One question that often arises early in the process is whether the same CMS should be used for the website and intranet, or whether two solutions should be deployed.

Historically, this question was often driven by a desire to reuse the public-facing CMS for the intranet. These days, the question is equally likely to relate to reusing the intranet solution (such as SharePoint) for the website.

While there are advantages to having a single solution, this is not a ‘slam dunk’ option as this article will explore.

[May article, read the full article]

Style guides are a great way to ensure user experience consistency when developing an application and a way to communicate user experience standards across an organization. They can be application specific, platform specific, and may encompass enterprise-wide standards. A style guide can help make the development of user interfaces more efficient and help ensure good user interface design practices.

Secondly, you need to make problems tangible, so they can be understood by executives who generally have little understanding of the web. Top management is often where the strategy has to be signed off, and if you are asking for more resources you will certainly need to show what difference you will create for the organisation. Often, web managers will focus too much on low level problems and technical details that are irrelevant to others.

While basic metadata is routinely captured by most publishing tools, including content management systems and portals, there is still widespread confusion about its uses and limits.

Common questions include:

• How important is metadata?
• What metadata should we be capturing?
• How is it created?
• Where and when is it used?
• Should we be implementing simple or complex metadata?

This article explores the fundamentals of metadata, as it relates to common intranet and website needs.

Standard metadata fields will be explored, and advice given on how to use metadata successfully, within typical organisational environments.

(October KM Column, read the full article)

Yet, for its lack of visibility, content migration is often the single biggest activity in a web redevelopment. Certainly it is the least interesting, and unfortunately unavoidable.

This article explores a number of options for the migrating content, and provides some practical suggestions that should help it to go smoothly.

Redeveloping a site

Two factors often drive the redevelopment of a website or intranet:

• Moving to a new technology platform, such as a new content management system (CMS) or portal package.
• Redesigning the site, either to address the weaknesses in the current site or to add significant functionality.

Often these two factors are bundled together, with a technology selection process combined with a redesign.

In either case, there is a need to migrate the content from the old site to the new site. This is not a simple process.

A change in technology platforms makes the migration challenging, as does a major restructure or redesign of the site.

Unfortunately, there is no option for avoiding the migration, and careful planning will be required to get the best outcome.

[July KM Column, read the full article]

Usually, where universities come from is the same: academia was among the early adopters of the nascent technology and many ventured out on the web in the early nineties. With the archipelago of departments, institutes, faculties, over a decade many managed to produce hundreds of thousands or sometimes millions of published web pages. Often using different styles, editors, webservers, then CMS tools — it’s not uncommon to find hundreds of (sub)domains within a single institution.

We’ve been doing a lot of work with universities over the last year or so, and have observed all of the same issues and challenges. After a while, we worked out that universities are uniquely challenging environments because they are the only place that doesn’t have a shared sense of corporate identity. You don’t work for the university, you work for the School of Dentistry.

We’re now seeing university web strategy projects as a piece of organisational change, not as “create a document” projects. I think there’s some valuable progress to be made via this approach, but we’re still in the early stages of exploring what it means in practice…

Yet, despite all of this opportunity for change, the simple rule of thumb is that the new site will be at best 20% different from the current site.

There are fundamental reasons for this, which will be explored in this briefing. The implications of the rule for the design and technology aspects of the project will also be discussed.

New ideas

‘Blue sky thinking’ explicitly provides scope for rethinking the purpose and design of the site, allowing radically new approaches and ideas to be considered. Even without this, any site redesign allows for some reconsideration of how the site is designed and delivered, along with a concrete opportunity to implement these changes.

When the underlying technology is also being changed (such as installing a new content management system), the opportunity for change is even greater. High ambitions combined with an opportunity for reworking the site, can generate the desire for significant site changes, such as:

• Reworking the entire site as a ‘web 2.0′ platform, where content will be actively provided by users.
• Reworking the static CMS-based intranet into a dynamic, personalised portal that will target information to specific staff roles.
• Creating a dynamic, data-driven website that will use user profiles to deliver targeted information and functionality.

