A Pioneering Approach to College Admissions

by Marianne Amoss on January 20, 2012

This post was written by Marianne Amoss, Fastspot’s content strategist and resident writer.

What is the next generation of admissions marketing? And how can we integrate Web marketing and print marketing? These are questions that plague universities and colleges across the country, as they struggle with the cost and manpower required to keep materials updated and accurate—and see classes of increasingly Web-savvy students coming through their doors. When Tufts University considered these questions, they naturally turned to Neustadt Creative Marketing, which had worked with the school on undergraduate admissions for the schools of arts and sciences and engineering and on a university-wide brand strategy.

Tufts is a highly selective private university in the suburbs of Boston. NCM, a seasoned expert in providing marketing services to educational institutions, knew that Tufts would be ripe for a smart, creative approach. They launched an extensive, five-month-long market research project among prospective students and their parents to start to answer that question. Out of that research, NCM defined a series of marketing goals that altered the messaging strategy that Tufts was using, says Mark Neustadt, principal of NCM. What did they settle on? A relatively unconventional plan, says Neustadt: an “integrated program that abandoned the traditional package of print materials entirely and replaced it with a three-times-a-year magazine which coordinated with an admissions ‘microsite.’”

Once Tufts adopted the report’s recommendations, NCM brought Fastspot in on the project; the two companies collaborate frequently under the name Door No. 2. Together, the two teams worked together to design and develop the magazine, concept the stories, write the first issue, develop the Web design, architect the Website, build it, load in the content, and finally launch the joint project on 11/11/11. Fastspot also created a new virtual campus tour for Tufts, which launched at the same time.

The magazine, named Jumbo after the school mascot, is now published online and in print three times a year and mailed to students in the admissions funnel. The site and magazine are run on Fastspot’s BigTree CMS, a user-friendly content management system that allows the Tufts admissions staff to easily update admissions information and keep up with trends without assistance from their internal IT team. “Viewbooks can take over a year to develop and are very costly and difficult to update,” Neustadt says. “A three-times-a-year magazine is relatively economical to update and can be much more responsive to changes going on in admissions.”

jumbo, tufts' admissions magazineIt’s important to note that this program does not completely do away with print—or migrate everything to the Web, Neustadt says. “A lot of people think that’s what this is all about. This is not about eliminating print. But what is has done, which is incredibly exciting, is create a print program that is consistent with the pace and the energy of the Web.” Tufts now has an admissions microsite that is essentially separate from the main site; Door No. 2, which loads in the content for each issue of Jumbo (with minimal tech support), serves as “managing editor,” helping ensure that the content is consistent, professional, and on-strategy.

Since launch, the site has been enormously successful. Analytics show that the site is getting lots of traffic; the dean of admissions, Lee Coffin, often gets several dozen comments on his blog posts. “One of the successes of the design has been the integration of social media and the content,” says Neustadt. And Tufts has gotten students involved, creating a student group whose charge it is to create new content; you can see student-generated photos and content throughout the site. “Tufts has a superbly run admissions operation, and they are at a point in their evolution as an office where their staff feels energized and capable to take this on.”

There are lots of moving parts, and they all mesh together, seemingly effortlessly, from the print magazine to the Web to the social media. As Neustadt puts it, “It’s a smart approach to print.”

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Why Documentation Is Important

by Tracey Halvorsen on January 11, 2012

Today I was reading a post by Ryan on 37signals’ blog Signal vs. Noise called The Documentation Dilemma. Ryan proposes that the act of documentation and creation of project artifacts is a symptom of a bottleneck in the value chain. He implies the documentation process can slow down the creative process to the point where you either:

1. Produce design ideas at the pace of development or

2. Freeze ideas in the form of documents, diagrams and requirements until they are ready to go later on in the process.

I think this is an oversimplification of documentation, and when, where and why it’s important to a project. I live in the land of client services, where every project involves a new set of stakeholders, participants, audience types and overall business objectives. Ryan’s team is developing one set of products, used the same way by every customer. There is little customization or need for bureaucratic buy-in as they are their own client, and the strategy may already exist and be a given. However, I see 37signals’ thoughts and propositions on workflow often espoused by design agencies and firms working with client services, and unfortunately I don’t think they overlap well. While we can all appreciate an expedited process and it’s the very reason why we hold the annual X-Day at Fastspot, it is not a system that can support long-term complex client projects.

This tendency towards assuming documentation is a waste of time or as Ryan puts it, “I used to think design teams made so many diagrams and documents because… well, they like that sort of thing.” greatly devalues the importance of clarifying important issues and goals in writing. It is immature to say that some people just like that sort of thing, when in reality, unless you an extremely detail oriented control freak who is trained or gifted as a writer, you probably dread the notion of having to create detailed and important documentation when you’d rather be coding or designing. No, documentation is not something people just do because they like to do it, it is actually important. However, documents and their usefulness should always be held up to scrutiny and improvements should be made whenever possible. Just as the design process should seek to create something perfect and useful for the client, so should the documentation. Documentation can be the first set of deliverables within an agency process to become outdated, stale, or redundant – mainly because they are dismissed as unimportant or left to a lackluster team to plod through begrudgingly. This doesn’t need to be the case if we throw out what we think documentation means and seek to find more meaningful ways to integrate the process of documentation.

I find myself interviewing designers and developers these days and spending as much time looking at their writing skills as I do their technical and design skills. I place a tremendous amount of value on someone’s appreciation for and ability to conduct strategic thinking. We live in an age where a knee jerk reaction is to “just do it”, or find the “app for that” problem. However, you can’t replace good old fashioned brain storming, and the results of that kind of thinking must be successfully documented. Documents can be exciting, inspiring and creative forms of expression. Documents can be “living” data, intended to be evolving road maps which can empower a client team long after the vendor has left and the project deliverables have been handed over. Documents are often the foundations that survive the longest and inform the next iteration of the thinking. They are building blocks that should inform the future, not create problems or bottlenecks for the present.

Some of the most important documentation we create for clients is where we restate recommendations or strategic goals. While one may argue that this is a rehashing of a productive group conversation, what many who are not as familiar with management roles may forget is that important people who have some say in the progression of the project may not have been part of these group collaborative conversations. Often, teams must move strategic goals and recommendations up the pipeline for approval, sign-off, and budget allocations. These stakeholders often don’t have time to sit through the nitty gritty of the conversions and brain storming exercises, but they do need to see the final documentation. This paper trail will also serve as reminders to new members of the team who come on board mid-project and need to catch up. It’s a reality that teams will shift and the last thing you want to have to do is backtrack because a new VP of communications is hired. Documentation, when done successfully, can keep forward momentum in place and keep the team focused.

