MMP8: Getting Them to the Table, and Keeping Them There: Campus Web Redesigns

[Intro Music]

Announcer:  You’re listening to one in a series of presentations from the 2008 HighEd Web Conference in Springfield, Missouri.

Susan Evans:  Thank you all for being here.  I’m Susan Evans, I’m the Director of Web and Communications Services at the College of William and Mary.  Joel Patterson is my co-presenter and he is a Project Manager and Web Designer also at William and Mary.  We work in IT and we’re responsible for the college’s Web presence.  Additionally, we’re responsible for our campus portal and a lot of other Web-based communication and products and services that we offer to our campus. 

We are a public university, William and Mary is.  We’re located in Williamsburg, Virginia and we’ve been around since 1693, so we have a very long history, which is good news and bad news in a lot of cases.  We are mostly an undergraduate Liberal Arts institution, but we do have four graduate programs.  We have a Law School, we have a Business School, we have a School of Education and we have a School of Marine Science.  So between our undergraduate population and our grad students, we have about 7,000 students on our campus.

We officially kicked off our Web redesign in February of 2007 and we’ve launched the college’s main Web presence on July 31st, 2008 at about 11:38 in the morning.  And we launched a new website for the Law School on September 30th.  And we launched a new website for our graduate School of Marine Science on Monday of this week and we were here.  Two of us were back in Williamsburg so they handled that launch. 

But between now and the end of August we will have all William and Mary websites and all graduate and professional schools using the same content management system.  Using a set of custom designed Web templates for the College of William and Mary.  So for once, we’ll have an integrated Web presence with all of our websites playing in the same sandbox so that’s pretty exciting.

I thought we’d start off right away and let you know what we’re not going to talk about during this presentation.  We have a lot of ideas and suggestions that you might find useful related to finding a consultant for your Web design.  We used mStoner, which is a consulting firm out of Chicago.  We have a lot of ideas about getting great copy for your site, buying a content management system and even deploying Cascade Server which is a CMS that we’ve purchased. 

But we’re not going to talk about any of those things during our presentation.  Joel and I are going to stay after and we’ll entertain any questions you have about that.  And we may even have time in the Q and A for that.  But these are the kind of topics that we think usually get talked about when folks do a Web design.  What usually doesn’t get talked about is the communication that is required to do these things.

It was mentioned there are some handouts in the back.  We’ve got some samples of some things we used.  We have a communication plan we put together, a feedback form that we use when we were getting design feedback from folks on our campus.  And we did spend a fair amount of time on the handout that is in this bound thing here.  So there may be some ideas and suggestions that we don’t talk about in the presentation that you find in that handout.  So hopefully you’ll get a chance to look at that.

Before I talk about this slide, I do want to get a sense of is there anybody in the room that is getting ready to do a Web redesign?  OK, all right.  And how about somebody who’s already underway with one?  OK, all right.

One of the things we learned when we did this was that the Web redesign project was about 20% technology which is usually pretty interesting for folks sitting here since we’re IT people, and 80% not technology.  And we’re going to talk about the 80% today.  And usually when we say this to people they know exactly what we mean.  That they know we mean the 80% is the dean who doesn’t want to participate or the person who thinks we don’t need a new website or just any of the Web politics that go with keeping you from getting things done on your campuses.

And so, just to make sure that we’re clear though, I’m going to give you a few examples of what we think our 80% was.  And these are things we actually heard people say.  “I don’t like green.”  We found that there were a whole lot of professional Web designers on our campus that we were unaware of until we started our project.  Almost everyone is a professional designer we found. 

This is another great one we heard and you guys probably would hear it too, “Is the Business School going to be part of this Web redesign?”  “The font is too small.”  “I don’t want the College of William and Mary to appear on any of our Web pages.”  We have a pretty strong brand too which has always been surprising to me that folks would say that. 

And then these are my two personal favorites, “I don’t believe in Web communications”, said by a Director of Communications.  [Laughter]  Not the college’s Director of Communication, but one on our campus.  And another one, “Couldn’t you make that global navigation a little less obvious?”  [Laughter]  I explained that the point of it is.

OK.  So just so you know, that’s the 80% we’re talking about today.  We think that that 80% often stops a project, derails a project or at least keeps you from the getting the benefit of the 20% that you could get.  I mean a lot of the power that you can get from a content management system, a lot of the power you can get from everybody using the same Web presence is lost by that 80% sometimes.  So that’s why we think it’s so important. 

