Before I get started, I’d like to be clear that the points offered up in this post are gross generalizations, and certainly wouldn’t apply to all universities. These are just some of the issues I experienced at Waterloo—there are others that I won’t go into. I’m sure people who work at UW or other universities can think of additional factors to add. These points are also referencing the home page, although most of the factors listed apply to the rest of the web space as well.

Those of you who are familiar with web design in higher ed have surely seen the infamous venn diagram cartoon from xkcd:

When this was originally posted I remember seeing some talk about “web managers” not understanding usability. At least in my experience (as a former university web manager), that’s not the case at all. There are several problems at the root of this:

• University home pages are highly sensitive political objects. This can manifest itself in several different ways. Influential people may get upset if their department or project isn’t featured prominently enough. Marketing and communications staff want to keep these people happy, so they give in. In the above diagram, the Alumni profiles may be there because the director of alumni relations cozied up to the director of communications. There can also be a lot of butthurt from people if they think another department or faculty is featured more prominently than theirs is. This is a complex web to navigate. Pleasing these people is important.
• Core internal audiences (mainly faculty & staff) are resistant to change. They get used to navigating in a certain way. They use the website to do their work. If links or navigation change, it throws them off. Once I changed a label of a link on the home page, and some of the second-level naviagation, and was told (from a senior VP, indirectly of course) that I should let the campus community know about changes like that in advance.
• Universities have a lot of target audiences. Prospective students, current students, graduate students, undergraduate students, international students, faculty, staff, prospective faculty, researchers at other universities, parents, government, donors, prospective donors, local residents, and the list goes on. And all of these audiences want different things. As I mentioned in my previous post, the “external” audiences are considered to be more important. But this clashes with the internal people who will complain to the right people if they don’t like something. It’s difficult to compromise the needs of those groups.
• Web managers don’t have the appropriate level of authority and empowerment. We  are four levels down the hierarchy and aren’t considered to be important enough to make decisions. (I think this is also combined with a general and relatively widespread belief, also outside of higher ed, that web designers don’t have high level skills or expertise, but that’s another discussion). If there’s no empowerment, then nothing can get better because nobody with the appropriate expertise is responsible for it.
• The people who do have the authority don’t have the interest. They were hired to do traditional communications and public relations. They legitimately have a lot of other things to do with, and since web isn’t their area of expertise it continually falls off the radar. In my experience they can also be rather out of touch with the audience (Yes, they really think you’re interested in the promotions for campus events).
• There is never enough money to do things properly. In most cases, university web departments, like many other administrative groups and departments, are underfunded. Institutions of higher education are usually unable to match the importance of the web in their day-to-day operations with the appropriate level of staffing. I ran the central web properties with myself and a co-op student. This included responsibility for maintaining the back-end applications that made these sites work. This isn’t uncommon.
• Getting more money is important. Don’t blame the university—increasing government cuts have meant that universities have to rely more and more on other sources of funding. Institutions are competing with each other for private donations, research grants, and full-cost tuition from international students. This is why you often see things like research profiles on the home page. Universities are now hiring marketing managers from outside of higher ed. These are the people who decide that the website is a marketing tool for external audiences, not an information-retrieval tool for students and staff.
• Things take time. I don’t know about other universities and colleges, but at least in my experience there can be a general assumption that things just take time, and that’s the way it is. You can’t expect to get things done expediently. Since the web manager doesn’t have any authority, an array of committees are often created to “advise” senior management on every conceivable issue. Of course, these take forever. Major changes might need to get approval from senior people, who are usually either busy or away for some reason. And everyone knows that nothing gets done in August or December.

After all of this, a certain sense of inertia sets in. It’s too difficult and complicated to make changes, so you just avoid it. A lot of the things on the home page have probably been there for the past 10 years and nobody is willing or able to change them. By that point the website has gotten into such a bad state that you legitimately do need a redesign. Incremental change isn’t going to cut it. At least with a big redesign you can make a big deal about it and convince people that change will be good.

With the Waterloo redesign the first two points played out a bit differently, in that they were able to overcome a lot of opposition from those people by sheer force of will (not without upsetting people). But I think most of the other factors had a significant impact. There wasn’t enough money to pay a vendor to do a proper job. There was no web manager with an appropriate level of authority to oversee the project. Making a big marketing “impact” was a key objective of the project.

I think that any redesign is doomed to fail if the above points (or whatever else caused the problems) aren’t rectified. The site will just degenerate into a useless and chaotic mess, and you’ll have to do it all over again.