Additionally, documentation creates trust. We’ve all sat through great meetings only to see good ideas forgotten, see tasks fall to the wayside, and get stuck in those frustrating loops of “well…we talked about this, so I assumed it was going to happen.” Documentation sets expectations, provides clarity, and creates safety nets. It prevents outliers from coming in and playing “dumb” and derailing a project. It prevents clients from bullying vendors with the old “we talked about this” game. It prevents vendors from talking a great game but playing “dumb” when it comes to the deliverables. It provides a sense of accountability, and it gives teams something to cross check against.

One of our documents is the Creative Brief. One part of this document is a list of keywords describing the tone and style of the design. This document is formed after meetings and is based on collaborative discussions and fact finding sessions and research. The list of keywords is short and to the point. However, this list is often referenced during the course of the project by the designers, the developers and the client. If one of the keywords is “friendly”, we have documentation (approved and signed off on by the client) which empowers us to make certain decisions and have them backed up. It prevents an outlier from coming in mid-project and saying “this should be more slick looking”, or “why are all these colorful icons included?” The documentation sets things in stone. It reminds, reinforces, clarifies and limits the scope of the project. Without documentation, we often find ourselves in never-ending circles. Even the mere act of writing something down gives it more legitimacy.

We know that writing is a helpful tool for memory, we have learned that lists help keep us organized, we have even seen studies that suggest the act of writing something down ensures it has a higher likelihood of succeeding. Many of us were told by parents to write down our pros and cons lists before making big decisions. We often can’t see something clearly until it is clearly written out before us. Perhaps the problem with documentation is the tendency towards wasted words and ineffective thinking? I suspect the issue is not with documentation, but with the types of documents being created for the purposes set in place. I also just have to say I find it ironic that someone at 37signals is talking about documentation being a waste of time when their most popular product, Basecamp (which we use and very much like), is essentially an application for better organizing and sharing documentation.

Ryan from 37signals ends his post stating,”Documentation may be necessary when your throughput is low, and that’s an opportunity to see documents not as charming deliverables but as warning signs of a deeper problem in your process.” I would argue that a lack of documentation which is focused on strategic thinking and establishing foundations should be a warning sign of a deeper problem in your process. At Fastspot our “throughput” is anything but low, and our productivity is accomplished with a small team who pride themselves on efficiency. Yet no one here would argue on the pointlessness of our documentation. Sure, documentation might have gotten a bad rap from all the poorly conceived ones that exist in the world, but that doesn’t mean the process of documentation is faulty. When documentation is a recording of a strategic and creative process focused on clearly outlining issues, goals, recommendations and guidelines, and created in a way that empowers collaboration and revisions in the future, it is one of the most important phases of any project.

What do you think? Have you seen documentation derail productivity or the creative process? Do you have a unique process for generating useful documentation? How do you keep clients with bad habits from forcing you to spend time on worthless documentation and instead generate productive documentation? We’d love to hear from you.

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The Making of a New Online Museum

by Tracey Halvorsen on November 11, 2011

When the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore Maryland approached Fastspot to help solve one of its core challenges, allowing online visitors to browse its collection of works, we jumped at the opportunity. Here is a recap of some of the hurdles, surprises, successes, and failures that we encountered during the course of the project, with insights from Curt Kotula, Art & Technology Director and the lead designer on this project, and Ben Plum, Interactive Designer & Producer and the lead developer on this project.

UX Challenges
The Walters Art Museum has a huge online collection containing thousands of images. Just like the artwork featured in the images, you can’t count on a consistent image aspect ratio. Images range from the absurdly wide to the ridiculously tall, creating a huge layout challenge for us. You also can’t just crop a work of art—it’s impossible to set a standard size, and one solution will not work for all situations.

We attacked this problem on two fronts. First, when browsing, the artwork thumbnails are organized into columns instead of rows, allowing the variety of image sizes to cascade down the page without wasting space. Second, the artwork detail page is organized in such a way that the supporting content flexes and shifts to fit the aspect ratio of the image; wide images span the width of the page with content below, while tall images fill the left side with content to the right. Our goal was to let these beautiful images be the focus no matter what shape the artwork happens to be.

Browse Simple, Make it Stick
The best part about visiting a museum is stumbling upon a piece of art that sticks with you long after you leave. We felt that browsing the Walters’ online collection should also provide that experience. When the project started, there were over 7,000 items in the collection (currently there are over 11,000!). Increasing users’ access to this impressive body of work and overall “browsability” are two of the main objectives for the project.

We engineered several distinct browsing experiences to promote discovery and surprise. Users can browse by category, material, date range, location in the museum, creator, place of origin, tags, and popularity in the community. We engineered browsing options for a variety of audiences, and these options are presented in a simple and direct tabbed interface.

How Many Clicks Does it Take?
Have we mentioned how big the Walters online collection is? Paged results are a necessity when dealing with thumbnail images. Too many images would cripple older computers or take too long to load over a slow Internet connection. Too many pages make larger result sets a bear to navigate.

We asked ourselves: How do you navigate seventy pages of image based results with the same ease and control that you navigate three? How do you conveniently navigate a thousand individual works of art? We decided to throw out the traditional design pattern of numbered pagination (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 … 450), instead opting for a custom solution based on the ease of drag-and-drop. We engineered the pagination system to give the user fine-grain control; the user can step through smaller result sets with the “next” and “previous” buttons, while large result sets can be quickly navigated by simply dragging the handle to an exact page or piece of art. Every result in a particular set is now easily accessible—no more skipping 10 pages at a time just to get to the center of the set.

Community Organizers
Another challenge was that the previous version of the Website offered user curation tools—they are popular with teachers and museum staff but were not well-utilized outside of those audiences. The ability to organize and curate art isn’t just an important tool for educators; it also helps art novices and children alike begin to analyze and appreciate art by making their own connections.

We needed the barrier of entry to be low and the result to be useful and fun. We decided to use Facebook connect rather than managing our own user system, allowing anyone with an active Facebook account to get started quickly and easily. Finally, we branded the curator feature “Community Collections” and brought recent collections to the homepage to promote the feature and encourage sharing.

Programming Challenges
Modern museums have internal database systems for cataloging and archiving collections. The most popular choice for large institutions seems to be the Museum System by Gallery Systems. We don’t doubt that TMS is a fantastic offline collection management system, but simply put, the Web extensions offered are lacking and don’t seem to be a primary focus of the company. Customization options are limited and the default layout is a generic, confusing mess. The result is a hard-to-navigate online collection that isn’t particularly attractive and tends to look a lot like competitors.

