Jul 20 2007

Biola University: Redesigned Undergrad Website

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).

Biola undergrad redesign - photo illustration

  • 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).

Biola undergrad redesign - Academics - photo illustration

  • 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.

Comments Off | posted in Interviews, Web

Feb 15 2007

A Reading List for Web Designers

Update: Thanks to Mithrill, you can now down­load this entire list, in OPML for­mat. Many feed read­ers will then allow you to import the whole list in one step. Down­load: God­bit read­ing list (OPML, 28kb)

“Have some RSS; it’s good for you.”

“What’s RSS?”

These are times that demand we learn and grow, just to keep up. So many excit­ing things are hap­pen­ing in the web design com­mu­nity, that it’s hard to know where to start.

As the amount of inter­est­ing con­tent on the web increases, a bunch of peo­ple ask the same question:

Ques­tion: “How can I access, read and man­age all the con­tent I want, from all these web­sites, in one orga­nized place?”

Answer: All that con­tent pump­ing out of each site can be pack­aged in a “feed.” The feeds from all the sites you’re inter­ested in can be man­aged, orga­nized and read with a “feed reader.”

In other words, using a feed reader is like hav­ing your own cus­tomized, auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ated news channel.

RSS Readers

There are lots of dif­fer­ent feed readers. Some feed read­ers may be inte­grated in desk­top soft­ware, such as your browser or your office pro­duc­tiv­ity suite. Other feed read­ers are freely avail­able online:

In any event, the one I use and rec­om­mend is Newshutch:

What to read?

This is a list of RSS feeds, which is based on the feeds that I read, on top­ics includ­ing the church online, pho­to­shop, web design, etc.

By the way, under­stand that the term “RSS” in itself is a lit­tle ambigu­ous, since a feed can con­form to any one of sev­eral dif­fer­ent stan­dards, some of which have dif­fer­ent names. For sim­plic­ity, the term “RSS” in this arti­cle will refer to all types of feeds generally.

Add to the list

This arti­cle is an exper­i­ment here at God­bit, in that arti­cles are usu­ally writ­ten once, with a lim­ited time period for comments.

Instead, dur­ing the com­ment­ing period, I will update this list based on your input, so that the RSS Read­ing List can be a resource for all.

So, if you have an RSS feed of your own, or one that you read and rec­om­mend, let us know in the comments.

Resource: RSS Read­ing List

Church

Comics

CSS Showcase

Get­ting Things Done

God­bit

Mag­a­zines

  • Note:

My Host

Pho­to­shop

Pop­u­lar Blogs

Web Design

Web Design: Accessibility

Web Design: CSS

Web Design: DOM Scripting

Web Design: Events

Web Design: Infor­ma­tion Architecture

Web Design: Jobs

Web Design: Podcasts

Web Design: Textpattern

Web Apps

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

Also pub­lished at God­bit.

Comments Off   |  tags: | posted in Web, Web Standards

Dec 18 2006

Have a Mint!

Add me to the long list of Mint fans.

The site is excel­lent in almost every way, from design, aes­thet­ics, color, theme, typog­ra­phy, archi­tec­ture, and experience.

The Server Com­pat­i­bil­ity Suite is a very nice touch, allow­ing me to test whether my server meets the require­ments before pur­chase. Like­wise for the live Demon­stra­tion site.

The pur­chase process was easy, the down­load and instal­la­tion were well-​explained and pro­ceeded with­out problem.

The price for per­for­mance and fea­tures is well worth it, and most impor­tant, the client is delighted.

Comments Off   |  tags: | posted in Web

Sep 17 2006

Internet Explorer 7

Seven Things To Do When IE7 Is Released

Inter­net Explorer Upgrade:

Some­day soon, Microsoft is going to release Inter­net Explorer 7, their first major browser upgrade in five years. Those in the inter­net busi­ness have antic­i­pated it for a while now, dis­cussing and scru­ti­niz­ing it. If you don’t fol­low the lat­est inter­net events, you may won­der what I’m talk­ing about.

Back­ground:

Inter­net Explorer (IE) is the browser with the most mar­ket share, about 94% in mid-​2004 and slowly descend­ing to about 80% or less today. More infor­ma­tion on browser trends and sta­tis­tics is avail­able. IE’s strong show­ing is mainly due to default instal­la­tion on every new Win­dows PC, and being the default browser for the AOL ser­vice.

“…the IE ren­der­ing engine runs pretty rough in spots”

How­ever, web design­ers and devel­op­ers have long objected that it dis­plays web pages incor­rectly, in con­flict with the W3C spec­i­fi­ca­tions. In other words, the IE ren­der­ing engine runs pretty rough in spots, so bad that there’s almost a cot­tage indus­try pro­duc­ing and doc­u­ment­ing tech­niques for fix­ing or “patch­ing” these problems.

The web indus­try is so inter­ested in IE7 that there are detailed dis­cus­sions about the small­est details, includ­ing whether a par­tic­u­lar bug will be fixed, exactly how IE7 will be released, etc.

The good news is that the IE7 ren­der­ing engine fixes all kinds of bugs and other things, mak­ing it quite a capa­ble browser on par with its competition:

Inter­net Explorer 7 … includes improve­ments in per­for­mance, sta­bil­ity, secu­rity, and appli­ca­tion com­pat­i­bil­ity. Microsoft has also made enhance­ments to the fit and fin­ish of the user inter­face, com­pleted CSS plat­form changes, added lan­guage support, ….

On the other hand, many peo­ple argue that catch­ing up is insuf­fi­cient.

