Musings

November 02, 2006

Been a busy 10 weeks ...

Well, its been 10 weeks since we launched the new Dartmouth home page. The last time I posted, we were in the final countdown to launch and, since then, Martin and I have been busy maintaining the page and responding to the great feedback we've been receiving.

We've done some tweaking, mostly to the pages for Prospective Students and for Alumni, and added a page for Parents and Families. All three of those were in response to initial and continuing feedback from the community and from the offices most directly responsible to those constituencies.

Of course, we continue to get feedback through the "Contact Dartmouth" email address; we're responding to those messages as appropriate and forwarding others also appropriate to other areas of the College. As you might imagine, most of the traffic at this time of year has to do with Admissions, but we're getting plenty of "suggest a link" type of messages, too.

All of this is to say that the Dartmouth Web site will continue to evolve based on the needs of our users. We believe in our original principle of "user-centered design," and will continue to develop the site based on that principle.

I'm also continually on the hunt for new, interesting and cool content to feature in the "Up Front" section of the home page; if you know of something that might fit the bill, whatever that might be -- a new Web page, audio, video, images, anything on the Dartmouth Web -- email me.

As always, thanks for all the great input we've gotten. The response has been tremendous, and we're looking forward to the continued development and evolution of the site.

-- Rick

August 29, 2006

On the sharp edge of it ...

Well, here we go. We're on track to launch the new home page tonight (Aug. 30) ...

Continue reading "On the sharp edge of it ..." »

June 14, 2006

Writing for the living Web

A just-discovered oldie, but a goodie, from A List Apart:

“10 Tips on Writing the Living Web”

I’m starting to feel the muse …

June 07, 2006

Social search?

Not sure what I think of this yet, but in light of recent discussions and work on the search engine here at Dartmouth, here's an interesting piece from today’s Chronicle of Higher Education online edition, pointing to a Newsweek story:

Web Search Is About to Get More Social

May 07, 2006

Web Town Meeting

It was a beautiful day ... way too nice to be inside. So we really appreciate the 25-or-so folks who attended our Cinco de Mayo Web town meeting on Friday. Sorry we couldn't offer magaritas, but, well, you know how that goes.

After walking folks through our research process and findings and some of the basics of what we're envisioning as the navigation for the new site, we opened it up to conversation about the site. I offered that Dartmouth's Web site is a shared concern: it's not just what we think the site should be, but that everyone at the College has an interest in how Dartmouth is represented on the Web.

That said, there weren't any surprises (at least to me) in what folks wanted to talk about: how we get visitors to the site to content, how the search engine works, how the life of the College is highlighted on the site. We also ran an exercise on imaging: a series of "mood boards" showing a variety of images of the College that represent various aspects. Again, not surprisingly, folks prefer dynamic, energetic images of teaching, learning and living at Dartmouth. They were less enthusiastic about the more conservative, traditional campus beauty shots of flowers and architecture.

It was, we think, a good conversation. One that we're likely to repeat soon.

Martin's got some more formal notes; stay tuned for a posting on that. (Likely to come early in the week ... we're spending some time this weekend getting out from behind our computers and enjoying the spring.)

April 25, 2006

Higher Ed - Is there anything else like it?

As we start in on designing navigation, I've been trying to think of other types of organizations that offer similar services so I can take a look at how they're using the web. I'm thinking we might be stuck inside a "higher education" box in thinking about our web site, in which case it would be useful to look at enterprises that offer the same sort of "service" as a college or university. I'd like to be able to see how similar organizations use the web to support their work.

Continue reading "Higher Ed - Is there anything else like it?" »