MMP11: Maybe the Purpose of Our Redesign is Only to Serve as a Warning to Others

[Intro Music]

Announcer: You’re listening to one in a series of podcasts from the 2009 HighEdWeb Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Tony Dunn:� Hi.� I�m Tony Dunn and my presentation this morning as you probably already know the title of it is �Maybe the Purpose of our Redesign is only to Serve as a Warning for Others.�� If RCI even knew the title of this presentation, I�d be in a lot of trouble.� This is based on the demotivational poster that says mistakes, maybe the purpose of your life.� All right.

The inspiration for this presentation I have to give the entirety, I should give my red stapler to Jared Spool because he was the inspiration for this.� The HighEdWeb folks were crazy enough, misguided enough to pay this enemy of the Voices That Matter Web Conference last April in San Francisco and I really don�t like Milwaukee and I�m going to let it finish but San Francisco rocks.

Jared Spool was a speaker at that conference, a great conference by the way, not as good fun a back channel though I�m just saying as this one.� I had lunch with him at one point during the conference and he asked me, what are you doing at wherever the hell you work?� I said, oh we�re doing a redesign of our homepage and our top-level pages, and he was just like hmm, yeah, well, redesign is always a mistake and they always fail and good luck with that.� I was like, son of a.� I went back to Chico and I was like, oh god, I said great, what we�re doing is doomed to failure, Jared Spool says so.

It happened to be at a very frustrating point in our redesign process and so I got back and I was really depressed because everybody else is doing all this cool stuff and we�re bogged down and Jared Spool says we�re doomed to failure.� I get this email, and it said, bing, request for proposals, HighEdWeb �09.� I was like, okay.� I sat down, I punched out a really snarky proposal with this title seeing we suck and I hate my life.� I sent it in and a couple of months later, things worked out as far as the issues that we were having and I forgot about the presentation proposal and everything.

Things were going fine and I was like, actually we�re doing pretty good and then bing, you have mail, your proposal has been accepted.� I was like, oh and now I�ve got to present that.� It�s going to be a tough one.� How am I going to do this without getting myself fired?

So as a result, I have to walk a real thin line here as far as what I say.� Some of you who may follow my blog know that I got in a lot of trouble for it and suspended it for a while and the only reason that it�s back is because I don�t think my boss has discovered that it�s back.� So I�ve already been put notice.� I�ve had to sit in the corner once.� I had a timeout. �I might have to go to my room or something.

Anyway, so, as a result I have to have this slide.� The person and events in this presentation are fictitious.� Despite anything I might say to the contrary, I made all of these up.� Any resemblance to real persons living or dead or zombies is purely coincidental.� This presentation is intended for entertainment purposes only.� If you learn anything in this presentation, you have to leave it in the room, okay?� You can�t take anything out of here.

The views and opinions expressed here are those only of the author and do not represent the views of the California State University or its officers.� So that gets my CIO off the hook.� It doesn�t get me off the hook.

So with that, let�s dive in.� So let me get myself in trouble right away by giving a little background of our redesign process, where we came from to get to where we�re going.

Back in the good old days of, say, 2007, which I guess we know there are a few people that still need to catch up to 2007 if you catch my drift from yesterday�s keynote.� Back in the good old days of 2007, we had a web governance structure which is how we refer to it on our campus, that consisted of an ad hoc committee that had been formed in 1996 based on a group of people that were interested in this phenomenon called the interwebs and wanted to learn more about it.� So these people did not necessarily have any IT background.� They did not necessarily know anything about the web or technologies or anything to do with internet or the web, anything that you and I deal with.� They�re just people on campus that were interested in this.

So the university put up a homepage and these people, it was just a committee to meet and talk about the internet.� When the university�s homepage started to become important, people looked around the campus and said do we have any infrastructure that can deal with this?� Well, there�s the www.guidelinescommittee over there and they didn�t have that name in those days; it was just a web committee.� And it was like, oh well, they�ll do.� We�ll put them in charge of the homepage.

The problem with that was, and I can say this now because certain individuals are retired, that some of the members of that committee were large carnivorous mid Jurassic vertebrates if you get my drift.� They were much more interested in protecting their own prerogatives than they were in growing our website and serving the needs of the university.� I tell you what, I was put on that committee as a sacrificial lamb when I came aboard and boy, I tell you, I got eaten for lunch so many times it was very political and it was not driven by the best needs of the university, it was not objective.� It was all politics.