These three examples have been drawn from real projects. While desirable in vision, such ambitious goals will always need to be tempered into a concrete scope for the project, and into a clear design for the site.

[CM Briefing 2007-14, read the full article]

Last night I presented my talk on intranets at the Sydney Web Standards Group meeting. I spoke about the topic of two of my recent posts, namely web developers have the power and intranets: the beast we love to hate. In a nutshell, I covered these points…

At the end of the day, creating and maintaining websites and intranets is about communication, not technology. In order to succeed, and to have yourself heard, you need to be open to discussions with your fellow team members. You need to share the wealth of your expertise and you need to interface with all the different parts of the business.

Each of these dynamic Help systems for Web forms has its distinct advantages and disadvantages. As with all design decisions, an understanding of user needs and business goals should inform which of these dynamic Help systems is right for your Web forms. If you’ve used other types of dynamic Help on Web forms, please let me know, so we can extend this list of options.

The runaway successes of YouTube, MySpace, and Flickr have completely changed the landscape of design. One huge change is the rise in socially-enabled web applications, applications that connect users in new and more explicit ways. Witness the trend of “going social” on news sites, where they give their community the ability to comment on and even participate in the news. The design team behind the USAToday.com web site, for example, recently enhanced their site with new social features including comments, reviews, discussion forums, and the ability to make recommendations. Just this past week ABCNews did the same.

So what are the core benefits of making this change? Why invest in social features?

The new WIPA site was launched today.

The recently established Web Industry Professionals Association (WIPA) aims to foster the development of the Web Industry in Australia and provide forums where people who work in all the different facets of the industry can come together and exchange ideas.

Australian web professionals can now join WIPA through the new site.

WIPA is not just for one web practice or section of the industry. WIPA is for all web professionals in Australia including, designers, content writers, information architects, usability and accessibility specialists, web developers, interface developers, online content producers etc. In short, anyone who works in the business and who has an interest in discussing, promoting and improving the work we do.

WIPA is a not for profit association incorporated in NSW. Although the incorporation is in NSW, the association is committed to promoting and representing the work of web professionals throughout Australia. As a clear demonstration of this commitment, the Association Rules provide for representation on the Management Committee from all States and Territories with more than 5 WIPA Members. Also, the position of Vice-President is reserved for a person who does not live in NSW. The current WIPA Management Committee has members from the ACT, NSW and Victoria.

There is a variety of other web-related groups in Australia including, the Web Standards Group, Usability Professionals Association, Oz-IA, AWIA, Mobile Monday and AIMIA. WIPA aims to work cooperatively with all other groups in helping to develop a cohesive and sustainable web industry in Australia.

For more information about WIPA and to join the association visit
wipa.org.au.

These two elements reflect the underlying issues that typically drive web projects: the problems with the structure and content of the published site, and issues with the management and publishing of the site.

The temptation can be to select a single provider to deliver both the redesign of the site and the underlying CMS. This would, however, be a mistake. Instead, organisations are almost always better served by separating out the design and the CMS, and sourcing these from different providers.

Website redesign

The primary reason for the website project is that the current site is broken. Typical issues include poor site structure, dated design and out of date content.

To address this, organisations should follow a user-centred design process. This involves applying a range of usability and information architecture techniques, such as card sorting and usability testing.

[CM Briefing 2006-18, read the full article]

With so many form elements to choose from, each with distinct advantages and disadvantages, it can be difficult to decide which elements to use in a given situation. Use radio buttons, checkboxes, and select boxes appropriately: for radio buttons or checkboxes, use the “fieldset” and “legend” tags to group the elements logically under an obvious heading. This grouping keeps the form manageable to users, as it can be broken down into smaller pieces in their minds.

Most usability professionals don’t have a driver’s licence to web servers and are not aware of the steps that can be taken to make servers behave in a user-friendly way. In this article, we’ll take a look at how to avoid that server technology becomes an obstacle to usability.

[Thanks to InfoDesign.]