Kerri A. Hicks

The guy with the ink defines you

I’ve been at this higher ed web thing for a few years now (has it really been more than 15?), and have watched the landscape slowly change, from an awe-inducing grey screen peppered by a list of blue links (ah Netscape 1.0) to today’s jQuery libraries that continually answer “sure, you can do that” when faced even the toughest interface challenges, to the 4G(ish) mobile holy grail.

In that time, the most important shift has been from a focus on the technology to a focus on the message. The person with the printing press has the power — but we learned years ago that person is usually not the right one to compose your university’s message. Imagine the press operator with ink-stained hands running the newspaper printing press. Should he be the guy who’s also writing the articles in that paper? Taking the pictures, cropping them, and color-correcting them? Doing layout, proofreading, and design? Writing your marketing copy and crunching your analytics? Shooting and producing your video? Building your user experience?

This is the puddle that the higher ed web has been muddling through for the past ten years. People with the global message — folks in communications, marketing, admission, enrollment — have been wresting the press from IT departments (who themselves had to become content experts years ago…wasn’t that an unnatural thing), but most haven’t been able to build a resource infrastructure to support the high-pressure hydrant of content that the school’s hundreds of content editors want to publish. Sure, one or two folks in public affairs can manage the home page, create templates, support content management systems, and do training on best practices. But shouldn’t there also be central oversight of the message? The user’s experience? What should be published, where, when, and how? Are technologists and departmental web content editors really thinking about recruitment, retention, yield, and reputation?

Here’s a simple example: One department lists all of its courses by the term they’re offered. Another lists them in numeric order. Still another organizes them by instructor, or by program requirement. And the prospective student’s mind boggles when moving from department to department, relearning each time how a department chooses to handle course listings.

This is exhausting for and disrespectful to our users.

Our users expect better. Our users deserve better. When they think of our schools, they necessarily think of them as a single entity. They don’t think of us as a rag-tag conglomeration of stuck-together entities — they think of us as a school. A place. An entity with a voice and a personality. And we need to present ourselves to them that way whenever we can.

Care and feeding is a real job

The problem of tech people wrangling the message has now become the problem of the message people wrangling technology, and the struggle remains. But the more insidious problem is when neither technologists nor messaging experts are responsible for maintaining content — which is the way so many higher ed web sites are managed.

“Add a link to that on the web site” the (dean | professor | administrator) says. And the (student | administrative assistant | professor of something or other who’s volunteered to help | departmental computing coordinator) who has the FTP or CMS username and password for the web site does so. No matter if it looks horrible, doesn’t make sense in context, eclipses the overall message of the site…that’s what someone with the password decided, and since they can publish it, they do publish it.

When does it come down? How good is the photo? Are there spelling or grammar errors? Have you created a page full of text that no one will read? Have you created a page full of links that boggles even the most organized mind? Did you notify anyone else, so they can link to it? Does it work? Does it improve or worsen the site as a whole? Most of the time, this isn’t considered — as long as you get it up on the web site, you’ve achieved your goal.

I think we need to raise the bar on our goals. Just “put it on the web” isn’t enough.

The password gives the power

Distributed responsibility for web content is killing our sites. It’s killing our message. When we need to be moving towards user-centric services, a unified and service-oriented voice, and a goal to meet high user expectations with a marriage of sophisticated technology and user-centric content, instead we’re pushing the web down the org chart as far as it can go, treating web content publishing as though it were a trade, rather than a profession. We should have a centralized cadre of web communication professionals responsible for oversight of every web site — not just its creation, but its lifecycle, as well. Imagine if we distributed payroll across departments. Or admission and enrollment services. You get the idea.

Michael Powers, director of Web Services at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, summed it up brilliantly in a recent comment on Mark Greenfield’s blog:

Many, even senior managers, still see the web as primarily an IT issue. The creation of web content gets pushed down to junior faculty and from there to administrative assistants and from there to students. All are well-meaning but lack the skills, experience, and perspective to actually create effective websites and web content.

That is, the creation of websites isn’t seen as a professional endeavor. “So you’re a webmaster? That’s nice. My teenage son has a website.”

It’s frustrating. Would it be ok if, instead of having a central health center for our students, we allowed each department to train a couple of grad students to provide health care?

We love our visitors

Those of us responsible for web publishing love our visitors. We really do. We live to give them both the information they come looking for, and the stuff they didn’t even know they wanted to know. We want them to have a good experience. We have invested our professional careers in understanding information architecture, user experience, marketing, branding, writing for the web — all the skills that make our profession unique. Can good web sites be created and maintained by people who don’t have deep and broad education and experience in web development? I don’t think they can. I might have a neighborhood teenager mow my lawn, but I’m certainly not going to rely on her for landscape architecture, soil analysis, scheduled fertilizing, seasonal grub control, weed suppression, and wintering over my prized rosebushes. She needs guidance and oversight. She’s not well-suited to the real task that needs doing.

When you leave your school’s web content in the hands of people who don’t have professional experience, you’re shortchanging your school, and your visitors. If your departmental web site has 20 navigation links (“There’s no way we could possibly get along with fewer, we have so much content!”), if you’re adding links to your site without thought of what impact that change will have on your users’ experiences, you may not realize that you’re actually jeopardizing the very fundamental perception of your institution. And of course, all of the decisions made about your site should fall into line with the university’s goals for web experience, branding, and messaging.

The quality of your web site should reflect the quality of your school. Instruction must be provided by qualified instructors — even TAs need oversight. Health care should be provided by qualified health-care professionals. And every shred of your web content should be strategic, professional, and awesome.