As a result of that structure which our website suffered under for so many years, I sure hope I don�t in trouble because it�s all history now, it�s no surprise that the current information architecture for our website was created in November 1999.� It�s going to have its 10th anniversary next year.� We are going to party harder than everybody partied last night in order to celebrate 10 years.� This was the design in 1999.� Five years later, we re-skinned the homepage to make it look better so in April 2004, this version of the homepage debuted.� It entered kindergarten this fall and we�re very happy for it.

This design is a table-based design. �Originally the HTML tags were all in uppercase; I had nothing to do with this site, absolutely nothing to do with it.� I did have to go in once it was implemented.� I did have to go in and make it work with Netscape 4.7.� That was two weeks of my life that I will never ever get back.� I assume it still works with Netscape 4.7 but as you can tell, it�s a table-based design.� It�s very inflexible.� If you look at this, you�ll realize there�s only one place that we can add information and that�s right here.� If we add something here, now we have a lot of white space here.� It�s a very inflexible design to deal with.

As a result, we haven�t been able to grow it or do anything with it.� These gifts rolled over sweet.

Just to give you an idea of how this committee operated, this always brings a little down the line, the office of alumni and parent relations, that�s what�s they�re called, wanted to change this.� This used to say alumni and friends.� They wanted to add the word parents.� Now, originally, this was up here with perspective students, current students, faculty and staff.� It was with all the audience oriented stuff; it was down at the bottom there.� But there was one large carnivorous mid Jurassic vertebrate on the committee who said, if you add the word parents, that will impinge on the curve.� You see the little curve?� Yes.

As a result, we had this huge battle over whether we were going to add the word parents to the homepage.� The end result being against practically over my dead body was to move alumni and parents away from the other audience-oriented things down to the very bottom because that preserved the curve.� So that�s how business is done at Chico.� Now you see, you understand now?� You understand where I�m coming from?� You feel my pain?� Yes, it�s bad.

As a result of having a very politically-driven infrastructure or governance of for our homepage, upper level pages and having a very inflexible design for our homepage, we kind of painted ourselves into a corner and there was really no way we could get to the future with either the governance structure that we had or the homepage that we had.� And this is where I�m just going to flat out say Jared Spool was wrong.� He said that redesigns are a mistake and always ended in failure.� What he really meant, and I�ve talked to him, Jared is a cool guy, he�s very smart and he�s right, is that you should never have to do a redesign.

If you designed your page correctly, it will be flexible enough to grow and change with the needs of your institution.� Do you think the needs of your homepage are the same today that they were five years ago?� Anybody here?� No.� Do you think the needs of your homepage are going to be the same five years from now?� Do you want to go through a whole redesign process?� I�m not seeing any hands here, folks.� So his point is well taken.� If you do the redesign, if you do it right, you build your website right, you don�t have to ever rip it all out and build it again.� You can grow it and adopt it to beat your needs in the future.

That�s our goal this time but the fact was we couldn�t get there from where we were so we had to rip it all out and start over again, not just the homepage itself but the infrastructure on campus that was governing our homepage.� That all had to go to make way for the future where we could do what we needed to do.� So that�s really what my presentation is about.� It�s how do we get there from here?

So the first step, and actually I can�t credit our CIO enough for this.� I don�t know what he went through but as I was building this presentation, I realized he must have gone through hell many times over to get where we are now.� We all knew that what we had as far as the committee had to go and we had to have some responsible governance for our website.� Those of you who will have a web governance structure like you have a web communications department with a director of web communications and you�ve got staff and money and all those things, yes, we seen very primitive to you, the little amoeba crawling around the bottom of the ocean.� Yes, for those of you, you�re lucky.

Now, for those of you who are a web team of one, you�re at the other end of the spectrum.� We�re kind of somewhere in the middle.� We have people but we just didn�t have the infrastructure to make anything happen or the will to make anything happen.� So that was the first thing that we really had to do.� It was to come up with an infrastructure that would work.

Now, our CIO didn�t want to take this on.� His view is we�ll run the servers, blah, blah, blah but the content and community has to belong in communications, public affairs is what it�s called.� They�re down with that and as soon as public affairs as soon as they�re sure that the internet is going to catch on, they�re going to get on that.� So unfortunately, we knew it had to happen but there was really nobody to take the ball.� The CIO finally broke down and said, I have to do this, I�m the only that�s willing to do this.

