The thing is, we had a fairly decent web site for a while, before they unleashed this hovering grey menu crap.

Looking at the OIT wiki there seems to be some effort at redesign but even those efforts don’t seem too fruitful.

http://wiki.williams.edu/display/webweavers/Home

Amherst’s site is by far one of the best websites out there. Williams should hire http://www.Plainspoke.com to design its site.

Well, the WebWeavers site certainly reflects good intent. After watching IT at Williams for two decades, I begin to wonder if those are the kinds of intents that lead to Hades.

I am teetering on the edge of deciding whether I should talk about pragmatics, or about attitude. Since I usually tend to pragmatics, I’m going to yield to attitude, and give you something of the mini-lecture I presented to Nokia’s Ian Browde last week. (For Nokia, this should be billable hours…).

Ian complained that Nokia too often focuses on technology, and too infrequently on humanity and human needs.

I beg to differ, and to concur. (I love straddling the fence, and moreover, jumping back and forth from one side to another).

At the GALC– our web identity site is in progress– I have forwarded that my title should be “Director of Information and Technology.”

Too often, the position is “IT Directory,” and the attitude and approach, that one directs Information Technology. Information Technology is a “thing”– well, that word doesn’t quite do. (In German, a “thing” is a Gegenstand, something which ’stands against’ something else, a part of an organic whole…). In the moment of English we are speaking of, in the moment of time and in the attitude we are speaking of, a “thing” is a fixed and inhuman entity, unchanging, “material” in the poorest sense of that word, without soul…

I beg to differ. If I turn back to the lessons John Schaar once taught me in the dusty classroom we set up in a hallway of a storeroom at Deep Springs, and the idea that we can find meaning if we turn to the philology and lost usages of words– and if I turn to the lost disciple of Rhetoric– I will remind that Rhetorika has two roots, Rhet-, and Torika, from Technika.

Both roots survive into the modern languages, though as far as I know, rekla- is the root for the word for speech and speaking only in the Western Slavics (via Church Slavonic).

Rhetorika– we might quibble over the correct transliteration– is literally the technology of Speech.

Speech is a technology.

Everything is techne. Skipping some decades, to Freud, Strachey’s translation of “Civilization and its Discontents” (Die Unbehaegen der Kultur) makes one critical mistake– the error of perspective we are talking about here.

It separates Culture and Civilization, the material, and the spiritual. Gegenstand und Geistliche, we might say in German. But in German there in no such separation.

In Freud’s German, there is no such distinction. There is only Kulture. There is only that which is made by men– and of which men and women are made.

A building is Kulture. A cell phone is culture. An email system, a blog, a web page, is cultivated, just like a plant. It is a form of life, it has a history, a culture, a personality.

Personal web pages? Web pages in general? There would be no personal web pages as we know them, without what happened at Tripod. Apache, the piece of “soft-ware” which powers nearly 50% of the world’s web servers, would probably not do so if Nathan Kurz had not given it careful attention, in Tripod’s birthing moments.

Somewhere I have an email from Nate, from five or six years ago, about how his personal charateristics hobbled the oranism of Apache. (Some of his code still remains, and much of the pattern of culture he set in motion).

Freud is known as the founder of Pyschoanalysis– a cultural disciple– and few remember that he was the person who created the word “neuron,” as a young lecturer in nervous diseases at Vienna. Nor that he was part of cafe reading group rediscovering Neitzsche and Paul Ree, and through them, Kant and Leibniz.

I’m now giving you a bit more than I’ve given Ian– after all, Nokia needs to treat this a billable hours. If we follow this path forward, we find Ted Nelson creating the term “hypertext” to describe the new pattern of relationships; if we follow it backwards, we could focus on Socrates, or the pre-Socratics.

Philo-sophia, the love of “knowledge”– exactly the wrong word. “Sophia” is the name of a woman– or of woman, if you will– and of Sophistry, another form of the root for Speech, the arts of languange. For the world of Greece, Socrates was never anything else than a Sophist, an accomplished speaker and orator, a technician.

If we stop at the Phaedrus, as I did in my first semester in a program that should have focused on Rhetoric, I believe we find Plato saying that there is no absolute knowledge. There are only understandings between humans, between organisms evolving in a living culture. My memory of Jacob von Uexkuell– who coined the modern sense of Environment as Umwelt, a surrounding world of possibilities (affordences), is failing me.

