August
Rotating Content - Do It Right
When engaging in the conversation between media and audience that instills the sense of your brand, trying to boil it down to a memorable and effective home page can be daunting. This is especially true of colleges and universities, which have so many faces and audiences to represent. When faced with choosing that one iconic image or defining feature story, many schools have embraced the web’s flexibility and asked “why only one?” While this is a creative way to use the web where a paper publication fails, the majority of colleges take the easy way out and wind up with a much less effective—and often actively detrimental—approach.
The most common answer to rotating content from us web folk has been to create home pages with images or features that rotate each time the page is refreshed. This is the easiest way to do it, as it doesn’t require delving into Flash or JavaScript and can be done very simply with server-side scripting languages. Of the 25 “New Ivies” I linked yesterday for your perusal, fully half of them utilize this rotate-on-reload method. However, this method has some serious potential pitfalls.
When choosing images for the Warren Wilson College website, we have a very hard time finding enough images that are of the quality and brand-enforcing subject matter to work in prominent positions on the site. When you have multiple slots to fill by using rotation, this process becomes watered down, and images that would have never been considered as stand-alone are put into the mix. The problem is that these images are stand-alone when they appear by themselves on the site. How many prospects do you think visit your home page more than one time and see the rotation in action? The answer: very few.
Take a look at these example sites that devote large, prominent placement to rotating images:
University of Rochester
Skidmore
Hit refresh and look at the images they have chosen. Most of the photos seem okay and fairly professional. Some are overly generic, staid shots of buildings or columns. A few are weird or of questionable quality—these stick out immediately. Imagine if this is a prospects first impression while they’re still floating around in the wide mouth of the funnel. Will they go further than that first page? Now keep refreshing until you find a picture that is obviously aimed at a specific interest. What happens when the art major prospect hits your site and sees students in lab coats peering down microscopes? Will they come back? Or perhaps the pale-skinned computer geeks find an image of your baseball team instead of the lab coats or shiny new computer lab?
If you look at all of these images by hitting refresh over and over, you get a rich sense of the school and its depth (Rochester actually looks like a pretty neat place…), but prospects rarely do that. These photos that are designed to compliment one another together can strangle that sense of depth that you were striving for when they show up, as they always do, alone.
Fortunately, there are several other solutions. One common way is to use Flash or JavaScript to rotate the images or features without a reload. This grabs the visitors attention and allows them to absorb as much as they want passively. One obvious problem with this approach is that it’s easy to have content rotate too quickly for users to read. Moving too slowly and the visitor leaves your home page before they even realize that they’re missing the show. For an example of rotating images that rotate a little too slowly, have a look at Reed.
By far the best solution I’ve seen is to create an interactive Flash or JavaScript user interface to allow for the user to control their experience. Since I picked on App State the other day, I’ll use them as the example of one good way to do it. Have a look at the way they present their rotating content (nice redesign). I think the UI could be a little more apparent, but it is otherwise kind of a fun approach. Goucher successfully combines automatically rotating content with a UI in their news section (lower left). By implementing a UI for your visitors to control the experience, you give them what they want, when they want it. Isn’t that what everyone says is the way to the heart of the Millennials?
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