And why does the communication help with that 80%?  Well we think it helps you build momentum.  Getting things started in your campus is hard but once things get started inertia sets in by the people who don’t like it and then the momentum can take over.  So if you can get going with your communication and get some momentum going, that’s really positive. 

It helps you establish trust.  It helps people handle the change if you talk with them.  And it’s key for consensus and collaboration.  And these are all things we know.  It’s just like exercise.  We all know we should do it; it’s hard to do it everyday though.  And even though these seem like they make sense and you’re thinking, “Why didn’t I think of that?”  How often do we actually do these things when we’re doing a project by the way?

So what we’re going to do today is spend the first part of the presentation which should last around 25 minutes.  And I’m going to talk a little bit about the early communication that we did in laying the groundwork for our project.  And then Joel is going to talk about working the plan that we developed and the collaborative process that we used to get all of our decisions made and get people all onboard with the same goals.  And then we’ll spend some time with Q and A.  And we had several minutes the last time we did this, probably 10.  So hopefully we’ll have that this time too.

So part one, building consensus and understanding before the project is announced and creating a brand and committing to transparent communication.  People are distrustful of things that they don’t understand so it is important to explain to people what you’re trying to accomplish and what you’re trying to do.  Creating a brand for us, we call that our project “re.web” and I’ll talk a little bit more about that as we move on.

And then our campus, I don’t know about yours, but our campus had a long history of a communication strategy of not communicating.  And you would hear people who responds to the communication to say things like, “This has been decided and this has been announced.  I can’t give you a copy of this memo because then people would find out about it.” 

And so really, we really had a long history on our campus of that.  And when we first decided to start this project and when the Provost initially asked me if I would lead it, the thing that I said to him, “If we’re going to do it, we’re going to do this in a transparent way.  We’re going to tell people what we’re doing and we’re going to get people involved.”  And so our strategy from the very beginning was that we were going to have transparent communication.

When you get ready to do these sorts of things, when you think about these kinds of projects and sometimes they’re not even Web redesigns, they’re just campus wide initiatives like implementing ERP.  You can usually immediately come to your mind the folks who are going to be against it or the folks who are going to be positive about it.  And my guess is if you all closed your eyes right now and think about starting a project like this on your campus, you can quickly identify the three or four people that would be a pain in the neck from the beginning that you have to deal with.  And then you can probably identify the same number of folks on the other extreme, who would be very positive and supportive.

Now, what this means is you can’t call them and you can’t email them, that is not the kind of communication that you want to do in this vein.  You want to go and meet with them.  And in a time when we’re all using technology very efficiently, the power of personal visits is amazing.  I mean you don’t visit people that much anymore and they don’t visit you.  So if you call somebody up and say, “Hey, I want to come over to talk to you about something we’re getting ready to start.  We really need your help and expertise, really would like to see what your thoughts are before we announce this.”  Chances are, no matter how cantankerous, you’re going to be able to get in.

So that’s what we did.  We met with people individually; we told them what we were planning.  We started to describe why it might be something they’d like to participate in.  What we did not talk with them about was the fact that we already had a mandate from our Provost that everybody was going to participate.  I had a great executive sponsor in our Provost.  I did ask him not to tell anybody.  I said transparent communications and now I’m contradicting myself.  I did tell him that I wanted to do the communication, explaining the project and not tell everybody up front that they were going to have to do it because I felt like they might want to.  And I don’t know about you guys but the first time you tell somebody on your campus that they have to do something, they all run in the opposite direction no matter what it is that they might get out of it.

So there was only one unit actually that the Provost had to finally say, “OK, you guys are going to have to do this.”  So everybody else, we talked to them up front.  We didn’t talk to them about how complicated it was going to be or how hard it’s going to be because we felt like we could take care about that on our end.  And we didn’t try to get a commitment from them at that first meeting.  Now the positive folks were saying, “Yeah, we’ve been meaning to do this for a really long time so thanks for coming and letting me know.” 

And sometimes these things take more than one visit.  Our Law School Associate Dean who’s responsible for the Law School’s website, I started a meeting with him in December of 2006.  And he asked me in July of 2007 if they could participate effort and be part of the redesign.  And I said, “That would be great.  I would love it if you guys would participate.”

Our Business School, we have a Director of Marketing in our Business School.  I started talking with her in April.  I can’t remember exactly when she said this to me but she at one point said to me, “We’re going to do this.  I haven’t told our dean yet but I’m telling you we’re going to be part of this and I’ll tell the dean and we’ll be onboard.”

