White Whale Web Services

White Whale Web Services > Business travel diary: A trip to Southwestern University

January 24, 2008

 

Today Alex and I are visiting Southwestern University for a general project check-in. We have great relationships with all our clients, but we have a special fondness for the folks at Southwestern; the notion of "fit" between a vendor and a client is kind of a catch-all cliché, but nonetheless, SU and WW are a pretty great fit.

The Southwestern.edu redesign in its early phases, and each of the elements of the project that we're handling for them (application development, graphic design, and content development/information architecture consulting) is at just about the same developmental phase. (We have a brief debate in our kickoff meeting about whether this stage is best termed zygotic, embryonic, or fetal; we decide embryonic is about right, because we've certainly laid down the basic structure in each of these areas. But there's still plenty of room for collaborative evolution.)

When it comes to design, we spend some time talking about "edginess" in Web design. We know that Southwestern is looking for striking, unconventional design decisions from us. They're also expecting a larger-than-typical degree of openness to the process; we like to run public blogs for our site redesigns, and that's something that drew them to White Whale. Well, it goes without saying that the more edgy and risky a Web design, the more likely it is that some people won't like it, and if decisions are made and announced in a public forum, those people will make their voices heard.

Our Kenyon College site redesign (which I would call bold and striking, if not radically unconventional) is currently in the blog phase; Kenyon's redesign committee has made a design selection, we've refined it a bit, and it's gone online for public comment on the Kenyon redesign blog, where we've proceeded to post derivative designs for departmental pages. The comment volume has been fairly light; there have been a few very positive comments, a few negative ones, and several questions, tweak suggestions, and concerns. In the end it strikes me as the perfect balance, and just what I'd expect for a design like Kenyon's. But when I think of site designs that I consider truly unconventional— like the Biola Undergrad site, Miguel Ripoll's Berkeley Spanish & Portuguese masterpiece, or the ambitiously minimalist new Oxford site— I wonder how these would have held up if discussed in a public forum.

As we begin, internally, to work toward Web design proposals for Southwestern, I find myself wanting to push them away from convention. This will have some consequences; in the morning, we sit with our client and discuss them.

Our next session (with the same people, mostly) covers application development. Southwestern will be using custom Web applications that we've built to manage, tag and share news items; to maintain databases of frequently asked questions; to create and maintain photo galleries; and to allow untrained users to edit Web pages. Although we've never thought of ourselves as a company that believes in CMS's— see here for more on that— it's clear that the tools we have built, together, comprise a content management system already— and that is going to mean something fundamental and interesting for the future of our business.

We are very lucky to have Southwestern on board with us to develop this idea further; we are giving them a considerable discount on our application development services in exchange for helping us test and scope out this suite of tools (which includes other tools that Southwestern's not using, or which they already have solutions in place for). I have a feeling when Tonya reads this she's going to worry that I'm giving up too much information here— we haven't even trademarked the name yet!— so I'll stop there. I start the meeting with a brief demo of our tools, then Alex takes over for a nuts-and-bolts session on the technology powering the system, while I break off with Southwestern's newly hired Director of Creative Services and communications staff to talk about the relationship between print and Web design.

When we reconvene as a group, we have a relatively short time to talk before a groundbreaking ceremony that everyone (including us) is expected to attend; our last topic is content development.

Whoever said "a site is only as good as its content" wasn't entirely right. A site can be a little better than its content. But not too much better! The fact is that we wouldn't be doing our jobs if our site designs didn't come with strategies for keeping them alive and dynamic long after we've left the building; that means it's our job to help our clients develop workflows, processes and institutional priorities that will result in a steady flow of interesting content.

This means a few things.

It means locating content providers— that might mean finding faculty, staff and students who are willing and able to write blogs, or hiring work study students to shoot short videos of campus life. (We've proposed both of these ideas to Southwestern.) Most of all it means finding people for whom creating content won't be a burden, or another task added to an already full plate. People who want to take pictures and write content.

For some of our clients, our work together leads to a change in their thinking about what content development is. It doesn't necessarily mean rewriting 100 pages of a Web site; really, in our view, the process of content development means locating and gathering stories, little details and features about what makes a school interesting. Story-gathering isn't the only process that matters in content development (narrative voice and consistency of tone are also important)— but it's the most enjoyable part. Really, the first step in a higher ed content development process ought to be to create a page like this (a collection of sidebar featurettes that we developed for our 2004 Duke Admissions site design). Once you've got the stories, it's a straightforward and simple process to develop a content strategy around them.

I digress. (And sorry, Tonya, am I giving away the recipe for our special sauce?) Our meeting with Southwestern winds up cordially and genially, as always; we review the timeline, promise Bob we'll do everything we can to ease his concerns about content development, grab one last kolache for the road, and split.

Back in Austin, we meet up with some old friends of mine who I've just learned are living here. They take us out on what I'm told is a pretty traditional Austin-style night on the town; it involves queso fundido, Lone Star beer, country music and dancing, places called the Broken Spoke and the Horseshoe Lounge, and two five-dollar bags of "roadkill jerky" (which I suspect is actually venison). We discuss the favorite topics of my generation: Barack Obama, the irony divide, and how silly the Zune is.

— Jason

White Whale Web Services