Content strategy and Governance are two hot topics in higher ed web discussions these days. A lot of the issues I mentioned above fall within those two realms. I am a bit wary of topics like this because I think you’d end up needing a committee for that, which would take a year. Then you have a big report that nobody reads, and need to get a decision from someone higher up, which takes 6 months. By then everyone’s forgotten about it, and you still don’t have a person or group who is actually able to take responsibility for your web space.

As a sidenote, I think these reasons also cause many higher ed redesigns to end up at more or less the same point. Witness Oxford vs. University of Toronto (big horizontal photo, boxes of links in a grid, blue). Or how about College of William and Mary vs. Dalhousie? (big photo with promo stuff on top; more promo stuff in a horizontal row of boxes below; horizontal main nav; utility tools at the top, green). Similar problems often lead to similar solutions.

Comments are moderated. Come to think of it, I think I’ll do that on all my posts… looks like I’ll need to find a module plugin to do that.

So how can I contribute? How can I combine my interests into a meaningful, fulfilling, successful career? Do I have to pick a speciality? Am I asking too much of myself? In web design we are frequently faced with the work of experts in our field. Is it unfair to compare ourselves to them? Surely, yet sometimes it’s hard not to.What I’m faced with now is the prospect of specialization. Specialization in a direction that’s quite outside my skills and interests. I like to think of the skills involved in web design and development as a continuum between the creative and the technical:

The line marks where I am on the curve. Usability and mark-up is the heart of what I do. I love the challenge of figuring out how to make something work well for people, and then actually implementing it with code.

In my previous position at work, my job was further to the right than I’d like to be. I had to deal with rails apps and server problems and other things that were quite outside my skills and interests. Now I’m being pushed in the other direction. Do I want to be a designer, without the ability to write code?

One of the things that attracted me to web design in the first place was the ability to make things happen. I did my undergrad degree in planning. A very slow moving discipline. You could spend years working on a project only to find out that the government won’t put up the money for it. Things happen at a snails pace, and that was frustrating for me.

Then I discovered web design, in the form of Netscape Contribute (version 3, circa 1997). This was IT! Creative and technical at the same time. You could code something, put it on a server, and people would see it immediately. Almost fourteen years later and I’m still trying to find the right fit.

1. You poured over pages of free clipart, looking for tiled backgrounds and horizontal rules
2. You actually learned how to make an animated gif (and not just for ads!)
3. You were thrilled to have a tool for making complex page layouts. And that tool was a table.
4. You remember having to use spacer.gif’s to get your table widths right
5. You checked Webmonkey for new articles every week
6. <font> was your friend
7. You have coded html in UPPER CASE (<BODY>, anyone?)
8. You remember having only a vague understanding of who the W3C was
9. Netscape 4 and IE 3 were your browsers of choice
10. Your website directory consisted of a bunch of .html pages and an images folder
11. You used Server Side Includes with a .shtml extension
12. You displayed shiny “awards” graphics on your site
13. You learned how to make 3D bevels and metallic effects in Photoshop
14. You installed “CGI” scripts written in Perl
15. You had to find out if your server supported PHP
16. Your site had a visible counter displaying how many “hits” you got
17. You put up “under construction” notices, and asked people to “come back soon!!!”
18. Headers? Who ever uses those anyway?
19. 10MB on a shared server was plenty of hosting space
20. You actually had a chance of getting your first choice of domain name, even with a .com extension!
21. Your site had a Guestbook
22. You had free web space on Geocities, Xoom, or Tripod (bonus points if you used all three!)
23. You had tons of webrings on the bottom of your home page
24. You had to do rollovers with JavaScript
25. You had to code the same thing twice for IE and Netscape (remember <body leftmargin=”0″ topmargin=”0″ marginwidth=”0″ marginheight=”0″>?)
26. You submitted your site to the Yahoo web directory … and actually got in (for free)

Can you think of more?

This takes up time. Time I could be spending with more valuable contributions to the forum. I could write more valuable posts. I could add more functionality that would be helpful to users.  I could write more blog posts. I could write more articles for A Padded Cell. I could clean my house.

The topic of SEO

Most of these spammy posts come in the SEO and Marketing forums. I suspect that many of these people work for those companies that send you unsolicited email telling you that they can get your site to the “top of Google”. Unfortunately, many unsuspecting website owners fall for that.

These people think that forum signatures are a good way to get backlinks, and they have a tiny bit of knowledge of SEO (seeing as how they work for an “SEO company”), so they post a bunch of crappy posts in our forum. Thus, our forum becomes filled with crappy SEO posts.