So it does take time but it’s basically good old fashioned schmoozing and talking to people about you’re planning.  I had a budget which is also really helpful when people think they’re getting something for it, that’s also really, really helpful.

The other thing that we did was did create a brand for our project.  We were doing what’s commonly called a Web redesign but we felt like we didn’t want to call it a Web redesign because we were doing a lot more than just the way it looked.  We were buying a content management system, we were completely changing our information architecture and we wanted to separate the front-end from the back end in a way that would make it more powerful for the future.  So we called it “re.web” because “re” means renew.  Again, we can talk about revitalizing, we’re renovating and give people the impression that it’s really more than the way it looks.

This gives people something to hang on too.  They can just say the re.web project, they don’t have to say, “The thing they’re doing.  They’re redesigning the website and they’re buying the CMS.  And we’re all going to have to use the same template and we’re going to have start new system.”  So it gives people to hang on too and inspires confidence.  Sometimes if things are named, they just seem more legitimate so that’s why we did this.  And it made our communication easier.  We had shorthand that we could use to describe the effort.

These little cards Joel designed and we had them all over the place on our campus to give people our project website.

Having a communication strategy and having a communication plan.  You need to plan how you’re going to communicate and we spent some time and that’s I think the sample handout that we gave to you as part of that communication planning.  We have a lot of options on our campus of ways to communicate.  I’ve been the IT Communication Officer for about six years so I knew most of the channels to get the word out because I was telling people when servers are going to be down so they’ll know it’s going to be changed.  So we started using all these communication channels.

The most important thing we did I think was that we started right away telling people what we were doing.  Another thing that I’ve seen happen a lot in higher ed is we say, “We can’t really communicate with them yet because we don’t know everything.”  And what happens when you don’t start communicating right away is people know that the project has been kicked off.  They know that they might not be on the advisory committee that you’ve put together and they start to fill the gaps in themselves.  So if no one tells them that we’re buying a new content management system and that the homegrown Web templating system that we’ve developed and they’ve been using for six years is going away, they make the worst case out of that.

So even though you don’t have all the answers right a way you should start telling them what you do know.  And it’s OK to say, “We don’t know what CMS we’re going to buy and we don’t know when we’re going to have our hands on that CMS.  And we don’t know exactly when we’re going to launch.”  And then you can turn it around and you can say, “What kind of features and functionality do you think you need in a CMS?”  So even though you don’t have all the answers it’s really important to start communicating what you do have and start discussions.

And so we went to a lot of presentations.  We talked to a lot of groups.  And every time we went to a group, we told them about all the other groups we already talked to.  We set up a blog which ended up being a really, really positive thing for us.  William and Mary, because we’re 300 years old, we’re kind of behind in times on some things, ahead of the times on others.  But an idea of a blog on our campus was pretty, pretty amazing.  It was not moderated, we had comments turned on, they weren’t moderated.  That turned out to be not problematic at all.  Joel’s going to talk about that more in this part. 

But we blogged probably on average three times a week and we kept the blog going from the time we started the pre-planning phase which was in November through July 31st when we launched the site.  And so that was a very positive and easy way, time consuming, don’t get me wrong, but it’s an easy way to get the word out to those.  And the weird thing was we didn’t realize this until we were about halfway through, is that it was educational for our campus because we were using the Web to communicate during a Web project.  So that was kind of cool.

That handout that we put together has some what we call little bits of genius that we’d like to tell you we thought ahead of time but they just kind of came to us as we were going through the project.  So hopefully this will be helpful to you.

And the last thing before I turn it over to Joel is that we invited people to participate on our RFP process.  We were searching for our consultant and we on-campus presentations from the three consultants that we had narrowed it down to.  And we invited lots of people in our campus and we tried to make sure we hit every – it’s kind of a Noah’s Ark thing where you get two by two.  You get one from Business and one from Law and one from Arts and Sciences and one from administration.  We got a lot of people in a room, they got to see the consultants.  They left thinking, “OK, these three consultants are great.  These guys know what they’re doing and we’re going to be OK.”  So that was another thing that we did early on.

I’m going to turn it over to Joel to talk more about executing the plan that we came up with and the collaborative process.

Joel Pattison:  Thank you.  Now I’m going to talk about how we started the project initially and laid the groundwork.  I’m just going to go through some of the milestones of the project and how we communicated each of those milestones. 

