Modern Website Development

Editor's Notes

• #3: Welcome. Intro self I have been asked to talk with you about what goes into building a good website. Books have been written on this topic but I will try to be a little more brief.
• #5: Let’s first take a look back…
• #8: Why did we go back to look at this history? In part to remind you that the internet as we know it is still only 20 years old. It is amazing to think it is so young when we look at everything that we have access to today. In spite of the overwhelming amount of content, we are still dealing with a relatively young medium. And our understanding of how to develop for it is equally young and in immature. Consider as a comparison the growth of television…
• #9: Television in America became widespread in the 1950s. By that time we had been listening to radio programs for decades. More to the point, producers had been formatting programming for the radio medium for decades. They knew what worked. When television came along they did what was natural…they applied the rules they knew from ratio to television. Thus we had the “talking heads”… news anchors would read the news just like they would on radio, the only difference was that the camera was on them. Fast forward to today… the television medium is mature. Producers know how to splice in video of the actual news story instead of keeping the camera focused on the anchor.
• #10: The transformation from print to web is following exactly the same path. In the early days of the internet we simply thought of web pages as an online version of our printed content. It is only recently that we have begun to push the boundaries and build web sites specifically designed for the web medium rather than simply applying the rules that we learned for print. We are in internet terms about where the television industry was in 1970. We have a long ways to go before we can take full advantage of the web. We need to continually push ourselves rather than falling back on the same ways of doing things.
• #11: We all know that the nature of the web is ever changing. This can be seen in the very technology that we use. We used to literally browse the web, going from one site to another to stumble on content. We no longer do that. Recognize that the speed at which the status quo changes means that we need to be forward-looking toward new methodologies rather than remaining mired in today’s or yesterday’s.
• #12: This is also the reason that search engines have become so important. Half of an average web site’s traffic comes from search engines. This is because people go there to look for content instead of browsing sites. So the question becomes… how do we do this?
• #14: In spite of what I have just said about the web being a separate medium and that the old rules don’t apply, the basic principles of communication never go out of style. They remain the same on the web as in print and on everything since you were first taught to write in high school English class. First, have a stated reason for building a website in the first place.
• #15: Identifying your audience is crucial to having a focused web site. If you don’t keep your audience in mind the sheer amount of content that you have will cause you to create a less cohesive site that will be bloated and difficult for your users to find what they want. Sometimes this is unpopular. On www.tamu.edu the most popular link on the site was for email. Students/faculty/staff would to go www and link to their campus email instead of typing it in. In our last redesign we specifically identified potential students and parents as our primary audience. They had no use for the email link, so we took it off. People on campus complained, then got used to it. In the end the university site was better for it. Removing the link allowed for more real estate for other content that our audience was interested in. We have had many comments from parents complimenting how easy it is to find what they want.
• #16: The creation of content should be the longest and most involved part of a web development project. It is the most important part of the site. Content should drive all design and development choices. It is too easy to start a project with a design and tailor your content to that design. Start with content instead and tailor your design to the content. Don’t be afraid to look at your competitors for ideas during your research.
• #18: So let’s assume that you have done all that work and have the content that you want. How do we put that into a well developed web page so that it provides a benefit for our users?
• #19: This is a book – a great book. Go get it and read it. It is written to be easy to follow and is much more eloquent that I can ever be. It is also, though, a philosophy. As you write every page on your site, and every section of every page, the meaning should be obvious and self-explanatory. If your content isn’t simple and to the point it isn’t effective. If it isn’t effective, if you make the user think, you have failed to meet your primary objective.
• #20: Depts get hung up on both of these, but you have to be firm in advocating for your user. Supplemental Instruction vs. tutoring
• #21: In general, we are not providing users with what they are expecting.
• #22: As a good comparison, think about this presentation if I wrote these slides in paragraph format. How you organize the content on the page also matters…
• #23: Research has shown that users not only scan pages, but scan them in a predicatable pattern. Generally known as F-Shaped pattern. Recognize this behavior and stack your most important content in areas that are heavily read.
• #24: For example - www.tamu.edu has calendar and tamutimes Virtual tours has calendar plus aggie maps plus foursquare Make your properties support and strengthen one another. Common data feed for all = consistent content that only has to be updated once
• #27: Part of adapting to the future of the web is to incorporate social media into your sites. Traditional way of using social media follows the standard funnel. Social media drives awareness of your brand, which filters into loyalty, which filters into action on your web site. This could be enrolling to the university, buying a product, or just getting a bit of information.
• #28: The one piece missing from the traditional funnel is an arrow that takes users from your content at the bottom back up to the top. Social media can act as an amplifier, increasing the reach of our pages to audiences we never would have been able to reach otherwise.
• #29: That is why we put, and recommend that everyone put, share icons on their sites where appropriate. News articles and photos are a good start. Pick a package that offers analytics. We use addThis.com and it shows us the amount of viral lift that we get from people clicking back to our article from a facebook or twitter post that somebody had shared. Just adding these links has doubled the traffic that our news stories have been getting.
• #30: Also, incorporate social media into your pages where it is appropriate. We have Foursquare on virtual tours, and will be incorporating likes and pins of photos there as well. The key is to make sure the content makes sense, don’t put it in just for the sake of having it.
• #34: Branding sets the way others see us. It defines our Aggie personality and shapes the way others perceive us. Cohesive use of colors, logos, and site elements help create a cohesive web site. One of common complaints that outside users have is the complete lack of focus that comes from every department having their own look and feel…particularly if it is completely unrelated to the core university brand.
• #35: We started this presentation by noting the speed at which the internet, and therefore web development, is changing. One of these changes is the adoption of mobile devices to view web sites.