templatedata

One thing that I have been belly-aching about for years is branding and the web. Specifically the problem of aligning print and web publications. This applies to general branding institution-wide and specific campaigns. The process usually goes something like this:

- Idea hatched
- Campaign developed
- Graphics / other print collatarel developed and signed off
- Posters / publications / post-its printed
- Distribution
- Oh! We need a website. We've made up a URL and put it on our brochure!
- Can you build a website that will look like this brochure? The images and text in the brochure will do won't it?
- Website cobbled together using branding, images and text never intended for the web and constrained by existing CMS templates and website branding that often has no relationship to campaign material.
- Oh. That website is not exactly what we wanted but it will do.
- User distinctly undewhelmed by online experience

Experience. This is the key word here. A website isn't just about getting a specific message across, it's about providing an experience. I'm not talking about some wizz-bang, knock-my-socks-off experience. Just an EASY experience. An experience that isn't difficult and doesn't leave a bad taste in the mouth.

So, with a re-branding exercise on the horizon, it's timely that Damon Dimmick has said all this much better than I can in Don't let branding kill your brand.

Of all the arguments for modifying brand attributes to better suit a digital experience, the most compelling is this: The way users feel about their experience is inseparable from the way they feel about your brand.

I was struck by his assertion that it is time for designers to stop passing the buck. Although we know that a lot of the time the brand problem is out of our hands, we can at least be evangelists and make it easier for those making decisions to make the right ones.

Fault doesn’t matter. Responsibility does. At the end of the day, as user experience professionals, it is our responsibility to advocate on behalf of the user. That means we have to be champions of the user experience, and sometimes that means going against the status quo.

Ok, I'll end my rant now. Seriously though, go and read it.

Sometimes I think Gerry McGovern is stating the obvious but it's a sad state of affairs when something that seems so obvious is still so alien to some.

Take for example his latest column, Senior managers: you can't keep ignoring the web.

Senior managers have been out of touch with the Web for two main reasons. Firstly, they have no previous experience in managing websites. Secondly, they didn't see the Web as deserving significant management time. Well, the Web has come of age. It is no longer the new kid on the block. The Web has become mainstream. It needs to be professionally managed. Otherwise it becomes a dumping ground.

Those who have been working with websites for a while know that websites require management. They require ONGOING management. What they don't require is an elaborate, expensive and high-profile project every few years with no resourcing in between. Websites aren't projects. They are an ongoing part of your organisation. Much as you wouldn't expect a newspaper to be starved of resources and enthusiasm after an initial, expensive project, a website can not survive and prosper when starved of resources after the initial enthusiasm.

This is one reason that I don't like 'launch parties'. A party to celebrate the launch of something often points to a project mentality. Once the project is over senior managers wash their hands of the website and assume that it's going to run itself on the goodwill of those who actually care about it. They often appear in several years time telling all and sundry that the website is 'rubbish' and that a project will solve the problem. What they fail to see is that if the website had been managed and resourced properly from the beginning there would be no mess.

The thing that suffers most is the content. The very reason that people visit your website. Content has to be maintained, it has to be created. New content strategies have to be developed and funded in an ongoing manner. If an organisation fails to see the ongoing nature of content development they are like a magazine owner who assembles the very best printing technology, hires a project team and prints one issue. After that they fail to hire editors, writers and designers and wonder why the magazine struggles to make it to the presses a second time.

A website isn't a vanity publication. If it is it will surely fail. A website is a communication tool for your students, both current and future. It's a communication tool for staff. It should enable them to perform basic tasks easily. If you fail to see the ongoing nature of developing such a tool your website will fall behind those of other universities. If you fail to resource content development and if you allow senior managers to design websites while ignoring the expertise of those who have years of experience, your website will be in continual need of fixing. It will fail to develop and the web team will always be in damage control mode rather than free to innovate and refine.

If you haven't seen it, Google Trends allows you to see how often people are searching for a term and where they are located. Another useful application of it is the ability compare different search terms. In doing this you can compare the usage of different terms to describe the same thing. Why is this useful?

Often we sit around trying to think labels for navigational elements or sections of a website. Sometimes we argue about how the users relate to language that is familiar to us but less so for them. Being able to see what people are using to search for our site or how they are combining terms and where they are searching from gives us an insight into how they are using our website.

