RED3: Maybe the Purpose of Our Redesign is Only to Serve as a Warning to Others

Announcer: Will serve as a warning to those. Take it away, Tony.

Tony: Hello everyone I just want to, I’m going to apologize in advance and this is called managing expectations. If you went to Dan Frommel's thing you talked about managing expectations so you’re going to lower your expectations a little. I haven’t done this presentation in a year. I first looked at it again during MMP4 which is right before lunch so I kind of apologize in advance if I don’t do as well as I’d like to but hopefully, it will be OK. Also, I trashed my voice yesterday so I have that very wide voice today, so hopefully my voice doesn’t completely give up before the end of the presentation but I don’t think so. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy it.

The title of my presentation is maybe the purpose of our redesign is only to serve as a warning to others and this of course is from the motivational poster called Mistakes. I’ve done my own take on it but it’s Mistakes. And the reason I title my presentation this was a couple of years ago the High Ed Web people were crazy enough to send me to the Voices That Matter Web Conference in San Francisco and I met Jared Spool there, this was a year before he was our keynote speaker last year.

And he said, “Oh, what do you there at Chico state?” And I say, “We’re in the middle of a redesign.” And he was like, “Oh, well, those are always a huge mistake and end in failure.” I said, “Great, great. That’s really, really -- I wanted to hear that.” And at that time, we were going through a very frustrating phase in our redesign process where we were kind of stuck in this brainstorming thing that we couldn’t get out of.

We had a person on our team that was this fountain of ideas and we couldn’t -- it was sort of like the well in the Gulf, you know, we couldn’t find a way to turn it off. And so we got stuck in this phase of brainstorming and I was very frustrated with the whole process.

And then George Full says, “Oh redesign is a huge mistake, you should never redesign.” And so I come back from the conference and I opened my email and, ping, now accepting proposals for High Ed Web 2009. So I said well, and I sat down and so I made this proposal, oh, what a horrible mistake of redesign, hate the process. And then I forgot, I sent it off and then I forgot about it.

And then things improved in our process, start to move along again and things start to go pretty well and then, oh, come about June, I get, ping, email. Your proposal has been accepted and I was like, oh, no, what am I going to do? Now I have to present on this. So that’s where the title comes from and -- so that’s the source of that but really our process as you’re going to see -- and actually worked out pretty well for us.

But it puts me on kind of a tight rope where -- and I’m not going to say some things about our University which I need to be have disclaimer so I don’t get in too much trouble. The persons -- I’m going to read this so it’s on the audio. The persons and events in this presentation are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental. This presentation is intended for entertainment purposes only. So if you learn anything during this presentation, you have to leave that in the room, you can’t take it with you, OK? The views and opinions expressed herein are those only of the author and do not represent the views of the California State University or its Officers.

OK, so these are my ideas of the process of how we went to the redesign at Chico State. Before I get into that I want to give you just a little bit of background. I’m actually depending on what I decide to do on my presentation tomorrow or either go into this -- some of this background a lot more detail or I won’t go into it at all but I want to tell you a little bit about where we came from in our redesign process to give you an idea what we were dealing with.

Before we went into the redesign process, we had a committee that had been in place since 1996 that supposedly governed our homepage or made decisions about it. But like several large cretaceous reptilians, they were rather cold blooded and we’re more interested really in maintaining the status quo in their own influence than they were about evolving our Web presence. And so they actually had to go extinct before we could move forward in going into the process.

And part of the thing that happened was, because they were more interested in maintaining their status quo, it was really no surprise that the last time that we had redesigned, redone our site’s information architecture was in November of 1999 and this was the design that we implanted then, notice the nice curve, OK.

And then in 2004 they hired the son of one of the members of this committee to do the new design and notice how they, very subtlely, they maintain through the curve. Now, when we went back and we wanted to add, this was alumni and parents and it used to be up here with perspective students, current students, faculty and staff, audience based, anything, but when we wanted to add and friends, it broke the curve so we had to actually move it down to the bottom.

You see how -- this was a six-month process, to get this done, OK? I attempted to hang myself several times during this process.

[Laughter]

Tony: I did bring a News Ed campus but they wouldn’t let me use it. It didn’t have any ammo in it anyway.

It was very frustrating to deal with this. So our last rede -- our last design was actually in April of 2004 and so this design was in place until March of this year, so six years this design. This is a nice -- tell me how this was done. Everybody say after me, tables, right? And it was optimized for Netscape 4.7.

[Laughter]

Tony: There’s an entire week of my life that I will never get back that we spent optimizing this for that one user who’s still using Netscape 4.7. It doesn’t look right on my computer. OK, so the problem with is a very static design. I mean, where do we add things? How do we move things around it with this table?

If we want to add another announcement down here, it creates a big white space here, forces this whole thing down. So it was a very inflexible design, it was totally inaccessible, you know, roll over, you know JPEGs, right, you know?