We don’t want to be an SEO forum!

We don’t! And yet, because we rank well for “Webmaster Forums”, this is what we have become. If given the choice, we wouldn’t call that. This is a legacy thing for us. This forum was started back in the 90′s. It was one of the first forums of it’s kind. In those days, SEO was only one of the many things as “webmaster” might do. In those days, web people weren’t nearly as specialized as we are now.

What I’d really like to do is ditch the Webmaster Forums domain and  merge everything into A Padded Cell. Then we might have a better chance of attracting the kind of members we want. The problem is that we’re currently first in Google UK for “webmaster forums” and second in Google Canada. How can you abandon a #1 ranking in Google?

Where do these people come from?

We have noticed that the majority of these spammy posts come from South- and South-East Asia. Normally I’m a big fan of diversity. It’s always been one of the strengths of our community. But this is starting to become a bit of an issue. Lately they’re even becoming more open about where they’re from. They used to say they were from the US or Britain, but now they’ll be honest (which I don’t mind, because lying about where they’re from really annoyed me).

Why is it an issue? Well, mainly because I think it can be off-putting to other members. They may think that everyone in our forum is from these regions and therefore they don’t fit in. These members don’t write English very well and their posts often don’t make sense. They also tend to use wording that would seem strange to native English speakers (e.g. calling other members “dear”). Add this to the fact that the actual content of these posts is not very strong.

All of this would be fine in smaller amounts, but when the majority of our posts have one or more of these issues it tends to lower the quality of the forum overall. If the quality of the post content was better none of this would be a problem.

Of course, I don’t mean to say that all members from South-east Asia are problems. They’re not.  We have some very good members from that part of the world. It just so happens that most of the spam comes from there too.

Do people even want to talk about design & development?

It seems that few people want to talk about anything other than SEO. I was wondering what it is about these topics that make them more popular than others. There are a few factors that could contribute to that:

• In design & development, forums aren’t that important. I imagine there are a lot of designers and developers who have never participated in a forum community. In SEO and Marketing, the opposite is true. Forums are an important part of the professional community, and there are a lot of them. In comparison, there are relatively few forums that focus more on design and/or development. Why is that? Do people just not want to talk about web design? I actually think that the SEO community overall is much stronger than the design and development communities (but that might be a topic for another post!).
• SEO is easy to talk about. It’s easy for people to have an opinion about simple questions like how to improve your site ranking (not that these opinions are necessarily good ones!). It’s also easy to articulate what these techniques are. How do you explain a process of problem solving in design or programming? How do you explain a design approach that is innate?
• Design & development questions often don’t prompt ongoing discussion. A question on SEO, such as “how do I get more traffic” can get a lot of responses over time. In contrast, design and development qustions are often very specific. This doesn’t line up in IE6. How do I fix this code? They don’t need answers from multiple people, let alone an ongoing discussion. Once the problem is solved the topic is over.

We are also targetting a more beginner level audience. These people don’t live and breathe web design like the professionals do. It might be a hobby, or a tiny part of their job. They might just be starting out in the profession. Engaging these users is tough. Currently I am reading the Art of Community by Jono Bacon and it’s giving me a lot of ideas.

The sentimental value

I met my husband on this forum. I have spent a tremendous amount of time over the years posting, deleting spam, and otherwise improving the place. This alone is the main reason why I keep doing this.

In the relatively near future every website will be a dynamically-generated web application and all of today’s sites built on multiple static pages will be ripped out and replaced.

I was trying to explain this to people in a meeting a few weeks ago. Static files clearly can’t handle the demands of todays websites. Even attempting to build in your own functionality by coding your own php is fraught with problems. Why should you do it yourself when you could just use (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, your CMS of choice)?

Will there become a time when nobody publishes static html files anymore? Will new designers jump right into WordPress instead of building static websites first? An intersting topic to ponder.

Front and centre, just under the search box. Now, I don’t know if this is always there… for some reason I think it might be a standard, but the recent rise in the value of the Canadian dollar changes everything. As of this morning, the Canadian dollar is valued at almost $1.04 US ($1.0382 to be more precise). This means that online shopping is a lot more attractive than it used to be when our dollar was worth 80¢. We don’t want to go to Amazon.ca where our dollar is worth $1, we want to shop at Amazon.com where it’s worth $1.04 (or $1.06 as it was last week).

To add to that, book prices are stuck where they were months ago when the books were printed. This means that the price for most books is $2-$4 higher on the Canadian site, if not more (I think Amazon may have adjusted these prices for the dollar value already). Buy a few books and you’ve covered the $5 + tax Canada Customs charges at the border (don’t get me started on that!). Oh, and I think the limit to qualify for free shipping is lower on the US site.

