Web design

I recently had to do some research work and had to visit about a dozen Web community and higher ed Web sites. The higher ed sites were community colleges and small four year colleges. Uniformly, all the sites were quite bad. Basic information like street addresses and phone number were either missing or hard to find. Different parts of the sites looked different and had different navigation buttons in different locations. Many pages with the right titles lacked useful information in the body of the page.

The average size of a Web page has tripled in the past five years, on track with other studies that show demand for bandwidth has been tripling at about the same rate.

I visited two Web sites this morning that illustrate perfectly two problems that I write about frequently:

• The tyranny of IT departments.
• The tyranny of Web design firms

The first site I visited was a well-known educational software publishing house. I wanted to order a typing program for one of my kids. For the second time in the past six weeks, I went through the entire order process, only to have the final "procesing your order" screen sit there and grind away without ever finishing the order. I had tried to place an order back in July with the same results.

I picked up the phone and got a nice salesperson who took my order, but I added another item, and she had to put me on hold because her internal company sales system would not show the item. She first had to look on the Web to establish what the product was, and then had to go ask someone how to enter the missing product into the system. She also admitted that the company knew the Web site did not work; "they are working on it," she told me.

It's almost beyond belief. The Web site ordering process has been broken for at least six weeks? This is pretty simple stuff these days. Even more unbelievable is that the in-house system can't even show all their products, and they probably have less than a hundred total. Here's an idea--give your ordering folks a piece of paper with the product names and numbers on it so they don't have to waste time looking on the Web site for it.

This is tyranny of the IT department in its purest form. Everyone in that department should be fired--they are costing the company untold amounts of revenue while they fiddle around with their software. The only possible explanation is "IT bullies;" the IT folks have completely flummoxed the company with jargon, arcane technical mumbo-jumbo, and IT fiddle-faddle. The IT department is running the company, with disastrous results. The IT department serves the company, not the other way around. Companies do not exist to provide full employment and ever-increasing budgets to the IT staff, but many IT departments have managed to pull this off.

Community portals should be clean, simple, and easy to use. Jakob Nielsen, one of the top Web usability experts in the country, has a new column out on the importance of good, usable Web sites.

I see too many community portals that make the same mistakes Nielsen outlines.

• Flash animations and splash pages that provide little or no information about what is on the site. Who wants to sit and wait while a pretty picture downloads over a dial-up line, only to have to click to a second page just to do anything? You may love that picture with the panoramic view of the mountains, but it's the wrong thing to put on your home page.
• Overly complex menus and toolbars that offer too many choices to visitors. If you try to list every single thing in your town and every single organization on your home page, it overwhelms people and they often just move to another site.
• Using Web designers who just want to use your money to design a "portfolio" site to help them get their next job. These sites are easy to spot because they are visually busy with lots of widgets, gimmicks, too many drop down and pop up menus, and other eye candy that makes it difficult to navigate.
• Nielsen does not mention this, but I see this all the time--hiring novices to build the community portal. You would never have a junior in high school or a part time hobbyist design a fifty page, color book about your town, but when it comes to Web sites, it happens all the time, with predictable results. We saw the same thing in the early days of Pagemaker--suddenly everyone with a copy of Pagemaker was doing the company newsletter, with predictably ugly results. It's even worse with the Web, since you don't even need a copy of Pagemaker to claim you are an expert. When it comes to qualifications, "I did the site for Cub Scout Pack 238" is not adequate.

Your community portal is how the rest of the world learns about your community. You want to put your best foot forward, so that you attract Knowledge Economy businesses and entrepreneurs who will want your broadband and your great quality of life. If your community Web sites are the very best they can be, you are missing a lot of economic development prospects. Disclaimer: Design Nine helps communities design and develop high quality community and local government portals.