a client you will know all about the difficulty in talking people out of their own design ideas. This is particularly common when designing front end web stuff. It's really difficult to avoid just saying 'no, that's a bad idea' when you KNOW it's a completely haywire idea that just won't work. It can be colours, IA, labels, content. Some people seem to see 'their' websites as an extension of themselves and thus have total control over the design, even though they have hired 'specialists' to do the job. I often wonder why they waste their money...anyway, if you've ever experienced this you might do well to read Derek Powazek's post 'The Art of No'.

Instead of saying 'No' and getting ourselves into a twist, and annoying the client, we should try asking 'Why' and getting the client to think about why they think their idea is better than ours. Sometimes it will be. Sometimes they will realise they have no good reason to run with the idea.

I know my clients don't want to be designers – that's why they hired me. And even though it may seem like they're making design choices for me, they're really just trying to solve a problem using the only language they know. It's my job to deconstruct the request, and that takes more information. If I can get the client to verbalize the problem they're trying to solve, we can come up with a better solution together. I can talk them through the ripple-effects that come from any solution. In the end, my client gains a better understanding of the role of design, the site gets a better solution, and I don't feel like I've been micromanaged to death.

Now, if only it were that easy...

Female? Studying IT or similar full time? Then you might be interested in the Google Global Community Scholarship for the Grace Hopper Conference. Google will give you $2500 USD to attend the Grace Hopper Conference in the US. Best of all for Aussies, it's only open to those studying in a Uni OUTSIDE the US.

Candidates must be:

* Enrolled full-time in their undergraduate or graduate study in a university outside of the United States
* In Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related technical field major
* Maintaining a strong academic background with demonstrated leadership ability

More info at Google.

Just a quick mention, for those in or close to the US: the eduWeb Conference is being held in Baltimore 31 July to 1 August. Shelley Wetzel, one of the conference directors says:

The conference focuses on "both sides of the fence" regarding a website: front end - marketing, communications, admissions, library, etc. and back end - IT, development, databases, apps, instructional design, etc. The aim is for poeple to not only learn about what's in their field but to bring a better working relationship among the personnel that now create the Web.

Check out the website for more detail.

One of my pet hates is content that is posted, then forgotten about. I know there are plenty of pages on University websites that should have been blown away long ago. When I think of them and the difficulty of tracking them down then convincing people to remove them I feel like crawling under my desk and crying. There seems to be no way to deal with them. And I know I can be as guilty of lax content management as anyone else. Sometimes there is just TOO MUCH content to handle. Timely well-written content across an entire site requires a lot of work and websites are not always (actually, that should be very RARELY) resourced adequately to maintain content to a decent level. Not in the University world anyway.

Ok, so I've had my whinge.

Sun have come up with a novel way of getting people to remove old content: a sniffer dog called Chuvo.

Chuvo is a Portuguese water dog owned by Nicole Yankelovich at Sun Labs. About 10 years ago, Nicole posted a dedication to Chuvo on her "people page" at Sun Labs, and promptly forgot about it. But the Internet found Chuvo; on a good month, Chuvo gets 3 or 4 visits completely unsolicited. OK, maybe it's not a very big number of visits, and that's the point -- we now have this question we ask ourselves about any questionable page on Sun.com: "Does this page even get as many views as Chuvo?" If the answer is "no" then we put the page on a "purge candidates" list. And, if occasionally a content owner expresses alarm at his page being a purge candidate, we can ask him politely: "Um, did you know your page gets beat by a Portuguese water dog?"

I am sure we could find our own equivalent of Chuvo...

The University of Sydney library launched its Sydney eScholarship Repository. The Repository aims to:

bring together, in one secure digital repository, as much of the research and scholarly material which is generated by the wide variety of academic areas of the University of Sydney...

The eScholarship Repository will provide long term preservation for a wide variety of material currently stored in a variety of electronic data bases and on individual computers. It will store numerous different digital formats including, text, audio, video images and data sets. Material in the repository will be discovered through web search engines such as Google.

What makes a good university homepage?

1. Clear pathways to further information

2. An uncluttered interface that serves only the users, not the wishes of every group on campus with a website that wants a link.

3. Clear and consistent branding

4. Pleasing graphic design that appeals to the largest target audience group of the page without alienating other groups completely.

Legal types got together at Harvard to discuss the role of blogging in legal scholarship this month. An interesting write-up can be read at the Harvard Gazette.

A silly post with a serious message - that it's amazing what happens when developers spend more time building features because they're cool, rather than because they're a practical solution to a problem.

Enjoy.