So he actually went to the cabinet and all that and he got a structure, a web governance structure in place that, guess what?� It�s actually working.� We made a lot of fun of it in the beginning but it�s actually working and I don�t want to spend a lot of time on this.� This may not work for you.� You may have something better but this is what we got and this is what we did and I�ll tell you a little bit why it�s working.

We had a web design team supposedly an ad hoc team of people from various departments to help do this redesign project but we all know now at this point, we didn�t know then, we do know now that we are permanent because we�re going to have ownership of these pages and it�s going to be up to us to maintain it, so I�m cool with that.� Up at the top, a bunch of suits making a lot of money, the cabinet VPs and things like that.� Over here, we have the web management committee and the purpose of this committee is not to tell us what to do other than say the university has a strategic goal of this.� Then what they have done, and this has worked really well, is they come to us and they say, recommend to us the best way of doing this on the web.

So they�re not micromanaging us.� They are sending us goals that they want to achieve and we make a recommendation back to the.� This redesign is our first test to that, saying this is what we recommend to do and then they look at it from their level, the management level, and say yes, that fits with the strategic goals of the university or not it doesn�t. �And if it doesn�t, go back and do it again.� I�ll talk about that a little bit more.� Overall that has worked really well.� It�s made up of some VPs and some deans, some directors whose resource is people are directly involved in maintaining the web presence and units of campus that have a stake in the content and presence that goes out like admissions and things like that.� So that�s the makeup of that committee, 10 or 12 people. �I think Max, the CIO is on there.

The web content committee is badly named.� I think it originally had a different purpose the way it has evolved.� Its purpose is basically an information conduit to the rest of the campus.� The web design team does something, gets the approval of the web management committee.� We present that to the web content committee which is made up representation of all units of campus to say this is the direction the university is going, this is what we�re doing.� Do you have any feedback, criticisms?� Should we be doing something different?� Then we take it from there.� But mostly, it�s just to communicate what we�re doing to the rest of campus.� If somebody in the department says, well, I saw the new redesign, it sucks and they say well, I got involved in this, do something.

The avenue that they can do is they can either come to the content committee if they get approved by their boss or if their boss happens to be involved or their boss� boss on the web management committee then they can go through them and get their input that way.� The idea is that they don�t come to us to tell us what to do which used to be the way things ran.� Anybody can randomly say you�ve got to this, and there was nobody to say no, you don�t tell them what to do.� So now that�s a big change for us.

The big benefit of doing this as you can probably guess is that exact thing.� It has removed academic politics from the process and this is Sayre�s law.� You can look it up on Wikipedia.� Academic politics, their viciousness is only matched by the insignificance of the stakes.� I think Henry Kissinger said it first.� I�m not sure but it�s listed as Sayre�s law in Wikipedia.

How many people don�t have to deal with academic politics?� You know, every question I ask, nobody raises their hands.� And that has always been a really huge problem for us and amazingly, this has worked pretty well in diffusing that.

So I don�t know what you need to do to implement that but I recommend that you have something that puts some rationality, some responsibility in between.

The biggest problem we had in implementing this new web governance structure was in the beginning, nobody really knew what these committees were supposed to do.� We were like, okay, so, hey, we want to do this so do we take that to the management committee, to the content committee?� What does the content committee do anyway?� That�s going to be big trouble saying that.� You got me in trouble.

What we had was a problem to get them engaged.� They really didn�t know what they were supposed to do in the beginning, and when the project was just getting off the ground, they didn�t really care.� It wasn�t a big focus.� It wasn�t like we had this big roll out super initiative.� It�s like we got a team, we�re going to redesign this.� It�s like yes, whatever.

So getting them in the beginning, it was very frustrating trying to get them engaged in the process.� This is my favorite slide of the whole presentation.� I just love that cat.� You take away the fur it looks a lot like me on Sunday night.� What�s that?� Yes, right, exactly.� The only reason I put this up there besides bringing the Lowells is that it was extremely frustrating in the beginning to try to figure out how the things got done in this new structure.� But as time went on, it got clarified and it has all worked itself out.� Everybody understands their roles and it works really well.