Another problem, which always applies to Amazon, is that the US site has a much broader product range than the Canadian version does, plus all those affiliated sellers. I can get a lot of stuff on Amazon.com that isn’t available in Canada at all. That’s why I want to shop there now.

For anyone running a US eCommerce site, now is the time to optimize your site for Canadian shoppers. Do you ship to Canada? Are the rates reasonable? You could even put up a little Canadian flag to welcome your neighbours from the North

Who just surfs the web anymore anyway? There’s so much crap out there, I can’t be bothered to sort through it. But I still like the web. I want to look at websites. I see a lot of websites and subscribe to a lot of feeds, but it’s just boring somehow. What sets StumbleUpon apart from other aggregation sites is that it’s just more fun! The randomness makes it entertaining, and you can pick from a wide range of topics. I don’t have to look at just tech news and even on that topic I’ve come across a ton of neat stuff I never would have found elsehwere.

That’s my 2 thumbs up for StumbleUpon What about you? Have you tried it or are you more into a different bookmarking site?

Midway through the article Eric asks: ”So is the gender imbalance in the eye of the organizers, or is it in the very fabric of the industry?”

Think about the sites you visit to learn about web design. They’re probably all run by men, right? What about the blogs you read, or the forums you post to. If you’ve been to TWF you’ll know who I am but I’m guessing the majority of others are dominated by men.

Why is that? Why is all the web design help and information created by men? Granted, you can pick out a few exemplary women in the field but it can be a bit of a stretch to find them.

I’ve been thinking about this off and on for quite awhile and I have a couple of thoughts on why this could be:

1. Men just outnumber women in web design – this is probably partly true, but I don’t quite buy it as a reason for this problem.
2. Women have less spare time than men – creating a name for yourself through blogging and writing articles and such requires spare time. Spare time that women have less of. Why? Because we need to care for our families, do the housework, exercise, and take some time for ourselves. Societal expectations are higher in the non-professional sphere. Sometimes you’ll hear that women need to work harder than men to do as well in the workplace. I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but it could apply here. In her post on this topic, Rachel Andrew mentioned that women can’t always leave their children for a few days to go to a conference. Unfortunately, lack of time probably applies to a lot of people, not just women!
3. Women have less confidence in themselves – making a name for yourself also requires some confidence in your own abilities. You need to believe that you have something worthwhile to contribute. Tantek says to  “stop waiting for a speaking invitation handout.” For a long time I resisted the idea of having a blog because I didn’t think I had anything worthwhile to say. One of Rachel’s commenters mentioned that she’s shy about attending a conference on her own, which is something I can definitely relate to.

Many others have posted their own thoughts on this topic. Some believe that the whole issue is irrelevant, while others continue to stress the importance of encouraging diversity. Dave Shea mentioned that with Web Directions North they intentionally invited diverse group of speakers and saw that reflected in their audience. Unfortunately I don’t have time to read all the great posts on this topic

Disclaimer: All generalizations in this post are simply that: generalizations. They are not meant to apply to everyone!

Edit: BlogHer has a good summary of the debate on this topic.

So I went to sign up for a hotmail account, thinking it would be a relatively simple procedure. Was I ever wrong about that!

The sign-up process

Disclaimer: When I attempted to go through this registration this morning, I got a completely different registration form than the one that currently appears (as of Tuesday evening). I think it’s possible they were changing it when I was getting the error messages I described below. Either that or I just got a different form because I was using Opera on Windoze. Most of these problems apply to the new form as well

The new form no longer requires reloading to validate, but also no longer indicates which fields are required. The new form adds the full birth date (instead of just birth year), and your time zone.

The Hotmail (now branded “Windows Live Mail”) sign up process is a whopping 5 pages long. First you decide if you want to pay for additional services (yeah right). Then you get to the sign up page. Since there are so many millions of people on hotmail, you’d think they would have a way to suggest a username that hasn’t been taken. Nope, sorry. Keep guessing till you find one that works. Of course, this feedback doesn’t happen until you submit the whole form.

This lengthy form includes your usual username, password, and password recovery sections, followed by a section for your full name, gender, birth year, and country/province/postal code. Why does Microsoft need to know that to give me an email address? All of the fields in the address section are required, including your birth year. What happens if you try to put in a fake address? That’s right, validation errors on submit. It even checks to make sure your postal code matches your province. The secret here, of course, is to pick some random smaller country that they won’t have validation information for.

