rose.pruyne

Consider the following Web site navigation: Home | Priorities | Giving | Council | Alumni Efforts | Foundation Challenge You might be able to guess that this is the main navigation for an alumni site of some school. But aside from Home , can you formulate a clear idea of where any of these links will lead? always crashing in the same car: recurring mistakes and misuses of the web Supposing your goal is to join this institution's alumni association. Which of these links would you follow first? Would you follow any at all? And what exactly is a Foundation Challenge, anyway? You see this all over the Web: critical navigation distilled down to as few words as possible--preferably a single word. Design teams hold meetings in which everyone struggles to come up with the right word to describe a category of activities, a diverse collection of information, a whole branch of services. It's mind-numbing work, and for a good reason: few single- or two-word descriptions ar...

Aside from the usual reasons why it's silly to duplicate static content from Web page to Web page, here is yet another: If your Web site has content copied and pasted from one page to another, it is very likely that Google is filtering out some or all of the involved Web pages from search results. The reason: The Google search engine does its best to optimize user experience by returning unique content. Because no one wants search results listing page after page of the same stuff. always crashing in the same car: recurring mistakes and misuses of the web Higher Education and other organizational Web sites tend to needlessly replicate content. This happens perhaps most frequently when information is repurposed as marketing material. The same content ends up appearing at its original source as well as at one or two marketing pages. Unfortunately, if this marketing material resides above the core content in the site hierarchy - and it usually does - it can end up replacing the core ...

Soliciting Web site user feedback. Posting online surveys. E-mailing listservs. Pulling together focus groups. Is this the long and the short of the plan for guaging the effectiveness of your Web site? If so, you will be rewarded with a wide scattershot of commentary, much of which is neither accurate nor usable. always crashing in the same car: recurring mistakes and misuses of the web In fact, implementing this ilk of "user feedback" can be detrimental to your site's health. Think about it. If you were overseeing the construction a classroom building, would you conduct focus groups and surveys to determine what materials should be used, where the doors and stairways should go, how strong the load-bearing walls should be? No? You would rely on qualified architects? Then why on earth would you open the door for individuals who have no understanding of how the Web works to step in and have a direct hand in your site design? When this type of free-form user feedback enters ...

Pick a higher education Web site. Any higher education Web site. Likely what you've got is the agglomerated result of battling needs, wants, and not a little politics.

Here's one that's been buzzing around universities for the past several years: The desire to make the Web presence and brochures look like "a family of publications." always crashing in the same car: recurring mistakes and misuses of the web Branding and consistency. These are the given reasons. Okay, there's nothing wrong with branding. Nor is there anything wrong - actually a lot right - about instilling a level of consistency across all facets of public communications, both online and in print. Or the uniform design and navigation of Web pages across a site. Unfortunately the "family of publications" notion is frequently misinterpreted to mean that Web sites should take on the design characteristics brochures as well as regurgitating their content - a misunderstanding promulgated by those who understand print publications but not the Web. And then, consistency becomes the hobgoblin. Some words of advice to those who push the concept to this point: Bro...