For this is not actual text. So it was kind of a really horrible, horrible site but we didn’t -- because we have this committee that really didn’t know anything about the Web, it wasn’t invested in our University Web presence. They only invested it in their influence. We had a very difficult time going anywhere with this process.

So we were really kind of backed into a corner. Yes George Full says that redesigns are a mistake and I agree in a way that if you do your design and your structure in a way that it’s flexible and that it can grow and it can change with you, you may never need to do a redesign again, OK. But if you aren’t at that point where you have something that’s flexible and that can grow and can change, and can be modified to meet your needs, at some point you’re going to have to part with the past and you are going to have to rip all that out and do a redesign to get to the point where you may never have to do a full redesign again.

So I agree with him sort of but we had no choice. We were really backed into a corner where we said, we have to rip all these out and start over. It isn’t meeting our needs in anyway what so ever, so we did, we started over and that worked for us in the end. Before you even go to the process of doing a redesign, you need to start with having a rationale web governance infrastructure.

How many people can say that they can use all those words in that particular order at their University? We too in certain parts, in certain areas, I’m not going to say over all but in certain areas we can kind of now say that we do have that. We have process and this is part of what I’m going to talk about tomorrow. We do have policies and standards and processes in place to handle things like deciding how changes are implemented on the homepage, policies for how things look and how things are working our content management system.

And one reason you need to have this, at least you need to have at the very minimum, buy-in for your redesign at a very high level. Somebody who believes in the process and the people that are doing it and can stop the flak. And what it really did for us once we got rid of that old committee and got this governance structure in place was it defused the academic politics that are so vicious that we’ve all experienced them right?

I spent two weeks searching for that image. I looked at hundreds of pictures of monkeys and baboons and apes trying to find the right combination of fighting a primate and I found that picture and I was like, bingo! That’s economic politics right there. And what that really did for us, before we have that we really didn’t have a buck stops here in place.

Anybody could have any opinion and just veto the process just by making a lot of noise. And by putting in a Web governance structure in place, like again I’m going to talk about that tomorrow, we were able to actually say, oh, if you have a problem with this, there’s a place you can go and talk to them about it. They’ve already signed off on what we’re doing, so, you know, good luck with that but you can go there and we didn’t have to deflect that flak ourselves.

So that was the main thing is -- that stuff needed to be directed above your level. I assume most of the people here are implementers, right? At some level, designers, developers, information architects, marketing people, you’re not mostly management people, right? So or high -- probably in a high management. That’s were that stuff that needs to be deflected and it needs to be somebody that can say I trust the process, I’m not going to insert myself in it just because you have some random complaint about it, so that really helped us. The problem that we had is our Web governance infrastructure was new and we really had a hard time getting it engaged in the redesign.

So in the beginning, they weren’t really all that interested. So we said, oh, hey we need a policy on this, we recommend that, send it to them. They are supposed to sign off and say, yeah, this is great and they’ll be like, it’s like, well, yes or no. More information, what do you need and they’re like, that’s not really kind of our thing, you know, and so that fixed itself.

Once we really started getting going in the process they realized, ooh, something big is happening and they got a little more involved and they got involved in a good way. They got involved in a receptive way in the sense of, hey, I heard about -- name a buzz word. Somebody pick the buzz word. SEO, I heard it perfect because we have that. I heard about SEO. You guys should be doing this. No, they weren’t doing that, fortunately. We didn’t have to play buzz word bingo. What they said is -- what they said was, we don’t know much about the Web. We understand this is important that we got that message.

We trust that you guys know what you’re talking about. Recommend what we should do. We’ll look at it from our perspective. See if we think you’ve missed something. See if we get it and then we can establish a policy. We were really lucky. I have to -- in retrospect, I looked back and I go, oh my God, how did that happen at our University? But -- because usually you know, any management, time management in here, usually they don’t -- they get an email that somebody sent that’s like five years old about something Web 2.0 thing. Ooh, Web 2.0, we should be doing that. It’s like, yes, so 2006.

And then they want to make sure you’re doing it. They feel like they’re helping the process and it’s like if you knew what you’re talking about, you would be but, so before you do that, you really need to have that in place to be successful. Can you be successful without it? I supposed. I’ve never heard of anybody that doesn’t have that high level buy-in really being successful and because you really need somebody that’s going to take the flak and deflect it for you.

And that will stand up for you and that’s where the buck is supposed to stop. Not your -- if it’s stopping at your level, you’re going to have problems because you just really don’t have that kind of power to deal with that. So what I’m going to talk about for the rest of this is the phases of the redesign process that we went through.

And when I did this presentation last October, the dirty little secret was when I got to the end of it, I was like, we haven’t watched our site yet. We don’t know if it’s successful or not. We launched our site last March to greater claim and it’s really been very good for us, so I can say that the process that we used, it worked for us. Would it work for you? I don’t know but it’s something hopefully for you to think about.