So if you do adopt a new governance structure for your homepage and how you manage your web presence, expect that there�s going to be confusion and frustration as people sort out their roles.� Just a minor point, because for us in the beginning it was like, oh god, we�re doomed to failure.� This new regime is the same as the old regime, except that they�re not engaged, not over engaged.� So that was the first step that we did.� We would not have any success without that step.

We�ve all heard this before.� The first year I came to HighEdWeb, somebody said this very thing.� If you don�t have high level buy-in for the process, you�re going to fail.� I said yes, it all sounds really good but we got what we got, right?� But now that I�ve been through the process, I�m like, hey, yes, this is for real.� You can�t get anywhere unless you have this.� Now that we have it, it�s great, better than great.

The second step that we realized we had to do to make this project a success was to create a competent and sufficient team.� Notice it doesn�t say or.� Somebody tweeted yesterday that there are plenty of competent and insufficient teams out there and that�s a reality for a lot of us.� We were very lucky in the sense that we had enough people on campus to build a team to do what we needed to do.� We decided because of certain constraints that the State of California is dealing with not to outsource this because that uses the green things that you carry around in your pocket with a little like this.� Yes, we didn�t have any of that so we decided to do it on campus.

The first thing is to realize that a team of web nerds along is not sufficient to do a redesign.� A team of designers alone is not sufficient to do a redesign.� A team of marketers, god help us, is not enough alone to do a redesign.� You need all those roles and more.

Just to show you the people that I work with on the nerd shop, when I showed this slide to the people, the guys that I worked with, they went, yes, whatever.� And they go there really should be a space between the age and the slash there.� It won�t validate without that.� That was a little too ironic for me so I added the space in there without comment.� I was just like, dude, seriously.� Somebody in the last session pointed out that PowerPoint automatically capitalize the S so it still doesn�t validate.

The thing is you need however many people you have even if it�s just you.� You need to have people that are competent enough in pretty much all these roles.� You wish, huh?� The fact of the matter is for us, I was this, this, this and this and a little bit of this and our project manager was also our designer.� We got web writers and editors and so we have most of these roles.� We don�t need an account manager.� We�re doing it all for free, right?� You ask our CIO, this is costing me half a million dollars.� I�m like, dude, you�d be paying our salaries anyway.

But you really need to have these.� If you�re lacking an area of expertise that�s where you�re going to have problems in your process and it�s not going to be a big surprise.� If you don�t have somebody who is good at information architecture, that�s where you�re going to run into problems.� It�s going to be very confusing.� How is our site supposed to be organized with the content, da, da, da?� So that�s a very important point.� It�s you really need to have all those roles to be successful.

Like I said, we�re lucky that we have enough people that we can grab from various units to participate in this to help us be successful.

The next step for our success was to define the project.� This seems like a no-brainer but it�s amazing how many people start projects without really knowing where they want to go with the project, what they want to accomplish.� So for us, we sat down and said, okay, what do we have to do?� What are our goals?� What do we need to accomplish with this?� What do we want to accomplish?� Where do we want to go with the university web presence, etc.?

So the first step in that process was to identify what was wrong with our current site.� If you don�t know what�s wrong with something, you can�t fix it.� This is our server room here.� I think that that was one of our problems.� The big problem with our website obviously is it was outdated.� It wasn�t flexible; it wasn�t able to grow.� We knew that there were voices that wanted to be heard on the homepage and should be heard on the homepage and there was no way to accommodate those.� We also knew that our homepage was mostly being used by internal audiences but the goal of the university was to direct it more towards external audiences, prospective students and parents.� And we knew that that was a problem because that wasn�t happening.

So that was the first step.� It�s to identify what�s wrong and what you�re going to fix.� That�s very important because if you don�t know that, how can you fix something where you don�t know what�s broken?

The second step was to set the scope of the project.� I was very big on this.� How many people here have experienced scope creep?� Yes, we all have.� It�s fatal, right?� It�ll grind the project to a halt.� It�ll make the deadline for the project stretch off into the dim and distant horizon, and we knew we couldn�t do that just for scale.

We started out to redesign our homepage and while we ended up building the Large Hadron Collider, it�s just you know what happens, you know?� Somebody will keep adding specs on to it. �Well, we couldn�t do that and we knew that that would be fatal.� So the first thing we heard when we set up redesigning the homepage was you redesign the portal as well, and it is like, well, are we?� That�s a good question.� And so we defined and we got the web management committee to sign off we are doing this, this, this and this but not, explicitly not this, this, this and this or anything else that we didn�t name.� And we had people come in and say you should be doing this, I don�t know why you�re not going to be redoing this page, you have to redo this.� And we say the web management committee has already signed off on this.� If you have an issue, please take it up with them.

