A Beautiful Nightmare

Wherein I worry that lowly end users of our content management system will turn our beautiful new Web site into an unnavigatable mess.

After years of beating around the bush, we're finally going to be getting an enterprise Web content management system (WCMS) for Chico State. We're getting Hannon Hill Cascade Server, but that's not the point of this post.

I've fought very hard for an enterprise WCMS over the past several years, but the closer we've gotten to getting one, the more misgivings I have.

I know that's heresy, but as an admittedly elitist web developer I'm wary of turning the unwashed masses loose on Web sites without adult supervision.

I'm not worried about them putting pink text on green backgrounds - we can control that with pre-made templates.

What I'm worried about is having people with no experience with or (concept of) organizing information creating and attempting to organize departmental Web sites. After all, we're talking about people whose desktops look like this:

(image stolen from this site)

We have spent years thinking about WCMS's. We've spent months reviewing products, trying to select the best one for our needs. We're going to spend more months developing the best and most beautiful templates for people to use. And we're going to hire people to manage this great piece of software and manage a smooth rollout of the technology to campus.

And then we're going to turn over virtually the entire CSU, Chico Web presence to (let's be honest) a bunch of department secretaries and let them turn it into a Web version of their computer desktop.

This isn't making sense to me.

Why bother to invest all this time, money and effort on the back end, if the people who will actually, hands on, implement and manage major pieces of the campus have no idea of what they're doing?

OK, so we'll offer - no, require - training in information architecture, organizational skills, writing for the web, etc. for everyone who will use the WCMS.

Right.

How am I going to sell that? That isn't sexy. The software is sexy (if you're into that sort of stuff, which personally I'm not). New designs are sexy. Training isn't sexy. Information architecture isn't sexy.

The very stakeholders that need to sign off the standards and requirements for the WCMS barely know what information architecture is, so they're not going to get it. If they don't get it, they won't require anyone else to get it.

End result... We end up with a beautifully designed new site, run by a sophisticated piece of content management software, but where the content is an impenetrable mishmash of confusing, redundant, mislabeled links and huge rambling pages of run-on content. Even better, there'll be no consistency across subsites with regard to terminology, labeling, organizational schemes or writing style.

For the user, our Web site will be a beautiful nightmare.

We have to prevent this. I'm open to ideas.

HighEdWebDev - A Few Thoughts - Part 1

I just got back from the HighEdWebDev conference in Rochester, NY.

Here are some of my thoughts on some bigger picture issues....

Buzzword of the conference: Social Networking

I wasn't too impressed with social networking as something that we need to get into the middle of. Yes, I think that it's important for university's to be aware of the social networks growing up related to campus, simply to be cognizant of what students and others are saying. However, I don't think there's any reason for Web Services, or any other organization on campus, to get too involved in managing or providing or integrating social networks.

Content Management

Content management remains a big issue. The ad hoc round table that Pat and I hosted was the most well attended of the round tables at the conference.

My main take away was that, because we've had experience with a WCMS before, we have developed a very strong process for evaluating a WCMS. This is something that most of the campuses we talked with have NOT done. They are (as we were) basically stumbling in the dark. They know they need a WCMS, but they don't exactly know how they will use it.

In our round table, we emphasized two things from our experience that we felt we vital in selecting a product that would actually work:

1. Understand you business processes, no matter how undocumented or dysfunctional they may be.
   
• You have to select a product that is going to work with your existing cultural, organizational structure and business processes.
  
• You dramatically increase the chance of failure if you are forced to change your organization or radically alter your business processes in order to make a WCMS "work".
  
2. Never, ever buy anything that you haven't taken the time and effort to learn yourself.
• We required vendors to provide us with a sandbox, and we took the time to actually implement templates and content elements in order to build a real live site using our templates and business processes. We then offered a training/demo of the products to the campus community.
• From that process, we learned things that no vendor demo or series of vendor demos could teach us.

More thoughts to come on issues such a identity management and using your web presence to compete for new students.