Phase 1 in this process is to create a competent and sufficient team. It’s not enough to have one competent person be the entire team and it is not enough to have a bunch of bad designers and developers and other people on there.

You need people that are competent and sufficient and the problem we had was sufficient. There was a pushed that reduced the number of resources involved in this process as much as possible and we said, no, we need to involve more competent people in work fields to make it happen. And it’s just -- it’s not enough to have just Web nerds, OK? Just to show you how bad and this is -- I’m not making this up. God can strike me dead if I’m lying.

When I showed this to the people that I worked with, I initially didn’t have a space after the sci.

[Laughter]

Tony: I’m not making it up and they said, that won’t validate.

[Laughter]

Tony: And they started arguing, no, that won’t validate without -- no, it won’t, it won’t. And I was just like irony, not gotten. They didn’t get the irony there.

I deserve what -- oh, God. But you really need a real Web team. Now our Web team was built from various units on campus. We all knew each other but -- and this is you wish this was your Web team. We wish it was our Web team but you need, at least you need a project manager. Dan was absolutely right, project management is a real skill and an art and you need to have a project manager. Somebody has to be able to get people to do stuff, to plan things out, to understand where things are going.

Now, our project manager was also our designer. But she was also an art director, so she was used to running an art studio, you know, a design studio. So she was familiar with projects and clients and deadlines and things like that. So that worked out good for us. Information architects, designers, usability specialist, do you need all these people? No, probably you don’t need all of them but you need people with some knowledge at least to these things enough to be confident, OK.

Not somebody that’s going to say, ooh, we need SEO, and that’s the extent of their knowledge, you know. Somebody actually understands what that means, but you do -- you need to put together a team. Ours was multi-disciplined and multi-departmental and we actually got along pretty well together so that worked out pretty good for us.

The second phase is you really need to define the project. If you don’t really clearly and in writing and get it signed off by whoever’s got the ultimate say on what the definition of the project is, you’re going to have problems. So the first thing that we did was everybody said, oh, we need a new website. Why? What’s broken? What’s wrong? Identify the problems. It looks outdated. OK, that’s a reason, it looks outdated and that’s a valid reason. Not probably the only reason to do a redesign.

It was inflexible, that’s a pretty good reason. There are a lot of voices that wanted to be heard on the homepage and we had no way to accommodate them. That’s a valid reason as far as I’m concerned. We really couldn’t accommodate anybody on our homepage and I forgot the other point. You know, we forgot it, so I’ll just skip it.

The next thing you have to deal with is scope creepers, OK. One of the first things that happened when we said that we were -- and it’s supposed to say I didn’t realize this isn’t showing, it’s supposed to say and well, we ended up doing the Large Hadron Collider. Well the first things that happened when we said we were going to redesign the homepage is like you’re going to redesign the portal too, right?

I was like, well, no. You’re going to redesign our college website. Well, not as part of this project. So if you don’t define the scope very clearly and have that signed off on again, then everybody is here has experienced scope creepers, is that true?

The project that won’t die because it keeps getting added on to, right? OK, so it’s like humans versus zombies. The zombies always win, right? OK, so -- and so, you really have to be careful to define the scope of the project before you even start doing anything. Because we had a lot of people come in, oh, we want to be part of this too. We want to be part of this too. No, no, no. You have to be able to say no to people.

Definitely you should sit down once you’ve done those things and at some point you need a brainstorming session or sessions and you need people to just think about, oh, what could we do? Blue sky is good but you can’t, like what happened to us, get stuck in that. That’s what happened to us is that we got bombed down in this whole brainstorming stage and couldn’t get out for several months and it was extremely frustrating. We all wanted to kill ourselves.

So the other thing that you need to do is to find very clear phases and deadlines. Now, somebody asked me how many of the deadlines we set that we kept? None of them, OK? We didn’t keep any of our deadlines and it wasn’t really our intent to keep the deadlines that were initially set. They were goals. They weren’t hard rules. You must have this done at this point. It was this is our target but we need to do what we need to do to get there.

And if we’re a little late, OK, our CIO, he was always, it was like every time, it was like, we have a new deadline. Oh, he moved the deadline back till after Christmas. OK, great. And then now it’s February and now you know so, realistically, before you start a project, unless it’s something you’ve done a million times before, can you realistically know what’s involved and how long it’s going to take? No, you can’t really.

How often do you do a redesign? We hadn’t done one for six years and that was a dysfunctional mess. And so if it’s not something you do a lot, you can’t really say, oh, it’s going to take us 17 1/2 weeks to do this. It’s like, you don’t really know. So don’t get too upset with the deadlines but you do need to set them as goals and you need to have clear phases so that you don’t get bogged down in any one’s specific spot in the project.