Fresh From The Oven
We decided early on to throw out the generic box mix provided by Gallery Systems and work with the Walters database team to create our solution from scratch. We knew right away that we didn’t want to expose the entire TMS database to the Internet nor did we need the massive amount of information it stored. What we did need was a second database that only contained the information necessary for the new online experience. We used our own content management platform, BigTree CMS, as the core technology that drives the site and engineered a scheduled synching process that eliminates double work.

The Fruits of our Labor
Many at Fastspot would argue that this project was one of our most challenging—and most inspiring. We were lucky to have a fantastic team at the Walters to work with, and they gave us a lot of room to flex our UX muscles and explore possibilities. We insisted on keeping things as simple as possible, even as we tried to integrate more complex functionality, so as to always let the artworks remain front and center. More importantly, we re-envisioned what was possible for a museum to offer its online visitors. Through a diligent process of refinement, a willingness to throw away things that weren’t working, and a constant focus on the visitor’s browsing experience, a wonderful new interface and interactive experience emerged.

So far the new Works of Art site has received glowing feedback, and users have jumped right in and started doing what the Walters Art Museum and all of us at Fastspot hoped they would do: delighting in the experience of exploring art.

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What makes a good Content Management System (and why we built our own)

by Tracey Halvorsen on November 2, 2011

Re-posting this article due to lots of discussion lately – let us know what you think!

Before clients see BigTree CMS, Fastspot’s proprietary content management system, they often ask us why we built our own when there are so many out there that we could have simply used. When they ask me, I usually picture this. I have seen these CMS offerings, and frankly, they are horrible. How could I ever expect my clients to wade through instruction manuals numbering in the thousands of pages when they should be focused on content? What is the point of purchasing a CMS if you need to hire several programmers or experts to run it? Why would I actually expect my clients to willingly log into a system that is unusable, unfriendly and doomed to frustrate and confuse as they try to update a page or change a video clip?

Clearly, there are different “types” of content management systems and there are blogs and companies that do nothing but rate them, review them, provide training for them, etc.. It is an industry of its own, and with little oversight or benchmarks being applied, it is confusing to determine what makes a good CMS. Here are the things that make a good CMS; they are built into BigTree CMS and enjoyed by our clients:

1. Easy to use. Let’s face it. Most of the time, you want someone who knows words and pictures doing the editing and updating on copy and imagery, not a computer scientist. I don’t know about you, but I only know a few very special people who can claim to be a programmer, a designer and a copywriter. If my goal is to be thinking about words and tone and audience, don’t make me worry about code.

2. Intelligent. If I need a piece of content to be placed in multiple places in the Website, it would be nice if the CMS could handle that for me. The benefit of a customized solution is that the development team can tweak the CMS to anticipate your needs and be ready to deliver when you need it to.

3. Helpful. When I need help, I want to get to it quickly and easily. Tool tips, easy-to-locate help sections, videos on how to do a certain process, FAQs—these are all extremely helpful. I like for this kind of information to be built into the system I am using so I don’t have to leave my CMS to find the information on a Website or, even worse, in a 1,000 page written manual.

4. Flexible. If I am going into my CMS to update a bullet point, I don’t want to have to jump through 30 hoops to get it done. Likewise, if I am adding an entire new section to the site—setting up new templates, adding links to the navigation, inputting SEO-relevant content, and setting up modules—then I expect some complexity, along with some checks and balances along the way.

5. Powerful. If I want something to be done, it should be possible. This is one of the reasons we developed our own CMS:  So we could do the things we wanted to be done within the system. It’s also why we developed it on open-source platforms. That way, our clients aren’t beholden to us if they want to build upon the system.

6. Intuitive. If I want to move a navigation item higher on the list of drop down items, wouldn’t it be nice to simply drag and drop it in the list? If I need to upload an image to use in a template or inline, wouldn’t it be nice if the system automatically knew the size and ratio and let me crop the image accordingly during the upload process? Oh, how we dreamt of sleep-filled nights without the worry of broken links or content that wasn’t being indexed by Google. Well, we answered our own dreams with BigTree—and any good CMS out there should be doing the same.

7. Stable. Don’t you love when you hit one button and it seems the whole internet goes down? Or, at the very least, it seems you may have fried some sort of major thing with servers and possibly satellites and you swear you smell smoke? A good CMS should keep you out of harm’s way. You shouldn’t be able to do massively bad things without being loudly prompted (several times) by your CMS:

“Are you sure you want to delete that page?”
“Are you sure you want to erase a week’s worth of work?”
“Are you sure you want to take down the whole site just because you want that animated gif in the copy?”

Additionally, if you do make a mistake and cause a problem, it should be a recoverable problem. Hitting one button somewhere should never take down your whole site. Ever.

8. Secure. You want the people who need to know, knowing. And those who only need to know a little, well, they should be in the ‘know a little’ room. A good CMS should allow for security and user account settings to be configured in such a way as to protect your sensitive information on the back end of your site, as well as on the front end. The system should only show users what they have been authorized to see. No more. That way, your disgruntled intern can’t mosey on over to the professional bios section and add a line about Mr. Smith’s prized Chia Pet collection…or something like that. You get the idea.

9. Pleasant. If you want your team to do something, willingly, proactively even, that something better be pleasant to engage with. Have you ever had your team say “no thanks” when you’ve invited them down for a pizza/brainstorming session? You make the brainstorm process more pleasurable by including the pizza. A little pleasure goes a long way, which is why we think a CMS’s administrative area should be as nice looking as the front-facing Website, if not nicer. It should be organized, friendly, use real world language—not things like “vars” or “default”—that make sense only to programmers. It should help you if you make a mistake, allow you to play without fear of crashing, and inspire you to log in and keep creating great content! A CMS is essentially tools for the creative process, same thing as Photoshop to designers, or paint and brushes to a painter. Who wants to create something in a sterile, threatening and confusing environment?

10. Simple. This is the most important element for a good CMS. Simple does not mean weak or limited. Simplicity is difficult to achieve and requires great effort and restraint to get it right. Sure, we could probably add modules to BigTree that would allow our clients to do some crazy stuff, but they don’t really need it. And, if they do, it’s one client out of a million. In that case, we do something custom just for them. Keeping the CMS simple allows you to build a solid foundation first. Then you have time in real world scenarios to determine if you really need it to reposition that satellite or not.

What do you think? Share your thoughts on what makes a good CMS, and don’t forget to tell us who you are. Perspective is everything!