Why are we unsatisfied with Williams’ web page– which we might also focus on as a re-presentation, an identify document, a character and char-isma, a public face?

Obviously, because we feel it is the wrong face. It does not present the vision we want– moreover, it fails to establish our character, our identity.

Why?

Dare I go so far to say that our character, our identity, is not worthy, is not good enough?

We are focused on directing Information Technology, on controlling and managing a stable thing, a series of material objects under our control.

We are not focused on directing Information and Techology, a dual relationship, amid many other relationships. We are focused on “things,” misunderstood as stable entities, as numbers of computers and servers and bandwidth, and not on an organic series of connections, and all-too-human technologies which create and nourish that culture, that cultivar, that world.

In our defense, Nokia faces the same problem, as do so many other organizations. Solve the problem in the microcosm of Williams, and you solve the problem for Nokia and many others.

Isn’t that why Nokia gave Mark half a million to create a crazy cyberseminar a decade ago?

Ken:

Or, maybe Morty just needs to spend some bucks on a good design firm!

ASDF:

I disagree about Amhert’s site. It is nearly impossible to navigate and sorely lacking in content — even the basics like Common Data Sets. It’s also slower than molasses.

I didn’t really understand all of Ken’s post, but I do want to share a pint with him some time.

They need to go beyond hiring a new design firm. Good web-sites have horizontal integration across departments. They also have a sense of integration with the institution’s own spirit and purpose.

A fixed plan or design can only do so much. What you really want to do is not just create “a web site” but rather a framework which can then generate particular web sites for all departments and offices, each sharing in the same broad theme. I would suggest starting from scratch.

when i worked at hampshire, the “framework” they used was the msot constricting and frustrating thing. our admissions webmaster, who was very skilled at webdesign, was constantly butting heads with it, unable to do what she wanted. so, while I agree that horizontal integration is desireable, those departments with adequate internal web-design skills should be allowed to exploit them.

(then again, hampshire’s website won some prestigious website design award…)

hwc:

I don’t think navigatability, content, or load time are factors in determining what makes a good website.

Well, the point of a web site is to present information. The most important factors in determining what makes a good web site are, therefore, the information itself (content) and ease of access to said information (navigability and fast load-times). I’ll take that over flashy colors and hovering menus any day.

ronit and asdf:

I agree with both you. What I should have written was:

Or maybe Morty needs to spend some money on a good marketing and design firm.

The first job of the marketing firm should be to help Williams actually define the core defining characteristics of the school and its mission. That should, in turn, drive the approach to the website (and all of Williams’ marketing materials).

To use the current buzzword, a good Web site is an Information Architecture problem, or as I usually state it, “A Web site is a collision between an organization’s view of itself and the tasks that visitors are trying to perform.”

Web sites are often a collection of the different departmental views within an organization, and most sites are maintained that way: Admissions maintains its section or has a big say in it, Alumni Relations does its thing, each academic department does its thing. This typically leads to different graphics, different vocabulary, different navigation schemes.

However, online visitors don’t want to deal with each department individually — if they did, they could just call up each department on the telephone and get bounced around like they did twenty years ago. Instead, they want to do something, often college wide. For example, a prospective student wants to get a feel for what it’s like to apply (what are the mechanics), what the campus looks like, maybe drill a bit into the History department, since that’s what she’s thinking of majoring in.

Great Web sites make it easy to do so, via a unifying look, coordinated navigation, a common vocabulary, and an understanding of cross-site visitor tasks. This is a view that is fundamentally at odds with a college culture, which is a bunch of departmental fiefdoms. This task is not impossible, but it does require strategic vision and someone with enough power to shove some reasonable standards down everyone’s throats. I’ve always found the best way to get everyone on the same page is to use Web analytics to document how dysfunctional the site is for visitors. (Employees always think the site is swell, because they know the vocabulary and have grown used to the site’s idiosyncracies. They’re often stunned to see video of normal people getting hopelessly lost trying to do a simple task.)

At the moment, I would give highest points to Carleton and Dartmouth in Web design. Amherst has made great strides (mostly because the earlier design was so poor), but I wouldn’t consider it a site to emulate. That said, if Amherst keeps working at it and Williams continues to do nothing, in several years Amherst will be head and shoulders above Williams.