Big thing that came along than this reflex back on deadlines was our budget right in the middle of this whole process. Any of you here from California, anybody? Yehey, Golden State, formerly Golden State, now tarnished bronze but --

[Laughter]

Tony: Right in the middle of this process we had a special election that Arnold Schwarzenegger put out like a whole boat load of special propositions to raise money or reduce taxes or something to solve our budget deficit in California.

And this election was in like February or something and I remember like February or March or something and -- but the day before the election we’re all talking about all these things we’re going to do with the site and everything and every single one of the propositions that were on the special ballot to raise money or save money or do things, they all failed.

And the day after the election when we came to work, it was like, well if we have jobs then maybe we could do something. We can move this logo a little bit because we were all like, wow, now we don’t have any money. Well, in a month later we were all on furloughs, so we immediately loss two days a month which 10 percent of your pay and your work time and so all the deadlines that we have set were like, OK, same amount of work, 10 percent less time to do it in, hey, great.

So our budget really constrained what we had to do. That was bad, it was also really good and I’m going to talk about that as we go along.

Phase 2, after you define your project very clearly, you need a project definition document of some sort. We have Confluence Wiki and we put everything in Confluence. It’s a huge mess, you can’t figure out anything that’s in there, but when you’re using it, it all makes sense. But we put all these stuff in there. But you really need to have something to define the scope and what the issues we hope to solve because you need to go back to that at times to defend what you’re doing.

Second step is do the research. There was a lot of pressure from our CIO who is our champion in this project to skip this step. There’s a lot of work, yadada, just build the site, OK? He’s a really good guy. He’s a very smart guy but he was also very impatient but doing the research was one of the smartest things that we did not only because of what we learned but because of the political goodwill we earned by doing it.

So the one thing that everybody wanted to see was Google Analytics. I already knew that I wasn’t going to learn a whole lot that I didn’t already know from Google Analytics. I mean, it is kind of surprising that the vast majority of the hits or visits to our website have come from California. Boy, that was -- I was blown away. I have no idea.

So, you know, everybody wanted to see this because they’ve heard of Google Analytics, right? Oh, Google Ana -- we want to see the Google Analytics and there are people doing interesting stuff but they are not doing it at the kind of level that we were going to look at things at.

We weren’t looking at click pass, that level, we didn’t have the time or resources really to do that, so this was somewhat useful but not all that useful. What was useful to us was the tool called Crazy Egg. How many people have heard of Crazy Egg? OK, this was amazing for us. It’s a click tracker.

It’s a little piece of Java Script you put on your page crazyegg.com, it isn’t free, you’ve got to pay for it. But what it did is it records every click and where it is on your page and what link it is on. And what it did for us was it showed us that 50 percent of the clicks on our homepage were to our portal and my comment when I first saw this was, well, our homepage is a portal to the portal, great.

It’s like why don’t we just get rid of the homepage and put the portal lab as our homepage. And if you start breaking it down you go, well, 7 percent got to the class schedule. Oh, get the portal, only students and faculty have portal accounts, internal audience, class schedule, 7 percent mostly internal audiences are going to look at that, email 10 percent, only internal audiences have that. We already have 70 percent of the clicks on our homepage are going -- are being used strictly by internal audiences.

Whereas, the high level management of the university wanted the homepage to focus on external audiences, prospective students, parents, parents of prospective students, etcetera because this is our showcase, right? When we show this to people, this eliminates the biggest roadblocks we had to proceeding with the design because there are a lot of people that said, I don’t see what’s wrong with our homepage. It’s fine just the way it is.

When we show them this image, they went, oh, and that was the last thing they said about, well, we don’t need to redesign. At that point, we have the green light from everybody whether they were directly involved or not. They said, oh, we do see, it’s not doing what we want it to do. So this piece of little piece of research here was worth the money that we spent, which wasn’t all that much, to get that piece of information because it removed a lot of roadblocks from us in people’s minds about why we needed to do this, why we’re wasting resources on this? It’s just fine.

The next thing that we did were user surveys and these were less useful than I thought they would be but they were very interesting, nonetheless. We sent out about 17,000 surveys or online survey via email to every constituency, current students, prospective students, there are missions people that made contact with parents, alumni, faculty staff, everybody.

We got about -- I think we got about 1,200 responses, about 7 percent. I think it was not bad response rate and we had multiple choice questions and we had open-ended questions, fill in the blank ones. And the fill in the blank ones were the most entertaining, I’ll give you credit for that but there were somewhat ambivalent. One of the questions we have, what do you like best about the Chico State homepage? Number one answer, it’s easy to navigate. Another question, what do you like least about the Chico State home page? Number one answer, it’s hard to navigate.

OK, well we’re getting answers going both ways, so not only answers were unambivalent or unambiguous but it did provide us some information but at a really kind of gross level. It wasn’t -- we couldn’t -- we weren’t really able to drill down like one specific, oh, we need to change this one thing. It was more like we got a general feel about how people felt about the site. That was useful, more politically than anything else.