That deflected it away from us.� The web management committee was like, you know what, go away.� That really helped a lot but we had to have a scope, otherwise there�s no way to define where our process, our redesign stopped.

The maps, our campus map, don�t look at it, don�t go to our site and look at it.� Please don�t. �It�s a hideous thing.� That dates back literally to 1978.� It has been updated but it�s 30 years old.� It�s not interactive at all.� Everybody wanted that to be part of this project but it was too big to fit in the scope of this project.� It�s a project of its own.� Some other day we�ll do it.� It needs to be done a year ago but that�s life.

The other thing that we did was to say, okay, let�s get away from the mechanics of this and let�s talk about what do we want our homepage to be?� It�s our homepage.� What should it be doing?� What should it be communicating?� What�s the message that we want to tell people?� Come to Chico and get drunk?� I mean that�s what we�re known for.� Pass out on the railroad tracks and be another casualty.� We have three or four of those a year.� Who passes out on those railroad tracks?� Come on.

So we sat around and we talked about it a lot.� We had a lot of great ideas.� We had more great ideas.� We had great ideas.� We had too many great ideas.� We got bogged down in brainstorming.� Well, we could this.� That sounds cool.� We could do that.� That sounds really cool too.� We spent literally almost five months in this stage of the process and that was a problem.� You have to do the brainstorming but you have to put a limit on it.� The reason was we didn�t stick to something that we did do which was the next step.� Our next step was define the phases, milestones and deadlines for what we were going to accomplish because if you don�t, the journey of a thousand miles often ends in a mud hole if you don�t plan your outcomes, your deadlines, your milestones.

Now, we have those but we got bogged down in brainstorming and we didn�t stick to what we said we were going to do.� We just couldn�t get out of that process so that was a big problem for us.� So even if you have a process, it�s not necessarily going to be perfect.� You�re not necessarily going to stick to it but at least if you do and it comes to it, you can kind of say, we have to move on even though we have great ideas.

The biggest constraint on this planning that we did for our project was our budget.� Do I look like a full human being to you?� Somewhat.� Yes, you're from California.� Do I look like an entire human being from what you can see?� Yes, right?� I�m actually only nine-tenth of a human being.� I should say nine-tenth of an employee.� There are some days that I don�t actually exist and those are called furlough days.� I have taken a 10% pay cut off the UC, I don�t know.� In the UC system, it depends on how much you make on how much you get furloughed but we have the same goals and the same deadlines, the same responsibilities.� There�s just 10% less of us to pass around.

The UC issues, I don�t know of the UC system.� They�re weird.� But anyway, in the California State system, we were told we had to cut $600 million out of the 2009-2010 budget.� They cut $284 million out by furloughing everybody 10% of the time.� That leaves $300 million and we still don�t know where that�s coming from and it�s October, so.

Back in, what was it, July, they passed a new budget and then it was like, oh, finally we have a budget, thank god, big drama.� Then the state controller came out about three weeks later and said, yes, you know about that budget, 2010-2011 we�re probably going to come up $800 billion short of that budget so we�re going to have to make some changes.� The union has agreed that this year we�ll do furloughs.� Next year, it�s pretty clear we�re going to have furloughs; however, the cuts in our budget due to furloughs this year will become permanent next year.� So we will start off with a base budget 10% less than it is now and we�ll have more cuts then but we won�t be getting furloughed so what do you think that that means?

There will be fewer of us next year.� So this has been a huge constraint for us.� And it has been a blessing and a curse, and I�ll talk about that as we go along.� But just to let you know, we�re doing what we�re doing under very constrained conditions.

I was in a session yesterday and somebody asked how many people have had their budget go up, and there are like there people who raised their hand and I yelled, get them.� How dare you have your budget go up?

The next step for us to be successful, and there was a lot of pressure for us not to do the research, just do the design, get it over, get it up there.� Let�s not waste the time and the effort and the resources and just do it.� But we insisted that look, if we don�t know what�s wrong, we don�t know what�s going on, we can�t determine what we need to do, so we need to do the research.