Seven Things To Do:

So, if you use Inter­net Explorer, here is a list of things to do when IE7 is released:

1. Do noth­ing. (or Install IE7.)
2. Check out the new inter­face.
3. Pro­ceed with cau­tion.
4. Enjoy new fea­tures.
5. Learn old fea­tures.
6. Surf with secu­rity.
7. Say good­bye to IE6.

1. Do noth­ing. If your oper­at­ing sys­tem is Win­dows XP, and you sub­scribe to the auto­matic updates fea­ture, IE7 will be dis­trib­uted as a “high-​priority update”. This means that when the final ver­sion is released later this year, it may auto­mat­i­cally down­load and upgrade itself for you.

The rea­son it’s being dis­trib­uted auto­mat­i­cally is the added secu­rity improve­ments, and it will hope­fully improve your inter­net expe­ri­ence greatly.

If your PC doesn’t auto­mat­i­cally install it, let’s edit that first step:

1. *Install IE7 Don’t hes­i­tate. Don’t even think about it. Just do it.

IE7 interface

2. Check out the new inter­face. IE7 sports a whole new look and feel. The inter­face is pret­tied up and cleaned up:

Sim­ple is good. A redesigned, stream­lined inter­face gives you more of what you need and less of what you don’t. The new look max­i­mizes the area of the screen that dis­plays the webpage.

3. Pro­ceed with cau­tion. You may be aware that the abil­ity of IE ver­sion 6 and below to ren­der web pages accord­ing to the “W3C spec­i­fi­ca­tion”: was … less than opti­mal. Again, the good news is that a whole lot of those ren­der­ing bugs are fixed with IE7.

The not-​so-​good news is that mil­lions of web pages were built to over­come those bugs, which will dis­ap­pear in IE7. So, please real­ize that some of those pages may look a lit­tle funny after you upgrade to IE7. Some things will be too big or too lit­tle, or shifted out of place, or even over­lap some­thing else.

Don’t worry, web design­ers are already busy test­ing and tun­ing their sites to accom­mo­date, and every­thing will set­tle down quickly.

4. Enjoy new fea­tures, such as:

  • Browser tabs, which allows you to open mul­ti­ple sites at once, each in a sep­a­rate tab of the same browser win­dow. You can also see thumb­nail images of all open tabs in a sin­gle view.
  • Sub­scribe to your favorite sites, includ­ing news and blogs. These sub­scrip­tions often use a tech­nol­ogy called RSS, which means “Really Sim­ple Syndication.”
  • Improved print­ing options, includ­ing auto­mat­i­cally shrink­ing text for a bet­ter fit on a printed page, cus­tomiz­able page lay­outs, head­ers and foot­ers, and print space.

Search box

Search the Inter­net directly from the browser frame using your favorite search provider with the instant search box.

  • More real estate. The inter­face ele­ments, called “browser chrome,” includes the menu bar, sta­tus bar, and tool­bars. These ele­ments are smaller in IE7, leav­ing more avail­able space for web page content.

5. Learn old fea­tures, such as:

  • Hover that mouse. Since most peo­ple don’t read the help files, point your mouse at any­thing you don’t rec­og­nize. Don’t click it imme­di­ately, but just hover there. In a sec­ond or two, a lit­tle hint may pop up, telling you what that thing does. (This won’t hap­pen every­where, but can be helpful.)
  • Learn the key­board. It’s time to learn a faster way. You’re wast­ing time, every time your hand leaves the key­board to grab the mouse. Learn what the “tab” key does (and the “enter” key, too), and the other key­board shortcuts.
  • Right click. A use­ful tip, almost always. When­ever you don’t know how to do some­thing, or what some­thing does, or how to do some­thing with a par­tic­u­lar thing, point at it and right-​click that mouse. A menu will pop up, and it will be dif­fer­ent depend­ing on what­ever you’re point­ing at. It’s as if the browser’s try­ing to antic­i­pate what you might want, even if you don’t know what you want.

Note: Cur­rent browsers (includ­ing IE6) already do this. But many peo­ple don’t know, so it’s news to the aver­age person.

6. Surf with secu­rity. Secu­rity is sup­posed to be a pri­or­ity in IE7. Hope­fully their efforts at mak­ing Inter­net Explorer more secure will “just work.”

Phishing alert

Speak­ing of secu­rity, IE7 has a new secu­rity fea­ture which tries to alert you of pos­si­ble phish­ing sites. The term “phish­ing” refers to crim­i­nals who want to “go fish” for your pri­vate information.

7. Say good­bye to IE6. And don’t look back.

In the mean­time, bet­ter browsers are available

Alter­na­tively, you don’t need to wait for IE7 to get a bet­ter browser now. There are sev­eral excel­lent choices:

  • “Get Firefox”:http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/.
  • “Opera”:http://www.opera.com/
  • “Flock”:http://www.flock.com/

Lots of good browsers out there. Most of them tuned up their ren­der­ing engines a long time ago, and have dif­fer­ent fea­tures and benefits.

An amus­ing dis­cus­sion about browser choices, in the form of a hypo­thet­i­cal “per­sona” who chooses each browser, tries to answer: What does your browser reveal about you?

Which to choose for now? I rec­om­mend Fire­fox, to every­one who will listen.

Con­clu­sion

There’s a lot of excite­ment about IE7, and for good reason.

In sum­mary, the sit­u­a­tion is fairly sim­ple: IE6 is essen­tially obso­lete, and IE7 is much bet­ter. (But other browsers may already be there.)

This arti­cle is © Mont­gomery 2006. Some rights released with a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-​NonCommercial-​ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Also pub­lished at God­bit.

2 comments   |  tags: | posted in Web