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RIP Steve. Thanks for Everything.

by Tracey Halvorsen on October 6, 2011

It is with a heavy heart I write this post, and I’m sure with a heavy heart that you read it. I was overcome by sadness when I learned of Steve Jobs’ passing last night, and it made me stop and think about why my emotions were so strong for a person I’d never met.

I remember first paying attention to Macintosh computers as I started to hear the grumblings of photography students back in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1993. You see, the photography department at the Cleveland Institute of Art (from which I had just graduated, just missing the influx of the digital age into higher education) had just invested in its first Mac, along with software called Photoshop and an instructor named Stan. Stan told the aspiring photographers and lovers of film and chemicals that the Mac would render film irrelevant, and one day in the not too distant future, all photography would be digital. Of course, this royally pissed off all the photo purists, but I waved my hands around and implored them to back up and tell me more about this amazing machine and the software it could run. When I imagined the possibilities of a creative tool set running on something as powerful and versatile as a computer, combined with the exposure the Internet offered, my mind instantly saw the new possibilities open to all artists. Suddenly I no longer was trapped in a world of physicality, slide sheets, printed resumes, mailed out portfolio packets, imperfectly exposed images, incorrectly sized prints, and the ability to only show my work to those who stopped by my studio or visited a show in a gallery (if I was lucky enough to get one).

I was an instant addict. I scrounged up as much money as I could and begged my parents for the rest so I could go get a Mac. A Performa 550, I believe. And a scanner. And some software. I didn’t know how to use it, but I knew I had to learn. I remember someone saying offhandedly way back then that I could get a PC for less, or it would be more expandable, blah blah blah, but I’d heard that Macs were for artists, designers and creative people. To me (a freshly graduated art school kid aspiring to be a fine artist), that warranted the decision. The revolution of desktop publishing was ushered in by Macs, and to me, that was the platform I should be on.

Over the years I purchased more Macs, more software, more peripherals, as they became available and I could afford them. I admired the evolving operating system, the elegant solutions, the celebration of the creative spirit. I turned a blind eye to the shortcomings, because for me, the cons were far outweighed by the pros. I became a Mac fan, and never wavered. On my wall in my office hangs 1 share of Apple stock, printed on parchment paper donning the old rainbow apple logo, purchased for $12 as a first year wedding anniversary gift by my partner (the first year is the “paper” year). It is now worth almost $1000. And yes, it’s sad it wasn’t 1000 shares, but we were poor struggling artists.

As my love affair with Macs continued, I was often questioned by others – why do you spend the extra money for a Mac? Nobody else is using them in business; why do you insist on using one? Isn’t it so much harder to find programs that will run on it? And on and on. It always seemed like mindless questioning. I could do what I wanted to do on a Mac and not on a PC; therefore the money was well worth it. I was creating for myself, not for other business people, so who cared what the business norm was? I had the tools I needed, and they worked really well, so who cares that I couldn’t buy a million crappy games or software apps to run on it? My Macs did exactly what I wanted them to do, and they encouraged me to keep making things that were creative, well-designed, and pleasant for others to experience.

I didn’t expect to end up spending my days working on computers, let alone run a company where our end product couldn’t exist without computers. And in fact I don’t think of it that way even now as I’ve been doing just that for the past 12 years or so – I just don’t see it as “work.” This is because I love the space I work in, the space in my Mac. It is more than a tool; it is the environment I create in, it is the window to the world through which I communicate, it offers the possible solutions to all my problems, it is my studio. From the moment I turn on my Mac (and this could be my desktop setup at the office, my laptop I use while traveling, my iPad I use at home, or my iPhone that I use all the time), I am no longer “working,” I am collaborating. I am conducting elaborate and complex dances with a series of programs, apps, technologies, interfaces, and experiences. I am being given the ultimate set of tools to help me be creative, and to be my best.

I was always struck by the articles or interviews I read about Steve Jobs. He was clearly obsessed with the user experience, and in making that experience the best it could be. I can’t say that about many people, businesses or organizations, but I can say it about Steve and Apple. “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” - Steve Jobs. When we are reviewing designs or new Website prototypes around the Fastspot offices, or just talking about ideas or checking out other things, it’s a constant effort to hold everything up to a high standard. It’s not easy or fun to constantly scrutinize every tiny detail, to look for (and find) problems, shortcomings, things we just don’t like. And it’s not easy on the ego either, when we are critiquing our own work. It’s so much easier to let that “good enough” mentality take over. It’s exhausting to constantly push for perfection. But it’s the only way you get great results.

Steve, Apple, and the products and experiences they have created over the past 17 years I have been using them have become a constant source of inspiration and aspiration. It is this pursuit to build a great company, create amazing things, and work with extremely talented people that inspired us to start Fastspot back in 2001. I seriously did write down “Karma” on a napkin and half-seriously declare it our business plan (yes, while at a bar). But it stuck – because you do indeed get back what you put out into the universe.  And this is why we have the extra revision rounds, blow through some project hours we didn’t have, stay late while we try to find a solution, or tell a client “no.” If we weren’t striving for perfection, and trying to put out the best of what we have to give, we would just be making unexceptional stuff, and who really wants to be doing that?

I worry that with the passing of such an inspirational creative mind, we have become a slightly darker world, with a slightly darker future ahead of us. I want more people to try to be like Steve; I want more companies to try to be like Apple. I dislike mediocrity, because it doesn’t contribute anything. I hate apathy, because it doesn’t promote change. I abhor literal thinking, because it kills off any chance of a creative spark of brilliance. I am a champion of individuality because without it, we are simply conductors of a larger, more generalized norm. I resist focus group testing for the same reasons Steve didn’t test so many Apple prototypes. “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” – Steve Jobs. I am grateful that I get to work in the design business, because design is what Steve, and Apple, and my first Mac helped me fall in love with, or helped me realize I was already in love with, or enabled me to realize my love’s true potential.

To all the other designers, seekers of excellence, creative minds and addicts of technology and the user experience who are out there, it is up to us all to continue pushing the things we do as far as we can, to hold them up to the light of our own critical scrutiny and ask, can it be better? I hope the rest of our country follows suit, because from my vantage point, it’s the only way out of the mess we are in. A world of easy, mediocre, acceptable, semi-functional, short-term creations is not the world Steve was creating, and it’s not the world I want to live in. Let’s make sure it doesn’t go that way. Let’s make a world of exquisite, magical, inspiring, fun, powerful, genuine, and beautiful experiences.

“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.” – Steve Jobs.

Rest in peace, Steve Jobs, and thanks for everything.