The research was good and it was not as good.� It was better in some ways than I thought it was going to be and it wasn�t effective in others.� One thing that everybody was very interested in was Google Analytics.� Who told us to Google Analytics?� The problem with Google Analytics for us is it really wasn�t telling us anything we didn�t already know.� I mean it is a little unique that since our university is in Oklahoma that we got all these hits out in California but I mean is this a surprise to anybody?� No, it�s not.� So Google Analytics gave us a 60,000-foot view of what was happening on our homepage but it didn�t tell us anything we didn�t already know, so that was one thing.

One thing that did tell us something knew and was really important and this is the single most important slide of this presentation, at least as far as actual process has gone on, is we used a piece of software called Crazy Egg.� How many people have heard of it?� Crazy Egg is a little piece of JavaScript you stick at the bottom of your page and it tracks where on the page people click and it has confetti views and heat map views like this one.� Well, we put it on our homepage and then we showed it to people.� Before we showed this exact image that you're looking at to people, they said I don�t know what�s wrong with our website.� It�s working just fine.� I know where everything is at.� Yes, it has been up there for five and a half years and it took you half that time to figure out where everything was.� So it�s like yes, you know where it is but is it doing what we want it to do?

Well, it works for me.� But the fact of the matter is 50% of the clicks on our homepage were going to the portal log-in.� Another 10% were going to email.� Another 7% to the class schedule.� This is not serving external audiences.� 70% of the clicks on our homepage are for people that are internal.� They�re current students; they�re faculty; they�re staff.� 0.2% of the clicks of the homepage were going to perspective students.� When we showed this to people, they shut up.� They no longer questioned why we were doing a redesign.� They realized that it wasn�t doing the job that it was supposed to do.� This was the single biggest thing that cleared the way for us to do our job.

We also did user surveys.� How many people have done user surveys?� Get something really interesting responses, huh?� One of the questions that we asked on our user survey was, we send surveys out to everybody basically, what do you like best about our website?� One of their responses that we got was that you have it.� I was like it�s a fair point.� Yes, well, that�s a point taken.� It doesn�t tell us much but the thing about user surveys, we got a whole wild range of some hilarious responses.� How many people have done user surveys but now lolled at some of the responses that you�ve gotten?� Yes, some of them you�re just like, what?

But the thing about user surveys was it was a good way to get people involved and it was a good way to feel like we�re getting the message out and communicating with people and letting them have their voices heard, but the results of the survey were pretty ambiguous.

We asked, like I said, what do you like best about our website?� Number one answer, easy to navigate.� We asked what do you like least about our website?� Number one answer, it�s difficult to navigate.� Okay, so the takeaway is you can�t please everybody.� So that was one of the things that we dealt with.� It was helpful.� It didn�t provide us with a lot of useful information though.

We also did a best practices review where we took 20 top university websites, got a student assistant to go through and inventory every single lead and every piece of content on the top level pages and then we built a matrix, so many percent of universities have this.� I actually did a blog post of how many universities are using perspective students versus how many are using future students.� That helped guide the process a little bit.� The main thing that this allowed us to do was see what other people were doing and also deflect some people�s input.� They say, well, you should be doing this.� Well, 85% of universities are doing this and only 5% of the ones that we analyzed were doing what you�re doing.� I go, okay.� That was helpful.

It also allowed us to see some good things and steal some good ideas.� It also allowed us to see mistakes that other people were making so that we could avoid them.� So that was the benefit of that process.� Again, maybe we didn�t use a lot of that but it was good for communicating to people that we knew what we were doing.

That�s the bottom line of doing the research.� It�s that people will believe anything you say if they think you�ve done the research.� If I knew that before we did all that research, I would have just made up the numbers.� I mean really, come on.� We went through a lot of work to get those numbers.� It�s academia; people believe research or believe it if they think that you�ve really done it.� So that�s a critical step.� For us, it was more of a political process than an actual discovery process.� We did learn things, yes, valuable things.� We learned more from the next phase but this convinced people that we knew what we were doing and we�re on the right track and that cleared a lot of interference out of the way.

The biggest constraint was our budget.� We had to cut back on a lot of research.� There are things I wanted to do.� I wanted to do usability testing of our current site.� I�m actually glad I didn�t waste my time because our site sucks, we know that.� Why do you need to test it?� Okay.� But I also wanted to do things like personas.� I wanted to develop profiles of types of users to see what kind of information that they needed to have.� We didn�t have the budget for that, so that was a constraint.