No fake answers!

But there’s a catch – when I select Angola as my country and submit, the validation page comes up with the fields reset to Canada. And, of course, each time this happens you have to fill out the password field again. Microsoft also insists on validating the birth year. I could not be born in 4444, or 1589. Sometimes it just says “Please verify that you have entered the correct information”. Gee, that’s helpful. Oops, now I get a “We are working to fix a temporary problem with our sign-up service.” error. What??? Probably because I kept having to resubmit the form a million times to get the information right

So, Microsoft has gone to extraordinary lengths to try to force you to give them your actual personal information. In the fine print next to the personal information section it says “This information helps us personalize your Windows Live experience.” Okkaaayyyy. What if I don’t want my experience to be “personalized”? What if I want to protect my personal information? What if I don’t want you spying on me you bastards?

Now this section says “Your location information can be used to help reset a forgotten password.” Isn’t that interesting. They already had a password helper question. Smells like bullshit to me.

Further thoughts: It is a bit paranoid to be fussy about entering my postal code, but it is in combination with my full name. And I checked – they do include this information for birth dates after 1991 (without any extra alerts or instructions … unless maybe they do that in IE, I don’t know). Children are often less discerning about these things too. They know your full name, roughly where you live, your birth date, and whatever you enter into your emails. What could they do insteaed? Just ask you what name you want displayed with your emails. Doesn’t have to be your real name, doesn’t have to be a full name, and it can be anonymous.

The user experience

Why in the world do people go through this! It’s unbelievable. And yet, most of the emails we see from students here are hotmail addresses. It is interesting that the example under Birth Year is 1999!

There is no example under birth year on the new form. It is interesting that they have drop-downs for month and day but not year, especially since they are insisting that I enter a valid one.

Once I finally got the form right (half an hour later), I saw a screen asking me to activate my account. Of course I click “activate” without reading what’s on the screen. This will come back to haunt me later. Then there is the obligatory Terms of Service and one of those annoying how many newsletters can you get me to sign up for screens.

The terms of service is now included in the registration form, not on a separate page. The registration process is now 4 pages instead of 5.

Follow up – what happens next?

I actually did sign up for an account back before Christmas to test some HTML emails. Today I had to test some new ones, so I attempted to log in to my hotmail account. This is what happened:

Oh, right! That’s the activate account screen I agreed to when I first signed up. Turns out that you can’t use hotmail if you’re just going to use it once in awhile. No, they want to make you sign in every 30 days – sooner if you’ve just got a new account.

I’m not sure if this screen exists anymore. Now the third screen in the process just tells you that the address is ready to use at any time. Of course, I have used my account recently so I can’t go back and check again.

Microsoft is just so out of touch

Now, I imagine they might have good reasons for some of these things. Some of these measures may help prevent people from abusing their services. However these are very severe restrictions on the user experience. This isn’t what the web is about anymore. It’s not about forcing users to do things your way, and preventing them from having any control or freedom, or forcing them to give you their personal information. It’s about the total opposite – empowering users. The reason why some of the so-called “web 2.0″ companies (and google) have done so well is that they make things seamless. It’s easy and elegant, and it makes things easier for people.

On the other hand….

I can sort of see how things like this happen. I know we’ve put in a number of restrictions in the forums to stop spammers. Unfortunately, they have put some small restrictions on regular members. However, we do stop short at anything that would really hurt the user experience. We do our best to find solutions to the spam problems without annoying everyone. There’s definitely a balance to be found there

Testing HTML emails

Yes, I know there is a service that can test your emails and show how they would display in different email clients. I think we will be looking into that when we redesign the newsletter in the spring. For now, the HTML we are using is very basic so I didn’t feel it would be worth it to pay for a service to test them.

An apology: I do apologize for all the mistakes in this email. I am still not sure what happened with that form – if they changed right when I posted this or if I was just fed something different because I’m on Opera. I hope you will all continue to read my posts here, despite the mistakes

I’ll give you a sec to skim through that.

Didn’t I see some of those in my spam folder the other day? “Cheap Hosting Provider”, “Wholesale Childrens Clothing”, “Dubai Furnished Apartments”, “Online Gambling Guide”??? Many of the links appear to be for legit but it’s these spammy ones that caught my attention. The W3C is effectively selling PR 9 linkbacks from a highly respected site for $1000 apeice.

Just disgusting. And sad. You’d think that google would recognize that as a spam page with all those shady links on it. Maybe it does, I don’t know.

(This was pointed out to me by this post about digg spamming which really has nothing else to do with this post)