Xoxo

Tracey

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8 Ways to Know if an Interactive Agency is a Fraud

by Tracey Halvorsen on September 20, 2011

I’m writing this post because I run into so many businesses and organizations who feel they were “burned” by a past Web vendor. They have negative feelings about the experience and often have been left with the impression that “the wool was pulled over their eyes.” I can relate to the frustration. In a technical field like Web development (which is growing increasingly more complex every year), how do you know if the groups who are after your business are legit? In the era of the Internet, it’s easy to pose as something you are not, so here are some tips to hopefully help the non-techy crowd, or simply the groups who feel inexperienced in choosing an agency. When you are oftentimes talking about a six-figure budget, you want to be sure you aren’t left holding the bag. These tips range from the obvious (but often forgotten) to the simple and easy-to-spot. I’m sure there are more, and I encourage any of you reading this post to tell me how you’ve found ways to spot the stinkers and find the flowers.

1. The browser title for their website’s landing page says “Name of Company – Homepage.” Nothing screams fraud to me more than a company selling interactive services that seems to have no clue how important the words placed in this spot in a browser are to search engines, indexing spiders, and people making bookmarks and saving or sharing links. Bad, bad, bad. They might as well leave a credit on the bottom of their site saying, “Website by AAA Website Co.”

2. There is nowhere to read bios about the team or find out about the company’s physical locations. This often is a telltale sign that you’re dealing with a one-man or one-woman shop where you pay them to consult and then they outsource the “design and coding” to freelancers or contract work. This is not an agency. The power of an agency is that the people are working as a team. You are getting good results because you have signed on with a group of people who know how to work well with each other and deliver for the client.

3. The portfolio examples are too few or feel weak, and the rest of the portfolio is propped up with print or other traditional design work. Here’s the truth of the matter: Most firms recognize that they are leaving money on the table if they don’t go after interactive work, even if they are not qualified to do it. Most clients who have come to them for print work or identity work or even PR or consulting work will inevitably ask about interactive work at some point in the relationship, and some businesses can’t resist saying they can do the work and then trying to figure out how to do it once the client is on the hook. So let the portfolio speak for itself. If you don’t see lots of great work, then they probably aren’t a valid (or good) interactive agency.

4. The portfolio is full of “banners,” “micro-sites,” or “games,” and you can’t see any full-fledged websites. The red flag here is that they are saying they can do full websites, but in actuality all they’ve done up to this point have been smaller projects with much less demanding requirements. Unless you want to try to get a bargain because you know you are the guinea pig, beware of being the first big project.

5. The agency’s website sucks. I know this seems obvious, but amazingly, people are forgiving of this sin. We’ve all heard the old, “We’ve been so busy doing work for our clients that we haven’t had time to think about our own interactive presence.” Hogwash. Any agency worth its weight knows how critical these first impressions are, and keeping the agency alive and thriving means bringing in good clients and profitable projects. A poorly conceived and crafted website is not working toward this goal. Therefore, you can conclude that the agency is understaffed, incapable, too new, or just not good.

6. You are met with resistance when asking for references. And take note, you should be getting references for Directors of Marketing or VP of Communications, not Web developers or lower-level people who may simply be friends with the group that’s after your business. At the very least, you should be given contact info for a reference that made the hiring decision on a project similar in scope or budget to yours.

7. Technology is leading the conversation. Beware of this, as it may be the sign of a bunch of highly competent programmers but not the best group to make strategic marketing decisions for your organization. Technology should be part of the solution, after you’ve identified the problems and chosen your path. If a group comes out of the gate pushing tech, you can probably assume you won’t be getting much creative guidance or leadership.

8. The mobile and tablet versions of the agency’s site aren’t taken into consideration. Consider this the “canary in the coal mine.” If an interactive agency isn’t paying close attention to the mobile and tablet user experiences, then they are living in the past and will fall behind the ever-advancing curve of what is considered contemporary in this industry. We are seeing a growing number of users accessing Internet content via their smart phones or tablets, and this number will only go up as devices become more affordable, more powerful, and more convenient for the user. These devices must be part of your strategy and approach, and if they aren’t being positioned as important aspects to consider by your interactive agency, then you might want to consider looking elsewhere. There is no easier way for an agency to show how they would address the mobile and tablet experience than with their own website, so pull up their URLs on your iPhone, Android, or iPad—and see what you get.

There are many more ways to spot red flags when considering an agency—these are just the ones that I look for. What tells you that you might be getting the bait and switch? Do share!

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What Makes a Good Main Navigation?

by Tracey Halvorsen on August 30, 2011

Your website’s main navigation, the primary navigation presented to users who first arrive on your website, should do several things, and do them well.

The main nav should be simple. The language, the organization, the placement, the size of the font—everything—should be simple. This is the most useful element of your site, and much like a doorknob or the power switch on an object, it should not be overly complex.

The main nav should tell a story. If you are a college or university, you don’t want to start your nav with “Giving.” You need to tell your story first. Many schools show just how desperate they are by making “Admissions” or “Apply Now” the first link in their main nav. This is bad. Just like a first date, you want to convey confidence and let your user get to know you before you move in for the big smooch.

The main nav should be mature. Nothing screams institutional conflict more than a main nav that is all over the place. A classic example is a nav that is one part general, one part categorical, and one part specific. Main navigation should be consistent in how it groups information; this is to aide users who are learning to use the system as they begin to navigate the site. Placing inappropriate links into your main nav is a quick way to lose user trust and degrade the user experience.

The main nav should start with the largest parts of the funnel. For example, you don’t want your main nav to be all about the specifics. Users will naturally click into sections as they seek more specific information. If they are looking for filet, they will click into the meat tab. If they are seeking lettuce, they will look under vegetables. Give them time and space to find what they are seeking in the natural order of the information.

Your main nav should be short. If you give users too many options, they will have option overload. A main nav that has more than 7 tabs or links is bordering on too big and should set off alarm bells about the overall hierarchy of the information. Remember, your main nav needs to tell a story—so if you overload your visitors with specifics right off the bat, you aren’t letting them read the big picture story.

Your main nav should be useful. It is easy to assume that all things important must go into the main nav. This is a knee-jerk reaction born out of misguided thinking by uneducated information architects or nervous clients. This is simply not the case. The main nav should be the foundation, and it should not have to change down the road. You should not have constantly changing content in your main navigation. There should be other, more visually impactful areas for including these somewhat temporary initiatives within the overall page or site design.