The next thing that we did, this was super valuable, this was eye opening for me, was getting input from the community on the campus.� The first thing we did was do focus groups with students, perspective students, parents and perspective students in particular, we did two focus groups with them.� They are the most inert bunch.� I�ll tell you they just sat there.� We showed them a website.� Do you like this website?� What do you like about it?� Do you like this?� They go, yes, that�s okay.� What do you like about it?� It�s nice.� Specifically, is there anything?� No.� Okay.� But we did get a lot of feedback from people on this.� We learned a lot about what people said what they wanted to see.� We all know that what people say and what they do are not necessarily the same thing but it is helpful to hear what people want.

Who do you think the most vocal group?� We did perspective students, current students, parents, faculty, staff, alumni.� We did focus groups with all those. Who do you think were the most vocal group?� Faculty and alumni, no, alumni don�t care.� Parents.� Faculty and parents.� Talk about your lawnmower parents, boy.� Does everybody know what a lawnmower parent is?� They�re like helicopter parents but are just closer to the ground.

So we did focus groups.� We got a lot of information from them.� I�m running out of time amazingly.� I don�t know why I�m running out of time.� The next thing we did which we really learned a lot was we turned it around and we had meetings with stakeholders.� These are people on campus, who work on campus that have a stake in the information that we�re putting out on the homepage and the interior pages.

What we discovered is there�s a hell of a lot of people that work on this campus and they all have very strong opinions about what should go on the homepage.� But the thing that we learned was there�s a lot of stuff that really, there are people who are doing a lot of stuff that really was important that needed to be communicated and wasn�t being communicated.

One thing that I learned was how complicated it is to be a student.� We had a recommendation on our current students� page we�d put a little box that says registration deadline.� The feedback we got from the stakeholders was which registration deadline?� Are you talking about new students, transfer students, current students, international students or continuing ed students?� I was like, they have different deadlines?� And they looked at me like I was an idiot.� Well, I don�t know.� But that was the kind of feedback we got.� We learned 95% of the content that had to go in our site from the focus groups and the stakeholder meetings.

The biggest constraint once again was our budget.� What we wanted to do was take that input, build wire frames based on the input we got from the focus groups and stakeholder meetings and then redo those meetings, maybe with new people or maybe with the same people, and say, is this better?� We didn�t have the budget to do that so that was a problem.

The next thing that�s important is plan your content.� It isn�t going to grow by itself.� I�ve done about 50 redesigns of departmental and college sites and if you don�t have a content strategy, you are going to fail.� The number one reason that redesigns fail is because of content.� If this is your strategy, you�re doing it wrong.

There was this woman who presented at the Voices that Matter Conference, Christina Halverson.� She has written a book called Content Strategy.� I haven�t read it.� I saw live it in concert at the conference and it rocked, it was great.� If you don�t have a content strategy, you're going to fail.

What we ended up having to do was, and this ended up being a huge project, we developed an information architecture for the site that not only included the pages that we were going to create but everything those pages we�re going to point to.� So every link in here.� And I always hear, I�m an information architect, that�s my background, that anybody can do information architecture.� Yes, well, let�s see you do that.

Now, this contains a place for every single piece of content and every link that�s going to be in this project.� It has to happen somehow.� Somebody has to put those links and somebody has to write that content.� It doesn�t magically appear.� If you don�t plan it all out, it isn�t going to appear for you.

Wire frames, we did these.� These are our wire frames.� It�s too much on here.� We�re going to take some stuff off, but we had to say every single link that was going to be on these pages, it�s got to come from somewhere and we have to plan what it is.� You have to realize your content isn�t going to build itself.� There�s some assembly required.

We�re using Google Docs and Dropbox and a few other things at campus wiki to keep track of an inventory of every single link, paragraph, photograph and other content element that we have to have by our go live date.� They�re assigned a deadline and a person who�s responsible for producing it, every single piece.� There are hundreds of pieces to this redesign.� Hundreds; I mean it�s huge.� But if you don�t do that, you're not going to get the content.� It just doesn�t magically appear from anywhere.

