Just Write

Dave Lowe is a web devel­oper at Biola Uni­ver­sity, and was respon­si­ble for the redesign of their under­grad­u­ate web­site, which received some awards and sparked some dis­cus­sion in the forum at God­bit. I recently had a chance to inter­view him, and obtain more infor­ma­tion from his team about the redesign.

Note: Part 1 of 2. Part 2 will be pub­lished next week.

• Michael Mont­gomery:

You work for Biola’s IMC Design Stu­dio as the web devel­oper for the Web Group. How (and when) did you start in the field, and with Biola Uni­ver­sity?

• Dave Lowe:

I cre­ated my first web site (if I recall cor­rectly, it was on Geoc­i­ties) in my fresh­man year of col­lege back in 1996. At first it was just some movie quotes, and then I uti­lized it for book lists and Ama­zon affil­i­ate links. A few years later I started work­ing with Cold­Fu­sion through a stu­dent job I had in the Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy depart­ment. Dur­ing my senior year, a good friend who was work­ing for Admis­sions as their web guy decided to move out of state and rec­om­mended me for the position.

Web design was very inter­est­ing to me because it com­bined what I was study­ing (art) with my back­ground in pro­gram­ming. And frankly, I was about to grad­u­ate and had no clue what I was going to do next so it was a very wel­come oppor­tu­nity. That was back in 2000, and I’ve been work­ing here ever since.

For the first 5 years I worked for Enroll­ment Man­age­ment, out­side of the more cen­tral­ized mar­ket­ing and IT groups, but man­ag­ing and devel­op­ing some of the most impor­tant uni­ver­sity sites. A year and a half ago, my posi­tion was trans­ferred into Inte­grated Mar­ket­ing Com­mu­ni­ca­tions (a move I advo­cated and am grate­ful for, because it’s the right place for this posi­tion to be situated).

• MM:

What would you be doing oth­er­wise, and what were you doing before?

• DL:

I’d def­i­nitely be work­ing on the web, no escap­ing that. Before this, of course, I was attend­ing col­lege (at Biola).

• MM:

Share a lit­tle about your faith?

• DL:

I grew up in a Chris­t­ian home and in a very priv­i­leged area (Santa Bar­bara). In junior high, I went through a dark period (who didn’t, right?) and for the first time real­ized the empti­ness of life apart from God. My youth pas­tor at the time was a pas­sion­ate believer and the way he lived his life was a pow­er­ful exam­ple of God’s redemp­tive work and love for us. Still, I wouldn’t say I really had a true per­sonal and liv­ing faith until I started attend­ing Biola and grap­pling with truth and com­mu­nity. That’s when I knew I not only needed God’s grace, but wanted to fol­low Him with all that I am.

At this point in my life, I’m find­ing myself more and more often just being amazed by God. I’ve been read­ing through the Old Tes­ta­ment a lot more over the last three to four years, and, man!, that has been an awe­some cat­a­lyst of growth. I was always bored by the OT when I was a kid, or won­der­ing what the point was and just want­ing to read the New Tes­ta­ment. I was miss­ing a ton! It’s incred­i­ble, exhil­a­rat­ing, and mind-​boggling how God so clearly illus­trates his ulti­mate plan of sac­ri­fic­ing his Son for our sake through­out his­tory. I know few things more strongly than this, that I will never cease to learn from the Bible, no mat­ter how long I’m on this earth.

• MM:

What are the ben­e­fits and chal­lenges of work­ing as an in-​house devel­oper? At a uni­ver­sity? At a Chris­t­ian university?

• DL:

Good ques­tion. There are some great obvi­ous pluses: con­sis­tent pay­check, great work ben­e­fits (vaca­tion time, 401k, med­ical and den­tal), sta­bil­ity and peace of mind. But it’s much more than that. I work in an incred­i­ble depart­ment filled with peo­ple that make me happy to come to work every day. Work­ing at a uni­ver­sity means that I work pretty much on the same site, or net­work of sites, all the time which can be a lit­tle repet­i­tive. But there’s also a broad range of con­tent and audi­ences too, so it keeps things inter­est­ing and challenging.

IMC has the rare bless­ing (within the uni­ver­sity world) of hav­ing the mar­ket­ing respon­si­bil­ity for the entire orga­ni­za­tion. On the down­side, that means a lot can go wrong and there’s the poten­tial for clients to become dis­grun­tled because they have to work with us. But the impor­tance of con­sis­tent brand­ing and expe­ri­ence can’t be overstated.

And finally, this is a strong, evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian uni­ver­sity, so work­ing here is in part a min­istry and a con­stant moti­vat­ing fac­tor for me to do my best work. Biola’s mis­sion is equip­ping men and women in mind and char­ac­ter to impact the world for the Lord Jesus Christ, not to sell more prod­ucts or increase share prices. That’s huge.