While we may come to think of the main nav as the thing that users see first, this is not true. Users see the features and other more brightly and boldly presented content first. They only move to the main nav when they have shifted from a browsing to a searching mode. The features and other more visual callouts you design for your users are for them to explore and interact with; they let users know what you are saying is important, what is hot, new, happening. They are your breaking news, your highlights, your top stories, your VIPs, your special differentiators. Your main navigation is a set of tools in a toolbox that you want your visitor to understand implicitly and feel confident using to effectively drill down to the specific data they are seeking.

Let’s break down the main navigation in a few sites to explore these positions in more depth.

Example: MailChimp

MailChimp.com Homepage

If you look at MailChimp’s home page and pay attention to where your eye goes, you can see that the most important messages being conveyed are not the main nav, but rather that you can sign up for free, that you can manage email and newsletters easily, and that there are some cool new things happening. Only after scanning these elements do you seek out the main nav, and now your mindset has changed. You are no longer scanning to get a sense of what MailChimp is; you are now going to follow a logical set of pathways to seek out information that is of more specific interest to you. That may be pricing, features, or places to learn more about the community, such as the blog or the support section. But these main nav items are not trying to sell you on the best parts of MailChimp—that is the main page’s job, and the brand, and the marketing messages, and everything else. No, the nav is there to get you where you want to go, now that you know MailChimp is something that interests you.

Example: Southwest Airlines

Southwest Airlines Homepage

In the case of Southwest, there are a ton of things going on, yet the main nav is quite simple—Air, Hotel, Car, Vacations. To the sides, sitting back sightly, we have Special Offers, Travel Guide, and Rapid Rewards. A nifty drop-down menu gives you immediate drill-down options to skip an unnecessary page reload and to quickly let you see what information and functionality resides within each section. Yet, similar to MailChimp, the main nav is doing its thing, and the rest of the site is presenting the hierarchy, directing your attention, making sure you see the special deals and have quick access to certain portals, etc. They don’t try to do it all in the main nav. With such a complex set of user experiences, they have actually presented you with a myriad of navigational “types”—which allow you to “learn” the way to best use Southwest’s site and not be left at the mercy of internal groups playing a turf war over the website’s nav.

Example: Mint

Mint's Homepage

Surely you’ve heard of Mint.com for managing your finances, right? No? Oh—well, if you check out their site you’ll see they suspect you might be a newbie as well, and they will help you get a quick glimpse of what they are about before offering up a helpful main nav geared toward a pleasant introduction process. Here’s what happens when you land on mint.com: You see right away that Mint is the best free way to manage your money, you can get started for free, it’s safe and secure, has bill reminders, gets lots of good press, and works on various devices. Great, you’re in! Now you head to the main nav to learn more. They opt for a two-option main nav: What is Mint? and How it Works. Pretty simple. Of course there are all sorts of other navigational options sprinkled in that you start to see if you haven’t already found what you are looking for, and typically these supplemental navigational elements cater to specific user groups—in Mint’s case, Canadian users, people seeking information about the company, or existing users who want to log in. Most importantly, they assume you don’t know them yet, and they present their offerings in ways that make sense and have a sense of pacing.

Example: Lego

Lego's Homepage

Lego has a fantastic landing page—it invites you right into its online game experience “Lego Universe” while also promoting other featured aspects of the Lego brand, like the Lego Club, My Lego Network, Featured Products, and quick links to highlighted product lines like the Star Wars line, the “Games” line, and the MBA series of toys. Once you are past the initial experience, you are ready to dive into the specifics—and here you have the main nav stepping up and ready to play its role. You have Products, Games, Create & Share, and Shop. Four links. Simple. And a story is being told; you understand that Lego is a brand that is about playing, creating, and sharing as much as it is about selling you small interconnecting plastic blocks. They don’t put LEGO Universe into the main nav, even though one could argue that it seems this is a big push for the company right now. Rather, they feature it in appropriate places. This is also a critical act of restraint because in one or two years, the LEGO Universe may not be the main feature, and it would be wasteful to need to redo the main nav every time a point of emphasis needed to change for an organization.

We try to impart these lessons to our clients at the beginning of every engagement, because much like a house, if the foundation of your main nav is not strong, you risk putting your entire site’s structure and integrity in a compromising position that may need to be readdressed in the near future. And when all else fails, remember that you can rely on your analytics data to truly tell you if your website visitors are going where you want them to go and finding what they want to find. That’s the beauty of the Web—we have data to base our decisions on! Now, this doesn’t mean that the entire process of how we expect to use websites won’t be shifting in the near future, as main navigation gets replaced with interactive elements that involve finger swipes more than the click of a mouse. But visual design, composition, and the inherent ways a person’s eye moves and the way the brain processes information is and has been pretty much the same for the past few thousand years, so don’t mess with evolution and human nature unless you have a pretty convincing argument to do so.

Now go forth and navigate!

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When Asking for Online Donations, Think Like a Pizza Shop

by Tracey Halvorsen on August 8, 2011

Seriously, have you seen Pizza Hut’s site lately? Or their apps? They make ordering a pizza about as easy as sitting down on the couch. They make it so easy you’d be crazy not to order a pizza from them, or get distracted halfway through and never complete your order, or decide it’s a pain and go to another pizza maker’s site. Take a clue from Pizza Hut. Make giving online donations to your school, organization, or cause as easy as possible. Make it so easy they can’t say no. And if they even think about saying no, use peer pressure to push them back into the “yes” column. Easier said than done, you say? I agree; being easy is hard work. It goes against what most of us are taught growing up. I’m going to give you a crash course, right here, right now. Then it’s up to you to put on your “easy” outfit and do your thing. And don’t say I never gave you anything useful!

1. Don’t be vague about what you are asking for. Be clear. But be realistic. Sure, you want everyone to give $1,000, but it’s easier to give $10. So take the easy route—ask for $10. Cheap isn’t bad. If you get more givers, you can still come out ahead. It’s worked for Walmart (the easy of retail); it’s worked for Zappos (the easy of shoe buying); it’s worked for Southwest (the easy of flying); and it can work for you, too. So be clear, and be realistic, and don’t be afraid to be cheap.

2. Don’t make the cheapskates feel bad. If you want $10, ask for $10. Don’t give people a range from $10 to $25 to $100 to $500, because then those that would have been happy to give $10 now feel like cheap bastards as they see all the other options on your list. If you must, leave a “set your own number” area, but just stick with a nice low easy range, and don’t make the lowest givers feel the worst. Make them feel like the winners!