One of our problems that we�re having when we did the focus groups, we got a really strong message from the perspective students particularly.� We showed them a site and we discovered and they had strong negative reactions to a lot of sites and what we discovered is perspective students can detect one part per trillion of marketing on a webpage and they don�t like it.� They�re intensely allergic to it.� Their BS detectors are turned up on high.

The problem that we�re having is our PR department is driving a lot of our content and they haven�t gotten that message.� They�re still writing happy talk and nobody wants to hear it.� So this is a problem and a constraint we�re dealing with.

Another constraint that we�re having that you need to realize it�s not a constraint for us because we realize this, it�s that your content management system is not going to solve your content problems for you.� It just isn�t going to do it.� It�s a tool.� A word processor does not make you a good writer.� A content management system doesn�t make your content good and it doesn�t make it appear magically.� So it doesn�t do your job for you so you wake up and get back to work.� Somebody has to write that content, plan for that, build that into your plan from the very beginning.� Don�t leave the content till the end.� Everybody does that and then you�re stuck with a beautiful template with no content in them.

The biggest constraint on this and this is actually where it has been good, our budget.� We have cut a huge amount out of our website, out of this redesign because we don�t have the time or the budget to do it.� We wanted to have all this fancy interactive things and video and stuff.� It costs too much, it takes too much time, too many resources as it goes.� So we had the opposite of scope creep.� We�ve had scope deflation in the sense that now we have less things that we�re doing but the good part of this is it has forced us to focus on what we need to do, not what we want to do.

So I�m hoping that our site is going to be much better because of that.� It�s going to have less fluff, less stuff that we don�t actually need to get the job done.

The last thing, we�ll spend about a minute on this because I know I�m out of time, is plan your design.� Now, I fully expected that when we released to do the design mockups to the campus that there would be a huge furor, it was just going to be a bloody battle with bodies all over the place because everybody has an opinion about web design.� Just because you wear suit, a VP in your title, it doesn�t mean you're qualified to critique web design.� But the fact of the matter was that we had done our job so well in communicating with people in having a web governance structure that worked and made rationale decisions that when the new designs came out, and I dreaded this moment, it was like, yes, those looked pretty good, great.� I was stunned.� You're kidding me.� Nobody wants to fight over the font color or anything?� Come on, bring it.� They�re like, no, it looks pretty good.� Good job.

So by doing all this stuff that I�ve told you that we�ve done that totally diffused this part of the process.� It was amazing; however, we did make one big mistake.� We�re putting all this into our content management system and as a result, we wanted to get out of the business of maintaining, i.e. hacks and stuff like that.� So we wanted to have an HTML CSS framework that was pre-built, tested on browsers that we could adopt, attach our own prettiness to but it would take us out of the business of having to maintain a lot of HTML.� Unfortunately, we brought this up after our designer had already done the designs and now she�s like, I�m not going to back and redesigning this to fit with Yahoo grids.� It�s like yes, well, we kind of need to do that because we need to do that so we�re having a big battle right now over that.� I don�t know how it�s going to work out.

The big advantage of using a framework is our budget.� If you use a framework, it�s less work for you.� Yahoo grids, they have a very smart team of people who are testing their code on every browser that has ever been used.� So we don�t have to do that.� As long as we work within the constraints of their framework, that takes that load off of us.� Do we have to write a lot of custom CSS?� No.� Do we have to write a lot of HTML?� No.� It�s provided to us.� It�s something we can use.� Are there constraints?� Yes, but we have a bugger constraint, our budget.

If you�re not sick of hearing about it, I sure am.� So how many minus minutes do I have?� About three.

So let me go over the takeaways real quick and then if anybody wants to hang out for questions, that�s fine.� If you don�t do all of these things, you�re going to have serious issues, probably failure.� If you dot have high-level buy-in and ownership of the project, you're going to have nothing but problems.� If you succeed, it�s a miracle.

Make sure you have the right people on your team.� We had some of the wrong people on our team; finally got them off our team.� We�ve been much more successful because of that.� Clearly define the project and its scope.� Do I have to say that one?� Do the research if for no other reason than to clear the way for you to do your job.� Get input and feedback.� Without that, we wouldn�t know what we were doing.� This gave us 95% of the information we needed to actually build the site.� Have a content strategy and a plan.� Don�t think that because this is the last point it�s the least important because when you get there and you go, oh yes, content, right.� Then you're going to think back to this and you think, he did say something about that.

Anyway, thank you very much.� If you have any questions, I�m here.