There’s still an awful lot to do. As you may have guessed, we’re taking the opportunity to migrate from PHP 4.x over to PHP 5. I’m also completely rewriting our CMS. We’re going to be purchasing and installing a Google Search Appliance. From a marketing perspective, the redesign represents an attempt to subtly tweak our brand image in a couple of ways. It’s both exciting and exhausting.

Internet Explorer 7 will be delivered through Automatic Updates – customers should complete preparations by November 1

To help customers become more secure and up-to-date, Microsoft will distribute Internet Explorer 7 as a high-priority update via Automatic Updates and the Windows Update and Microsoft Update sites. Internet Explorer 7 will be available for users of genuine Windows XP SP2, Windows XP 64-bit Edition, and Windows Server 2003 SP1.

This is big news. If you haven’t already grabbed a public beta and tested your site out, then now’s the time to do it. I’m pretty happy about this, as IE7 is much improved as far as web standards are concerned.

Fritz is the Creative Director at Stamats. He supervises web and print designers as well as writers. His ideas regarding breaking out of the web design “frame” are influenced in part by author Brendan Dawes.

(Fritz McDonald begins his talk.)

After listening to Fritz, I’m going to riff on his idea of the “frame” in web design for a bit before giving you the run-down of his points. I think that root concept is probably the most interesting part of his presentation. It was certainly the only part of it that was new to me (and maybe to you folks).

Web Design has undergone a kind of evolution common to many types of emerging paradigms. Simply put, when new systems begin, they are energized by inspired and inspiring prophets. The beginning is a kind of limitless creative time. At some point, after enough different ideas have been tried and failed or succeeded, the new system begins to become standardized and reified. Sociologist Max Webber called this the “routinization of creativity” and applied it to the historical development of religions, but I think much the same can be applied to the web.

When the internet largely arrived in the public world, mostly after the very limited dial-in BBS’s, there was this sense of a new, digital frontier. “The Information Superhighway” was the popular term among the laity, and the prophets discussed cyberspace—an entire world bound only by the imagination and the limits of technology. Many of us watched in awe as computer graphics and virtual reality developed, imagining what the internet may be like in a few years. The first chat rooms and online communities became not only a communication tool but clung to that driving metaphor of a mental space. Early web design began to reflect this with sites that had metaphoric navigation (rooms and doors), or else were built as information environments intended to be explored in a nonlinear fashion. In design terms, this was a time for abusing HTML in ways that the code’s creators had never intended.

At some point, the process of limitless creativity met the business world where the creative development had a specific purpose, was measurable, and cost money. The result was market-based design, usability, designing sites with some sort of conversion intended, and the assumption that users (not visitors) came to either complete a task or ask a question but not to explore or experience. The most obvious and least expensive solution was to apply the grid-based layout systems used in print media. This is part of what Fritz described as “the frame.” With the dominance of the frame, cyberspace, virtual reality, and allot of the creativity in web design went the way of the flying car.

(Fritz describes much of today’s standard web design as coming from USA Today.)

The frame exists all over in the way that the world is designed. In fact, it is nearly ubiquitous when describing doorways into mental places. Think about it—windows, doors, television screens, movie screens, pages, text, and photographs are all presented to the world in square or rectangular frames. Fritz said he thought it was the reflection of a male urge to order his environment. Fritz also blamed the browser wars, the frameset tag, and seemed to link “standards-based design” to “standardized” looking websites. I’m not sure I agree on that part. The point is that a medium that started as limitless and could be described by any number of poignant metaphors became over the years just another representation of a newspaper page designed to be easily scanned for text-based information with a few graphic elements thrown in. Chat rooms and virtual environments are largely gone, replaced with instant messenger clients that are little more than text-only telephones. Where once we imagined a world where you could be fully immersed in a digital environment, now we are impressed at the ability to embed video in a website. Why? Because we don’t expect a website to do any more than a newspaper or book because it is designed just like one.

Fritz described websites that break the frame as those that encourage the user to participate, think, and experience. He advocates bucking the “don’t make me think” trend began by Steve Krug, especially where higher education websites are concerned. Instead, he believes that aesthetics should stand on a level with usability. Fritz described how design, in all aspects of our lives, is improving and increasing with the end result that the aesthetic bar is being raised. Instead of continuing to design websites for the largest common denominator, using a “herd” model to move “users” through the site, Fritz suggests exploring what it means to design for the individual—the human being.

During the presentation, Fritz asked how many understood the soul of their institution and very few people raised their hands. (I did, unfortunately, because he wanted me to share it in a few sentences and I sure didn’t have an elevator speech ready…) He also asked how we could convey the institution’s soul in the design of the site. As an example, he discussed some young people who have created personal brands to describe themselves. These teens create logos and apparel around their personal brand as a way of differentiating themselves from those who wear GAP or the like. If creative teens can articulate how to communicate the essence of who they are as a person in a brand way, then why can’t a college?