3. Peer pressure works, and people love to brag about good deeds. Let your donors shout to the world that they have “GIVEN!” to the cause! Don’t make them work at it. Build into your online donation process an automatic part that prompts them to share their good deed on Facebook and Twitter, and don’t make it easy to opt out of this part (but don’t do it until after they’ve given the cash). Pre-populate the prompt with something like, “I just helped ensure another kid like me gets a great education at X University by making a donation. Have you?” People are wallflowers; they don’t like to brag if it takes too much effort, so make the message easy and to the point, so all they have to do is hit “allow” or “share” or “post.”

4. Don’t over-complicate things. Use PayPal. Use ChipIn. Use Google Donate (some of these are just for non-profits, but you can find plenty of good options). Spend your time and energy on making the “user experience” as easy and simple as possible. If you are collecting donations in “the real world,” use Square—just make it EASY! Ever wonder why Amazon introduced “One Click” to make it faster and easier for people to buy things? Of course you didn’t wonder! Why wouldn’t they make buying things on their site easier?

I’m a huge fan of the Savannah College of Art and Design, but when I see this online donation form my eyes start to bleed and I feel the urge to run. I gotta REALLY be in the mood to donate to put up with this. Seriously, shouldn’t “I,” as your potential donor, be given the nicest user experience? Instead I feel like I’m in some backroom storage area with cobwebs and an old PC terminal from 1996. After a quick scan, I can see that I’m not even CLOSE to handing over my credit card info once I do finally make it through this form. Yikes.

And Yale—I get that you want lots of information about my gift and me, but seriously, I’m BUSY! If I’m a Yale grad I’m probably super busy doing many important things, so just let me give some money already—leave all this “stuff” for later!

Hey, Greenpeace: OK,way to go on keeping it simple, but you could use a little work in the “nice looking” arena. However, as one of the longest standing do-gooder orgs out there that I can remember who’s been asking for money, you get it more right than others with your simple and to-the-point donation page. And THANK YOU for letting me just jump in through PayPal and hand over my $10! Win.

And Save the Children, I commend you for helping many needy kids, but seriously, lower your donation amounts. If I want to give you $10,000, I’ll probably come drop off a check in person, or have my personal assistant call you, or have my other personal assistant write the amount into the box you leave empty for us poor broke do-gooder wannabes to have to type in $20 and feel like cheap bastards. You’re on the right path, but you could do a bit more to make this situation better.

Testimonial Interlude: I’m a sucker for animals, and I LOVE dogs. I’ve started following a few pitbull rescue orgs on Facebook, and oftentimes a dog rescuer has a situation where they have a dog that needs medical help, and they don’t have the money. These people have started creating Facebook pages to plead their cases and have made great use of ChipIn to allow fast and easy online donations. I have given more money to help out dogs in last year than I EVER have to any other organization or cause (in number of times I’ve opted to help, not in total dollars donated—YET), and this is because they’ve made it so easy! My one complaint: ChipIn is a Flash widget, and therefore it doesn’t work on my iPhone, where I spend lots of time browsing Facebook.

Since I’m on the animal thread: Humane Society of America, I LOVE your site and what you do for animals—but let me please donate through PayPal. I am currently sitting on my wallet, which means I’d have to roll my ass to one side to pull it out, and I’m too busy writing this blog post. But I have a PayPal account (probably like many people do), and there is money in that account, and it’s tied to a credit card, so I can just hit a button, log in, and give you money. Or rather, I could have, if you’d let me. And I would have as I researched for this blog post. Maybe next time, but please don’t call me. Nice site, though.

5. Being easy doesn’t mean being outdated. Be Progressive. Realize that many of your new potential donors aren’t on your Website; they are on Facebook or Twitter—and not on their computers, but on their smartphones or their tablets. Make sure your online donation process takes advantage of these social media spaces and tools. Integrate everything so it’s all happening in one place. Optimize your giving process for these mobile environments or miss out on cash—your choice. This isn’t a small deal; it’s a big deal, and it’s going to be a HUGE deal next year—mark my words. The world is moving toward mobile, not away from it.

Want to see some more great examples of HORRIBLE donation forms? Here you go!

Got some good examples of orgs or schools asking for (and probably getting) donations? Share a link. Like this post? Share it with your network. Disagree? Let me hear about it.

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Your Website is a Party! Who is on Your Guest List?

by Tracey Halvorsen on July 12, 2011

The other day, as I was sitting in a presentation where major project findings were being shared, the subject of Website visitors came up. One of the members of the client side team stated that it would be almost impossible to implement the findings and recommendations into anything cohesive, because that would mean setting a preference for one type of Website visitor over another. He continued by stating that a Website must try to be all things to all people … because so many different people use their site (this is a higher-ed site serving students, faculty, researchers, staff, media, community, etc.). Therefore, our mission was impossible. Of course, we disagreed. As unfair as it might seem, you must prioritize your audience and cater to those priorities, or you are setting yourself up for big problems. Often, these are the very problems we are called in to correct.

As I watched his face contort as our response was gently doled out, and as he was identified as the perpetrator of exactly the thing that creates runaway, out of control, sprawling messes of Websites, I did what I often do: I tried to think of a metaphor to assist in the visualization of the situation.

Let’s say you are having a party. You are expecting a variety of guests and some family members. Each segment of your guest list will prompt you to do things you wouldn’t typically do to prepare. For example, you know Aunt Debbie only likes Grey Goose, so you make sure you pick some up for her. (Or you clear the cabinets, depending on Aunt Debbie.) You also pull out that hideous ceramic bulldog statuette your mother-in-law gave you for Christmas last year because you have a bulldog and so now that’s all she gets for you, and you place it on the coffee table so she doesn’t know it lives in the basement in a box. Now, you don’t line these things up by the front door and shout, “Look, Aunt Debbie, I got you booze!” or “Look, Mother-in-Law, I love that hideous statuette so much I keep it here by the front door all the time!” But you do place those things where you know Aunt Deb and your mom-in-law will be sure to spot them. You get the point.

You also spend a fair amount of time worrying yourself over areas of your house you normally never pay attention to, especially the entryways and areas in the house everyone is most likely to congregate. While you no longer pay attention to your foyer, you do realize your guests will, and you want it to look nice. While your pride and joy is the game room you’ve built yourself in the basement, you recognize that most people will be taking in your whole house, as they move through it – so you can’t rely on some deep dark hidden cool thing to provide the positive experience you are looking to give off. Plus, you have to recognize your game room will only appeal to some, and if these “some” aren’t the majority of your guest list, don’t count on it doing all your work for you.

Continuing with this metaphor: You make some assumptions. Let’s say this is a neighborhood party, where your guests will vary in age, and you also have some friends and co-workers stopping by. You make sure the X-Box is ready to go for your pals because, let’s face it, you’ll be stuck being the hostess and chatting up your neighbors.