The main chal­lenges … well I have to be hon­est, because it’s a uni­ver­sity, there’s always going to be the pos­si­bil­ity of a lesser stan­dard of qual­ity. It doesn’t have to be like that, but the envi­ron­ment makes it a lit­tle eas­ier for it to hap­pen. Just look at how my career here began: for the first two or three years I was mak­ing it up as I went along, basi­cally learn­ing on the job.

When I started read­ing the blogs of guys like Jeremy Keith, Dan Ceder­holm and Andy Budd, my eyes were opened to a whole new world. I decided to get seri­ous and learn how to excel at my craft (even if it meant re-​learning every­thing I thought I knew). My boss at the time didn’t know any­thing about what I did, or how I should be doing it bet­ter. I think that’s com­mon­place in an orga­ni­za­tion that’s not commercially-​driven.

The other huge chal­lenge is not hav­ing full con­trol over what we’re respon­si­ble for (the web­site). IT has his­tor­i­cally con­trolled “the com­puter” which started out being just one or a few com­put­ers and now is the stan­dard com­puter setup for fac­ulty & staff, and the servers, includ­ing the web servers. IT doesn’t really under­stand what the web is all about, and still views this whole inter­net thing in terms of “appli­ca­tions” (which all too often means some­thing as sim­ple as a con­tact form) and “look and feel.” So we’re locked out of some pretty crit­i­cal areas. It’s under­stand­able and it’s a process, but it can still be extremely frustrating.

• MM:

Describe your biggest work accom­plish­ment, and failure?

• DL:

I’ll go with the redesign of Biola Under­grad for my biggest work accom­plish­ment. It was a com­plete redesign and I’m very proud of the final prod­uct. It was the first site we’d done that was built on web stan­dards. It’s not per­fect but I like to think it’s pretty darn close, all things considered.

It also helped us estab­lish some other stan­dards, like form markup and behav­ior. It’s a close call though because we just relaunched the main biola​.edu, and we’re going to be con­vert­ing the entire site over the next year. So that’s going to be a pretty big thing if we succeed.

Biggest fail­ure: I spent a lot of time a num­ber of years ago try­ing to build a slew of con­tent man­age­ment tools for my divi­sion and beyond. It was well-​intentioned but doomed to fail­ure. Some are still in use, but I think I could have used my time bet­ter (espe­cially if it meant I learned about web stan­dards earlier).

• MM:

The new redesign of the Biola Uni­ver­sity under­grad­u­ate site is quite a bold depar­ture from prior designs, and other uni­ver­sity sites in gen­eral. Your blog post said, “I’m also pretty cer­tain that there isn’t another uni­ver­sity web site like this out there.” You could say that again.

• DL:

I’m pretty cer­tain there isn’t another uni­ver­sity web site like this out there!

I’ll take a minute here to credit the peo­ple behind it. So much of this is due to the work of the out­side design­ers who came up with the print design, one of whom is Jes­sica Nel­son (who now works for us at Biola), as well as my cre­ative direc­tor, Brian Miller, who led the project. Tim Beard­s­hear is the web designer who trans­lated the design onto the web, so I can’t say enough about his work. And finally, the clients for the project, Josh Smith and Andre Stephens in Under­grad Admis­sions. These are some of the peo­ple I’m proud and lucky to work with.

• MM:

The site earned sev­eral awards, includ­ing the front pages of Style­gala and CSS Remix. Any other awards?

• DL:

We’ve got­ten a lot of men­tions across the web, which has been really neat to see. Vit­a­min men­tioned the site in their “best sites of the week” recently too. The print cam­paign has received CASE and Admis­sions Mar­ket­ing Report awards.

• MM:

How did the unique illus­tra­tion style come about, and how was it shep­herded through the university’s stake­hold­ers? Why did it take two years? Any­thing you would do differently?

• DL:

Our mar­ket­ing and admis­sions teams con­ducted a full year of research, includ­ing sur­veys, inter­views and focus groups, to get valu­able insight into design pref­er­ences, con­tent pre­sen­ta­tion, etc. One of the styles pre­sented dur­ing the focus groups was this photo illus­tra­tion style, and it quickly became a clear pref­er­ence for the stu­dents. The pro­duc­tion phase then took another year for the print and the web site (with the excep­tion that I had started work­ing on what would become the per­son­al­iza­tion sys­tem dur­ing that first year).

• MM:

What suc­cess cri­te­ria were selected, and what were/​are the results?

• DL:

CSS show­cases around the web, we were also see­ing very low bounce rates on the Under­grad home page

• MM:

• DL:

Thanks! Now web stan­dards and acces­si­bil­ity is the norm in our office.

Note: Part 1 of 2. Part 2 will be pub­lished next week.

This arti­cle is © Mont­gomery 2007. Some rights released with a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-​NonCommercial-​ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Also pub­lished at God­bit.