We also did a best practices review. I don’t like this slide because you don’t really know what’s going on with this website at some college. I blanked out the name. And this was not so useful for us practically but was very useful for us politically. We had one of our students, we went to pick 20 top universities websites. And we had Stanford and our big competitive campus for some reason we have to do better than they do is Cal Poli, San Luis Obispo, Mustangs...

And so we had in them in there, you know, we had Yale and a few others, big name campuses. We had a student go through and make a list of every piece of content and every link on their homepage. We did that with 20 campuses and then we made a matrix in Excel who’s doing what? And so when people came to us and said, well, we should do this and we go 85 percent of the websites of the university websites that we reviewed are doing something other than what you are suggesting. And that tended to shot people up because it gave some validation that, well, if Stanford is doing it that must be OK.

Well, you know, we all know that some of the big universities are not necessarily doing great stuff. I happened to like Stanford site but that’s OK. We stole some ideas from them. And that’s another thing about best practices, you can find stuff that people are going, oh, hey, we like that. Well we'll use something like that.

But it really gave us political validation that, oh, you have looked at what Harvard is doing and, oh, OK for Harvard is doing it, it must be alright, so. The bottom line, you can’t see those things down at the bottom but it says here, people will believe anything you say if they think you’ve done the research. If I had known that before we had done all that research, I would have just made stuff up.

We did all our hard work and then I realized nobody ever challenged anything we said. So politically, it was a big deal for us, as far as what we learned from it, we did learn a lot of stuff. It wasn’t as specific as some of the other things that we got but politically, it gave validation that we were doing our homework, we knew what we were talking about. It’s academia after all. If people think you’ve done the research, to them that lends support to what ever you’re saying.

Then of course, there was our budget. OK. Now we wanted to do other things on our website for the research. We wanted to do personas. I've always been interested in the concept, never had a chance to do personas as far as usability, I think, and personas -- if you're not familiar what the concept is, you basically create a hypothetical but realistic personality and you try to put yourselves in the shoes of that user.

What do they like to do? What do they use? Why are they there for? What are they going to want on your website? And you give those personas a name and you find some stock photo and you get picture and you try to imagine what that user wants and you try to think like them. I wanted to try that, I didn't get the chance. Also I wanted to do usability testing of our existing site because I knew that that would really point out specific choke points and problem areas on our current website and we knew some of them already but having users like current students and prospective students on our current site will point out this that we really need to pay attention to.

Weren't able to do that, you know we were furloughed. We had 10 percent last time to work so we had -- something had to go. The next step -- and this is really kind of the part of the research stage because it is research, is getting input. And this was the phase that I was -- I was a little more into the research phase and I was like, oh, input that requires like dealing with people and humans and their birthers, right and they all looked the same.

And so I wasn't so hot on that but once we start doing it I realized, well, this is where -- this is where the meat of this process is. And so what we did was we started out with focus groups. And, yeah, focus groups were really interesting. We did focus groups, we did two focus groups with prospective students, a group of juniors, a group of seniors, we did focus groups with faculty, we did focus groups with staff, we did focus groups with parents, we did with alumni and it was just interesting. We just basically sat them down, we had some outlines of what we were -- the direction we were going with the website, showed to them and got their feedback.

And so what we found out from the focus groups, particularly with the kids, they have a huge, very sensitive to marketing behest and they don't want it, man. If your message -- they want the facts. Nothing but the facts. Their attitude is I can figure out what's bullshit and what's not -- shhh. I can figure out which is -- and what is not. And that's really their attitude whether how good they are -- really are at that I don't know.

But that's how they feel. And so that gave us the -- that really taught us that we needed to have whatever message we were going to have needed to be very authentic. We need not to be trying to sell them something. And so we learned a lot from the focus groups. And we had definitely -- people had very strong opinions that didn't necessarily bear out when you look or closely but we did learn a lot from them.

Then we did stakeholder meetings. Wow, OK. Then basically, what this was was we said OK, so we decided we're going to have this top level architecture. We're going to have a faculty staff page. So let's meet with some faculty and staff as stakeholders. People have a stake in getting this information out there like the faculty staff pages is going to have the information from human resources. Let's get some human resources people in here stakeholders to give us some feedback.

And my main take away from this is again, I don't work in this area, is that higher education is really confusing. One of the things we said to, and it was like student records these people we have a meeting with them was like, we should have like registration deadline on the homepage. And they looked at me like I was a moron. I was like, "What? What?" And they, "What are you talking about? Are you talking about current students? You're talking about incoming students? You're talking about international students? Are you talking about --" You know, I was just like, I don't know.