As you can see, it’s actually ALL about the audience, and you can’t treat them all the same. Your friends don’t expect you to spend the whole party talking to them, because they realize it’s a neighborhood party and you have obligations to play hostess to your neighbors. It’s almost unnatural for us to treat all people with equal importance in the real world, and yet in the world of Websites, it’s a common infraction.

In fact, it would seem rather kooky and even rude if you seemed indifferent to your guests’ preferences and just put out what you liked to drink and eat. A party of Amstel Lights and cheese sticks might float my boat, but come on. I don’t think my guests would stick around, let alone come to my next party.

By catering your information architecture and your content to your expected guests’ interests, you show that you are a gracious hostess who is going out of her way to make a positive experience. I might even go so far as to say that if you DON’T go out of your way, you may come across as snobby, self-absorbed, and rude. You have to realize who your target audiences are and prioritize them. Otherwise, you are doomed to failure. So don’t take it personally, people. Just realize your Website is a party. Now go throw a good one!

Got some good party-throwing tips? How do you find ways to deal with the variety of audience types and set priorities? Do you think it is important?

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How to Tackle a Content Audit

by April Osmanof on June 16, 2011

The following post was written by Fastspot’s User Experience Director, April Osmanof, who has single-handedly wrangled in some of our nastiest cases of content hoarding. Here are her thoughts on the content audit / strategy process.

How to Rein in an Expanse of Web Content
A lot of our clients are longstanding, large institutions and associations. By the time their sites make it into our hands for a facelift, there are usually anywhere between 2,000 to 100,000 pages of content. They have already had their sites for years, and most of them have had CMS access to the content from the get go. We all know that not having to rely on a Web team for every update to a site puts a client at a great advantage, but what happens when the content added by the client gets out of control?

A well-functioning CMS can be an empowering tool, but in many cases, abuse of this power comes as no surprise. There are often some sets of instructions on how to add content, but hardly ever any plan for review or removal of unnecessary or outdated content. Building a beautiful site with a user-friendly CMS is a great start for a Web team to deliver, but Websites are living things. They differ from print pieces in that they are never packaged up and never complete; because of this inherent difference, the way the content is dealt with needs to be different. If a Web team just hands off a stylish site with a CMS to a client, especially a large client, the result can be an unruly mess. Plans for the content, along with a well-thought-out governance structure, must be in place from the kickoff in order for good content to be created and maintained. Older sites that have already had a life of their own typically need a lot of cleaning house.

Content, Content Everywhere and Not a Drop to Drink
When one of our larger clients comes to us seeking help with their content strategy, we do a complete content audit of their site. Once a Website goes live and the client gets their hands on the CMS, a collection of excessive and un-focused content can be posted. Pages and information are often added to the site haphazardly, with no one making sure that the content is placed in a logical location within the site’s navigation, that it adheres to the creative goals of the site, and that it is even necessary. When we are assessing sites that have been around for years, we are usually fighting an uphill battle against years of neglected or poorly organized content.

Pages of redundant, inward-facing, uninteresting, overly “markety,” or unnecessary content must be sifted through in order for us to get to the meat of the site. We assess the content, chanting the mantra “the content is for the user” and considering our target audience each step of the way. Whether the purpose of the site is to sell, educate, or entertain users, it cannot be forgotten that they are the reason the site exists and that its content must be pertinent or interesting to them.

Everyone Wants to Feel Important!
Our clients’ team members usually fall into one of two categories: people that are inspired by an-easy-to-use CMS and excited about participating in the content creation for the site, and people that are scared that participating will take up too much of their time or are unsure about what kind of content they should be adding. Empowering staff members to add content and giving them a clear set of guidelines for doing so can lead to a vibrant site that can bring the real social aspect of a community to life on the Web.

People who are desirable candidates for participating in content creation, typically those that are already generating content on their own via blogs or social networking, should know that they are expected or encouraged to generate content. Likewise, they should know where to turn with questions and what the expectations and guidelines are for the types of content they should be adding. One often-fruitful way to get rich content on your site without putting too much pressure on team members is to set up easy-to-update places for media such as photos and videos.

What are the Ingredients for Good Content?
The purpose of a Website is to be clear, easy to read, and interesting to the user; it should always be useful and never overly verbose or filled with useless information. A client cannot allow internal terminology or internal hierarchies to inhibit the users’ ability to understand the content. The Website is not a place to represent any one individual’s agenda. The Website is to be seen with a holistic approach, and one entity, be that an individual or a team, has to be in charge of reining in the content and its creators.

When we are auditing large sites we have to stop and examine each bit of content, asking ourselves at each step:

    Is it useful?
    Is it public-facing information?
    Is the content easily understood?
    Is it easy to scan quickly?
    Is the content laid out with well-structured HTML?
    Does it make use of sub-headlines and lists, allowing the reader to grasp the topics covered at a glance?
    Can it be found in a logical place by a user that is searching for it?
    Can it be brought to the attention of the user that needs to see it and doesn’t know to search for it?
    Is there enough content to warrant a full page?
    Is there too much content?
    Is it outdated?
    Is it redundant?
    Is it interesting or necessary? (It must be one or the either, or it should be deleted!)
    Are there any gaps in the content?

Content that doesn’t meet our criteria is left on the cutting room floor.

Starting from the Ground Up
Once we have combed through a client’s content, or in the case of clients who are starting fresh, we set up a strategy for who will be in charge and what their goals will be. Obviously these goals are different for each of our clients, but the overall goal is always the same: to keep the user clicking around and reading and to eventually move them to take some sort of action, whether that be applying for admission, getting in touch, donating money, etc.

The team left in charge of the new content from that point forward must keep these content strategies in mind. They can never lose sight of the goals or lose sight of the level of quality the content needs to achieve. Processes for editorial review and consistency review must be instituted, and the governance structure must be planned in such a way that the content workflow does not create bottlenecks. The team must be held accountable for the content and oversee those allowed to add content, ensuring that everyone involved in content creation is informed about the goals of the site and their role as a participant. Keeping an online, easy-to-access reference can greatly aid in ensuring that potential content generators are in the loop.

It is our goal as a Web team to be sure that the site and strategy we provide for our client’s content can grow with them and never limit them. But we also have to be cognizant of the reality of the level and frequency at which our clients are going to be able to generate content.

In the end, creating good Web content is a never-ending balancing act, but with the appropriate tools and systems in place, content creation and maintenance by a team can pay off tremendously, allowing clients to use their content to reinforce their brand and breathe life into their Web presence, instead of the old-school way of relying on a horde of stodgy brochureware.

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