Fritz gave several examples of sites that he thinks attempt to break out of the frame. Here are the few I could jot down (We ended up having trouble with the hotel’s stupid Waypoint and not being able to see many of the examples.):

bbdo.com
fullsail.com
modernista.com
www.kpf.com

In the end he went through several of the nitty-gritty barriers and possibilities for breaking out of the frame (things like trimming bloated sites, using basic design elements, campus buy-in), but they were all fairly straightforward things many of us have encountered in the past so I won’t recount them.

I’ll leave you with the bullets from one of his slides that stuck with me as particularly poignant:

* From user-centered to human-centered
* From accessible websites to websites worth looking at
* From sites that serve our needs to sites that we remember
* From separate approaches to one balanced philosophy

So here’s a horrid quality video I shot with my phone of my office as a proof of concept.

If you’d like to know how I managed to get at least this far, I’m using Jeroen Wijering’s Flash video player along with the WP-FLV WordPress plugin.

I’m still trying to figure out a better way to convert the .3gp video from my phone to a file format that Flash can work with. Right now I have to do two conversions, which doesn’t help the already yucky quality. At least working with a real digital video recorder will be easier :P

It seems that Brown has made some web design faux pas over the years. One of the more visible critics has been webpagesthatsuck.com (apparently the x-staffer). I have two things to say in response to this:

1) It takes people willing to stick their neck out or take a fall for innovation to happen. I applaud Brown for that.

2) I have never really much respected webpagesthatsuck.com because, rather consistently over the years, their website has sucked.

Secondary pages off of the main site are disappointingly inconsistent, though strong on their own accord (I happened to click “Admission,” “Explore,” and one of the letters of the index first.) Second tier pages are strongest where they have obviously been refreshed to echo the new design. The sparseness and typographical focus is carried through very nicely.

My main critique to the new design is in relation to the navigation. As with many college and university websites, there just seems to be too much of it. The homepage offers six distinct different navigational schemes (topical, audience, call-to-action, quick links, search, and a-z index). If you assume that someone is coming to the site to answer a question or complete a task, then they may find so many doorways bewildering and more of a hindrance than a help. Only focus groups or time will tell, and I’d love to know what the results are like. Also navigation related, the second tier pages carry through the multiplicity of schemes with both topical and audience based menus combined with a contextual menu. These are displayed on parallel columns that sometimes shift depending on the page’s other content. While I was able to understand them immediately, I wonder if they will feel a little confusing to some visitors. A last caveat: the rotating content on the homepage happens on reload. I have written in detail about the danger of this in the past.

On the whole, the new Humboldt site raises the bar for the rest of us in terms of visual appeal. There are very few other college and university sites that look so good—it’s like mint for my eyes.

The design uses JavaScript to allow for some segmentation of their audience right on the first page. Sliding “cards” combine topical and audience-specific navigation. The site also uses what I have seen described as a “Yahoo style directory structure” to offer the most important links in each category while also giving the visitor a sense of what each category is about.

The Brown design has several items that I find a little annoying. One is the left justification that leaves a large chunk of negative space on the right when viewed at a large resolution. Another is that they are using a picture of a building in their admission category. Others have found the behavior of the sliding cards to be somewhat counter-intuitive, as the link you are trying to click on has a tendency to fly up and out from under your mouse.

Despite the few objections, the new Brown homepage is one of the first in what will undoubtedly be a continuing exodus into interesting and unique attempts to conquer the many usability and design problems exclusive to higher education websites. A very nice job overall.

(They also unveiled a nice new directory.)

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?

This got me a little obsessed, so I Googled the web in search of Northland’s designer and found him:

Kevin Davis is, hands down, the most talented designer I’ve ever seen working in higher ed. He makes me envious and inspired all at once. The design for his WordPress blog is even incredible. Northland made out like bandits when, in his twenties, Kevin worked with them from ‘04-’05 to produce their site after attending school there. Now he’s apparently moved on to Capella University.

Kevin’s higher ed designs have both a clean simplicity and also an attention to detail that makes them fascinating. The subtle use of gradients and colored bands are elements that appear frequently in my own work. However, whereas I struggle with overly clunky beveling or overdoing the gradients, Kevin makes balance look effortless. While I am frequently using photographs, Kevin adds interest to his designs with unique icons, images, whirls, and fields of texture—design elements that can easily look bad if done wrong.

Kudos to Kevin! I’m glad he’s not at Northland so that I don’t have to compete with him anymore :P