So that was really good for me because I got to learn how the other many other halves of the university lived. And that gave us some much better perspective since we were doing this to do kind of what needed to be done. This was a super-critical phase. I learned so much from this. These people are going to be building our website but we needed to hear from them to get -- to be able to give them what they wanted and what they needed on there.

But there are also some people here who said, "You have no idea what you're doing." I was like, OK. And then of course, there was our budget. We wanted to have more stakeholders meetings and do more focus groups, we just have to cut a lot of that out. And that was not good but it also made us decide -- determine which focus groups and which stakeholder meetings were vital and which ones were not as vital. So it really kind of made us focus.

The next step is planning your design. Now, based on the battles that had occurred in 2004 when we had the little nepotistic -- say that word, redesign, I figured this part of the process was going to be the worst. Everybody is a critic when it comes to design, right? Everybody has an opinion. How do you deal with that? Well, in 2008 I came to this conference and the College of William and Mary presented on their redesign process.

And they said, it's a back channel, I see it, he's laughing. Now, I have to start reading really fast to get through my presentation, right. I feel like Danah Boyd -- to share, no I'm just kidding. So with the redesign thing, what the College of William and Mary did was they said, we informed everybody every step of the way and when we actually unveiled our new design, the Photoshop file, that this is what it's going to look like.

Everybody was like, OK, cool, and I was just like, right. on our campus there's going to be bodies everywhere because everybody will fight over this but what we did was we followed their advice. This is what I was worried about just because you wear a suit doesn't mean you're qualified to critique design. But we took their advice and said, OK, we -- and one of the things that we got -- the goodwill that we got from the research and the stakeholder meetings was everybody knew that we were doing this and everybody at least felt a little bit involved.

They felt that they had been heard even if we turned to ourselves and said, what did they say it was, gibberish. So they felt that they were involved at some level that they've been heard, so when we said, hey, we're going to have this new redesign, hey, it wasn't news to anybody or to most people. They had heard somewhere through the process either they got a user survey or they were in a focus group or a stakeholder meeting.

And so they knew that this process was going on. They knew there was buying at a high level. And we also involved some of these people in looking at the various design comps that we have created. We brought focus groups in of people of all over to look at it so it wasn't a big surprise.

Now, the other thing that I was doing at the same time was rolling out our content management system to campus in the old design. And I was doing trainings of about 10 to 12 people every two weeks. And so when we were working on these things I tell these trainees, you want to see what the new design looks like? And that was another way of communicating to campus what we were doing.

As a result, when we actually rolled out and announced here's what the new design is going to look like, there was a deafening silence other than a few oh, yeah, good job. It looks good. I was amazed. I was really amazed, I thought it would be hugely contentious but if you communicate, communicate, communicate, and you were there before somewhere and prepare people for that, then that removes the huge bad surprise of we're totally going to move everything that you've ever known.

So that worked for us, I was amazed, honestly, given our campus, hugely amazed. One thing that we didn't do right was frameworks. We'd already gone through the process of creating the design comps in Photoshop and then we realized if we're going to put all these into content management system, we have a reduced budget to maintain all these stuff, maybe it will be a smart idea to use HTML and CSS frameworks. Something like 960 Grid or something like that.

So we all agreed on that but we couldn't agree on which framework to use. I wanted to use Yahoo Grids because of the flexibility. They wanted to use -- their designer wanted to use Blueprint, they won, what am I going to say? I lost that battle but we did have a lot of big internal discussion about that. But we did get the frameworks in place and the big advantage of frameworks was because of our budget --

[Laughter]

Tony: We had to really focus on how we're going to maintain this.

We need to define ways to standardize, standardize, standardize, simplify, simplify, simplify. HTML and CSS frameworks like 960 Grid or Blueprint or Yahoo Grids give you that built-in standardization and some tools for doing your layouts. There's people that believe in them and there are people that despise them. I'm not recommending one way or another for you but for us it made the process much simpler as far as implementing and maintaining things because we can go into any website, any webpage on campus and go, we know how it's laid out, it's laid out using Blueprint.

So I got the standard Blueprint styles, our custom layer on top of that and it saved us a lot of work. With a limited budget and limited time we didn't have a choice. Planning your content.

Now, this was the phase we're entering when I presented last year. Now, I always tell everybody and everybody laughs at my job when I say this, I manage the Web content management system but I don't know anything, I don't know much about the Web which is kind of a lie. I don't know much about content, that's for sure, I don't know anything about management and I'm not a systems guy so I don't know why I'm involved in that.

But I tell people, I'm not a content guy and I'm not in the content business. So this was kind of the part of the project where I really got out of it for a while but I do know from spending five years in our Web services department where we build websites for people that content is the number one place where redesigns fail. If this is you content strategy, you are doing it wrong. You really have to have a content strategy.

I'm not going to go talk about content strategy, I'm not the content guy but we spent a lot of time -- we had a revelation at one point where we realized at some point we're going to have to determine every single page, every single link, every single paragraph, and every single word that is going to go on these pages. Every single one.

