Sheridan College – Episode #194
Site Scores:
| Site | Visual | Information | Code | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sheridan College | 67 | 57 | 77 | (201/300) 67% D |
Today’s Tip:
Be sure to have someone outside of a redesign project check out the site before it goes live. No matter how many time you check over your own work you are bound to miss something. In the case of today’s site it was the “Related Jobs” area. It looks great structurally but the content is a little off. I have never heard of anyone getting a job in “Drafting Job1″ or “Drafting Job2″…
Show Notes
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Tags: episode
October 1st, 2010 at 2:25 pm
I would love to have the time to have that sort of unscripted discovery meetings with every department and office on campus at least once per year (once per semester would be ideal). But this .edu web rock star is currently working on a solo career. That limits the time I have available, although I’m sure it would end up saving time in the long run. We’re slowly getting our site more manageable which frees up more of my time for meetings and planning. In the next year I hope to make a lot of progress towards more open communication with our various departments and offices, tweaking our site to be more mobile friendly, and content strategy.
I think community colleges often struggle with multiple campuses and even names for those campuses. We serve a 12 county rural area. While we have one “main” campus we offer classes all over the place, from agreements with local high schools to a few satellite campuses. Our web presence is pretty main-campus-centric and I know that’s a point of pain for students, faculty, and staff at our other teaching sites. I haven’t found a good way to address that yet (and I’ve been here 3 years now). While I doubt the large block of contact info and links in the footer of Sheridan’s home page is user friendly from a student perspective, I would probably buy myself a little political good will if I did something similar on our site.
With the video and “rich media” stuff too I get the impression this redesign involved a lot of control from some sort of central committee, likely staffed by people who aren’t particularly tech savvy or in touch with the expectations of college age users. I downloaded their staff directory (in PDF format, naturally) and didn’t see any mention of “web” or “communication” in job titles. So it’s probably a not-so-tech-savvy committee throwing money at this Datatel company with little to no in-house work. The portfolio link on Datatel’s site prompts me to download a .exe file by the way, so they obviously think no one who matters will be using a Mac.
I am of course making a lot of assumptions here. But I’d be willing to bet the bill from Datatel would have bought them at least one knowledgeable in house person (a solo rock star like me) for a few years. I know some external firms do good work, but I see a lot of stuff that feels like the aftermath of a sloppy one night stand. The design firm gets their check and the institution gets an unusable site filled with 404 errors and PDFs-as-content. The sad truth is a lot of higher ed administrators lack the digital literacies required to spot these issues. I really wish your videos would catch some attention from folks other than your fellow web geeks.