Of course, this should be done with the logs from the search engine on your own site as a matter of course. Not only in terms of language but also to guage the usefulness of content, getting an idea about when to push some content and when to pull back on other stuff. (Also, to make sure your search engine works). The academic year is a pretty good indicator of what is going to be required when on a university website but the analysis of search logs can help refine content reuqirements.

Using Google Trends allows you to broaden the user base and see what people are using before they get to your site, not just after they have found you.

A very basic example:

The University of Sydney is called several different names, according to who is speaking. Its full and correct title is "The University of Sydney". Often is called "Sydney University" or "Sydney Uni" or even just "Sydney" if the context is clear. Common sense would say that "Sydney University" would be most used within the general public, simply because it's easier to say. Google Trends bears this out. In general search it is far more favoured than the correct title. Surprisingly, "Sydney Uni" was used much less. The city in which it is most popular is Sydney itself, which points to 'local knowledge' playing a part here.

In marketing and communication terms, you can see how different geographical areas use different names for the insitution and are possibly more likely to identify with that which is familiar to them. A case could be made for shortening the name to "Sydney Uni" for some campaigns when the context favoured it.

You can, of course, also check out the opposition...whether it be by the more formal titles or the shortened versions of names.

(To my friends at UTS and UNSW: this was purely an exercise in illustration!)

Admittedly, Google Trends isn't going to give you a spot-on analysis of how people are thinking, but it is another tool to add to the collection.

A very simple but effective idea for keeping an eye on what is being said about your institution on blogs from collegewebeditor. Simply set up some technorati tag watchlists on some key phrases and subscribe to them in your favoured news reader. Possibly a useful tool for keeping an eye on what potential students are thinking?

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In the old days web development was owned by everyone and no one. I say everyone because anyone with access to a server and a little knowledge of html code or some WYSIWYG program could put up a website (or webpage in the really olden days). Websites were built by techies or the one very keen person in the department who thought it would be a good thing to do. So, by default these people 'owned the web'. I say no one because although these people 'owned' these websites there was no real ownership of the good stuff - content - on the websites. No structures for regular maintenance or accountability in terms of accuracy. These days things are changing.

For example, the main University website is owned by one group but ownership of sections of content is spread amongst different groups. The owners of the whole site are responsible for overall content cohesion, 'look and feel' and information architecture. Content owners are responsible for the content in their section and sometimes the fine detail IA that holds their content together. The process is far from flawless and even further from complete but it is on the way. Other large sites in the University are not so close.

It was with great interest then that I read James Robertson's KM briefing for this month: Who should own the intranet?

One of the first challenges when establishing an intranet is to determine who should have overall ownership of the site, and where the intranet team should be located.

While the responsibility for driving the intranet must be given to a single business area, this group must be located within the right area of the organisation if the intranet is to succeed.

James does not offer an answer to this question (because there isn't one) but he does look at different possible groups and offers guidelines for how ownership should be approached.

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I was reading news in my newsreader today and I clicked on an advertisement in a particular feed, thinking it looked kind of interesting. (It was an ad for 'Career change tests'. I wanted to look at it purely out of interest! Honest!) This is what I got:

We Apologize!

The advertiser you clicked on has requested not to receive any visits from users outside of their market area.

Firstly, I am not sure what they mean by 'market area'. Do they mean their geographic area or their target market? I presume they mean the former and as my IP didn't fit the range of their area it was blocked. What could be so geographically sensitive about a career test? Secondly, even if they couldn't offer me any professional help, surely they could have let me into the site and included a note about their service area on the front page? What do they care if I look at their site? Because they can't make money out of me I am not allowed to even look at their site? The ad said 'Free' career test, obviously they didn't actually mean it.

I find this such a primitive attitude. I would have been quite accepting to visit their site and be notified that they couldn't actually offer me their services due to my location. To try to apply business rules like this is completely counter-productive. It's like telling people they can't link to you without your permission. This is how the web works. Websites link to other websites and people use links to get around, sometimes randomly. You can't control how people use the web, the best you can do is develop a strategy for your site that actually takes into account the behaviour of users and the nature of the web itself. To attempt to control the web is to make your site and more importantly, your organisation look foolish. Understanding the beast is the first step to conquering it.

(Just to add: stripping back the URL to the domain name only rendered only a white page. Googling 'edapebaf' didn't get me to their site either. They've done a good job!).

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