And we started out by doing the information architecture. How many times have I been told this? That's my background is information architecture. Oh, anybody can do that, right. You do that. This is a very high level view done in free mind. The layout of -- these are just the pages and the links on the main pages from our homepage which is their site. The thing that you had to realize when you go into this process is you're going to have to determine all these stuff at some point or another.

None of it magically appears. After we did this sort of schematic view, then we actually had to build wireframes of all the pages and start enumerating what the links and content components were going to be on all these pages.

Stuff just doesn't magically appear on your pages. You have to plan it all. When I tell people as they say, your content, some assembly required. It isn't going to write itself. So plan from the very beginning that you're going to have to address what every single page and every single link and every single word is going to be. Get that into your mind and realize it and plan the time to do it.

We spent six months doing the content for the site. Now, it's six blissful months I was not involved with the process at all but I don't care. They can put whatever they want on the site. I put that in the hands of the content management -- of the content people to deal with. I made the places for the content, they put it in there. But you do have to plan it. This is the biggest thing that we realize was, whoa, this isn't going to happen on its own, we have to do this.

And your Web content management system, it ain't going to do your job for you, so wake up and get back to work. I don't know why people still think this. Does anybody still think this? That the Web content management system is going to manage your content just because those words are in content management doesn't mean it does any of that stuff. It provides a way for you to manage your content. That's all it does.

So people who are still operating under that illusion, fortunately, are fewer than they used to be. And if you're not tired of hearing about our budget yet, you should be but let me say this about the budget. It was quite a shock to our system when the -- all those budget proposals failed and we went on furloughs, it seemed like the world was like coming to an end because our workload didn't go down any.

But the silver lining, and it was a really huge silver lining, was the fact that we had reduced resources and it was such a shock to have those suddenly thrust upon us.

It made us focus on what was important. All the blue skies, ooh, we're going to do augmented reality stuff on our homepage. It's like are you kidding me? Are you serious? We're not doing that on our homepage. It made us focus on what our real needs were. And the real needs of our users and who they were. It made us cut the crap and get down to what we really needed.

And as a result, I think that we have a better product because we didn't futz around with things that weren't critical. We focused on what we really need to get done and we got that done. So that was a good thing and that was, I think, actually, I think we have a better website because of that, so thanks, Arnie, appreciate that.

Now, six months have now passed since the content thing. I've been playing games, robot, unicorn attack, and a lot of times it's better than that -- playing Angry Birds, no I'm just kidding. Read a lot of Icanhazcheeseburger, though.

Now, the next phase was the launch. Once they got the content in we're going to launch our site and this is the second point where you can have a big shock. And as far as planning your launch, you don't want it to be a big surprise. And so what we did, we were really afraid of this. We knew that we've gotten a buy-in and a pretty good acceptance by the people who knew about it but we also know that there was a huge audience out there that had no idea that this was coming.

People on campus, external audiences, prospective students, and we didn't want it to be a huge shock. So we did a lot of planning around our launch out of pure paranoia. We held -- we put announcements on our homepage linking to our development site, a fully functional site that people could go and poke around on. We even had an email formed that went to some dead box somewhere where nobody ever looked at. Those are like, we're done with this project. We are over it.

But, yeah, thanks for your input. So and then we did -- we actually -- we did announcements, our public affairs people who love to kill trees, they just love killing trees, they actually printed out this glossy 11x17 inch folding things about our new homepage and arrows pointing to all the new stuff and then they produced this 300 MB PDF file that was based off some in design file with all these vector images.

We'll get it some day. But we also did dog and pony shows. We had a room about like this, we did three of them, I was involved and we invited everybody on campus to have this big rollout, there was going to be tea and crumpets and everything and we actually had a pretty good turnout for the most part. People came just to see it and we said, ooh, look at the new website and we pointed out all the new features and the things that it moved like the portal login and all that stuff.

That garnered us some goodwill too and when the day came to launch everybody knew what day that was going to be. And we did it during spring break. So they knew it was coming when they got back. And it went really well. Now, is our website just amazingly incredible? No. Is it better than what we had? Oh, God, yes. It's so much better than we have. We have places now where people can get a spot light on the homepage for temporary events but they're not there permanently, OK.

We have a centerpiece. Everybody's got a centerpiece, right. That highlights our smiling students. That's supposed to be the big message. We have news and announcements. We have big arguments about whether we need an audience navigation or not so, yeah, throw it in there, let's not argue about it. And then we have our navigation. All these stuff that our internal audiences usually can't really see it up there but the portal, email, and all that are all in a row at the top, it's at the top of every page of every site up in the corner.

Initially, people are like, where did the portal go? And now they're, now they love it because all of their tools are in the same place in every page. So it worked for us. That process really worked well for us. People love our new website. It's been a selling point to move people into our content management system because the only way you can get that new sexy design is by going into the content management system.