It would be nice if the College made public its web usage statistics. (They have refused my requests to do so in the past.) This would allow all of us to see what is going on and for those with real knowledge (like Guy) to provide expert (and free!) advice.

There is so much more that the College could do to tap the collective wisdom and knowledge of the alumni.

It was mentioned that Williams needs a theme encompassing all that it represents. I think the Climb Far brochures are fairly slick and representative of Williams. Some shots can be viewed at http://www.plainspoke.com/work_16.html# (I especially like image number 3). This could provide a good basis.

I agree with David. If the Williams web designers would open up to the community, we could combine various strengths and create a great site for free. To stereotype, I’ve found that the people with computer programming skills generally lack the artistic touch (just look at the computer science site). Hence the differentiation between designer and developer. I’d be willing to lay out a few design ideas even though I’m not sure I could create them from scratch.

As for unifying the site, all Williams has to do is make a great template and departments could just fill in the text. Currently it’s a pain to browse through the jumble of sites.

Speaking of which, Swarthmore went live with their new College Website today. It’s been under development for about two years.

The College hired the design firm that does their viewbook, Pentagram, to work with the design of the webpage. Pentagram also did MIT’s website and USC’s website

This feature article from the new Swarthmore site provides a history of the six generations of college websites, including clickable Wayback Machine links to previous iterations from 1997, 2000, 2002, 2005.

The design is “busy” in my opinion, a consequence of the decision in 2001 to go with an information rich portal. Approaching the design as the front page of a newspaper rather than a simple portal makes the page more dense visually, but seems to attract readers. The web stats site Guy Creese linked a few weeks back shows that the Swarthmore site attracted substantially more hits (50% more, if I recall) over the past year than either Amherst’s or Williams’. So, it must be serving as a “community newsletter” of sorts. And, the school’s target customer base probably tends to be attracted to reading interesting, geeky stuff. The goal was apparently to feature individuals (students, faculty, alum) and their stories rather than abstract corporate-speak.

As a huge booster of liberal arts colleges, my favorite piece of content on the new site is the From the President message. IMO, the first two paragraphs get right to the heart of what really makes a small undergrad college special and why a student would choose this kind of one-on-one interactive learning experience over the more institutional approach of a research university. Any president or professor at a good liberal arts college could tell this story, but it’s so refreshing to see a college president cut right to the chase about interaction between individual students and individual faculty. Presents quite a contrast to the corporate congomerate style of large research universities that require drilling down through layers of links to divisions, professional schools, research endeavors, and business interests to even find a story of undergrad education. Answers the question a prospective $40,000 a year customer should reasonably ask, “What’s in it for me?”

I began to understand the unique qualities of Swarthmore when, in August 1974, as a newly hired assistant professor of psychology and linguistics, I opened my office door to find five students seeking direction for pursuing their intellectual passions. The first student, fresh from a summer internship with the renowned linguist Noam Chomsky, was set on probing the implications of Chomsky’s most recent book; the second was keen to explore the origin of the Armenian alphabet; the third was determined to test a new approach to helping dyslexic students to read; the fourth was intent to analyze the link between bilingual education and linguistic nationalism in her native Montreal; and the fifth — a first-year student — was eager to nail down who says “Swa’thmore” and who says “Swarthmore” and why.

By mid-morning, I was committed to working through Chomsky’s latest book, to mastering the evolution of the Armenian alphabet, to bringing myself up-to-date on research in dyslexia and linguistic nationalism, and to attending to variant pronunciations of my new home — and I was confident that I had the world’s most extraordinary teaching job. I was convinced that nowhere would I find undergraduates more excited and serious about shaping and testing ideas — for the sheer pleasure of it, for the contribution it makes to knowledge, and for the impact that pursuit can have towards a better world.

Ha! So much for my HTML talents. I screwed up the Main link in the above post.

The link for the new Swarthmore website is http://www.swarthmore.edu

One of the perks of being an author is access to the MoveableType account… meaning that you can go back and edit your comments :)

Is it just me or did Swarthmore just rip off Williams’ header? (Or did Williams rip off Swarthmore’s header?… go to the two websites and look at the headers).

Current Eph:

Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!

And, besides, it’s a different typeface….

Loweeeel,

I’ve never found a way to edit my comments in a thread I didn’t create, after giving David and a few other authors some headaches while trying.

Please enlighten me.

LOL.

K

Ken, you just login @ the author location, and after that, click on “comments” on the main movable type page.