So that worked really good for us. It was a successful process but we it was plan, plan, plan, communicate, communicate, communicate. Those are some of the key take aways. But here's kind of the process. You need to buy-in in high level ownership. Make sure you've got the right people in your team and if you get the wrong person, find a way to get rid of him, trust me. Clearly define the project and its scope. Do your homework. Do the research if for political reasons, if no other reason there for political reasons do it so you can get that validation.

Get input and feedback people, feel involved, it doesn't matter what you learn, you're going to learn a lot but it makes people feel involved and gets better buy-in. Have a content strategy in a plan and plan your launch. Don't just spring it on people. So that's it. I made it. I only forgot one thing. So any questions. Bryan, how many minutes do we have? Eight, perfect. Wow, it actually went long. Well, that's all right. Anybody have any questions about this? I'll be happy to talk to anybody offline about this as well about our process. Yes.

Audience 1: Are you under IT or marketing?

Tony: Yes, I'm under IT. IT in marketing, they work together. We don't really have -- our marketing is really under our admissions and they think that they know everything and they won't talk to us. We do have a public affairs unit and I'm pretty sure that once they're convinced that this Internet thing is going to catch on because they're going to get right on it

So pretty much, and I'll talk about this a lot tomorrow as far as Web governance, we pretty much had to do it on our own. We did have the public affairs people do most of the content. They did buy-in to write the content and the imagery and things like that for the homepage and top level pages. But our admissions people which handle most of the external marketing, they weren't helpful, so. Yeah.

Audience 2: What is the minimum number of people you need in a team?

Tony: One, that's the very minimum, right? One incredible genius. We had -- our core team was I think six people. We had a designer information architect, the Web content management person, maybe had a couple of writing people, few sort of go for minions to do stuff, somebody to write some Java Script.

We kind of brought people in as we needed and then kicked them out because we've learned that you don't want people to be on your team permanently that are only helpful in certain spots and ask stupid questions in other areas where they're not qualified. So bring them in, and scoot them out. Other questions? Yes?

Audience 3: How long was the project?

Tony: It took about two years to do it, yeah. It was originally supposed to take -- our CIO was like we're going to do this in nine months, really. No, really, seriously.

What's that? Three, sweet. It took us two years because, you know, there's a lot of things that had to happen. Things don't happen quickly at our university and if they do with yours something is wrong. Yeah. We use Hannon Hill cascade server. It works for us. It's a good product. I'm not saying it would work for you because everybody has different needs and different business processes.

My one line summary of choosing a content management system is understand what your business processes are very intimately before you select something and select something that will work with your processes not against them. And so -- and that's a good point. Yes.

Audience 4: [53:22 Gerard Spool]

Tony: We actually went to Hannon Hill after another disaster. How many people here use Serena Collage. Oh, boy, that was horrible. At some point we may and you're going to go through the incredible heart ache of trying to get all that content out of what you've got it into something else. Cascade servers all XML based. Because of cascade server I know XSLT pretty darn good. So we can get it out of there. I know we can get it out.

And whether we can get it in to whatever we buy next, I don't know. We don't have any plan necessarily to do that. At this point, we don't have a plan to do that. But we do realize that it could happen, sure. And we'll have to deal with that when we get there because we have no idea what that will be.

Yes.

Audience 5: [54:13 Unintelligible]

Tony: Yes.

Audience 5: [54:19 Unintelligible]

Tony: Oh, before, after or --

Audience 5: ...before.

Tony: I should talk about this tomorrow but we've actually doubled the number of sites that are in the WCMS since we made the templates available in June. So that's four months. In four months we've doubled from 60 somewhat to over 120. It's really -- I'll show you a graph tomorrow in my presentation. It goes like this, and because really people want it. They like the new look. It's much cleaner and they want to be a part of it. And that's been a very smart strategy on our part to drive them to that, so, yeah. Anything else? Yeah.

Audience 6: Have you talked to Jared Spool since then?

Tony: Yeah, he was -- last year I slapped him around a little bit. No. He just like to shake things up a little bit. He understands that. He's using hyperbole to make people think differently. He's a really cool guy if you haven't met him.

Audience 6: [55:17 Unintelligible]

Tony: Oh, of course, everybody's got girls under trees. That's what college is all about, and beer.

[Laughter]

Tony: Okay.

Audience 6: [55:27 Unintelligible]

Tony: Thank you very much for coming.

[Applause]

Tony: Don't forget to fill out those eval -- oh, darn it.

Audience 7: So why don't we fill this out, if you will please.

Tony: What is this? Oh, it's a release.

Audience 7: Yeah.

Tony: I used the S word.

Audience 7: ...three budget raise will come to us.

[Laughter]

Audience 7: -- the joke on.

Tony: Yeah, really.