We officially kicked off the project in February but there were a lot of people – we kind of needed a campus kick off for the folks in our campus.  We did that in September of 2007 with a strategic planning.  We put a small focus groups all together, groups in admission, officers groups and faculty groups and students, groups and they met with our consultant mStoner. 

Before we did that, before we invited them even, we created individual Web pages of these groups.  So for faculty we created a little Web page that gives them background of the project.  It talks about strategic planning process and why it was important and why wanted them to participate.  We gave them some idea about how they were to participate, gave them some discussion points and questions that might be answered at strategic planning.  And it also said how they would be asked to participate in the future.

And when we invited them, we invented via email.  We sent them the URL to the special webpage that we created so right up front. they’re getting a very personal invitation to the project, very personal introduction to the project that says, “We want you to participate and here are some ways we’d like you to participate right now and here are some ways you can participate in the future.”

When they actually came to the strategic planning meetings, mStoner said generally these meetings go better if it’s just the consultant and the constituent and we’re not part of the process.  Kind of becomes this three way thing when we’re in the room. 

So we took their advice, I think that was fairly rare.  Mostly people want to be in the room.  But what we did do was we set up a green room or reception room where we had coffee, water and soda.  We had fruit, bagels and things for people and we invited them to come a few minutes early to talk to us.  So this was an opportunity to meet somebody face to face the first time and just talk about the project. Based on the project, begin building relationships because we figured if you feed people and give them some coffee they could only say they have to be kind of positive about that. 

[Laughter]

And we invited them to come back to talk to us after they came out of their strategic planning session with mStoner.  99% of the people came out of this planning session very, very happy, mStoner was great, that they would stay.  People were just thrilled and excited about the project for the most part.  But one or two people had some concerns and we were able to follow up with them because of the strategic planning process.  In some cases, we even visited them in their office a few days later just to make sure that they were OK.  And it allowed us to catch some things really early on so we wouldn’t have to deal with them later.

The result of this we had 180 people meeting with the consultants in four days.  We had all of our deans, all of our vice presidents participating.  We had about a dozen faculty, a dozen parents and students, the students are the hardest ones to get there and the parents participated as well.  So we had a really good turn out, really good participation and I think probably 90% or more of these people were kind of excited and geared up about the project after going through this process.

I’m also going to go through the strategic planning phase with regards to the design selection.  And I think this puts a knot in a lot of people’s stomach when you start talking about Web redesign because this is a hard thing to build consensus on.  And it is the notion as part of the process that people have all their personal opinions.  You have people present a lot of data on what goes on your personal opinions of how the design looks.

We decided pretty early on, we had an advisory committee which is part of this project.  That the committee would have a recommendation about the designing concept of the Provost and that’s how the decision would be made about the design.  We also knew we wanted to start building consensus and collaboration a long time before we got to that point.  We also had this idea that maybe we should make the big splash and big announcement, the three design concepts and not the actual final design choice itself.  And that idea proved to be a pretty important I think.

We started off the room with myself and Susan and the dean of admission, couple of other folks on the requirements and a couple of the designs.  We narrowed it down to three designs for our campus and then we have those designs “which is is actually our consultant mStoner.  And they asked questions like which of these designs make you think that there’s a lot going on in William and Mary?  Which of these designs make you want to visit William and Mary?”

The Provost was very up front. from the beginning.  He was well on what he said.  So when we presented the design concepts, we said we never created a vacuum.  We always said, “Here’s three design choices and here’s what our preferred audience thought of these choices.”  And we were presenting these across the campus like faculty members, to the administrators, communications and design professionals.  We said, “Here’s the designs and some data about the designs which you have to go on.”  So it helps keep the conversations focused on more than just things like the color green and that font I think looks weird because you have some data to focus on.

So we insisted on making it around on campus starting with small groups of people.  And we did that, we asked the questions which some of them you see on the screen.  We did not compare the designs.  We did not ask the people to compare the design concepts.  We did not ask people to vote on the design concepts.  We never used the word “vote”, “choice”, “democracy”, or anything like that.  We used something like this where we took the specials from mStoner where we said, “what does it think about William and Mary?”  And we tried to get everyone to say something positive about the designs and etc. and we also gave them an opportunity to say something if they had any concerns about the design concepts.  So that’s how we gathered feedback for these designs. 

And another thing we did which I think protected the integrity of our design choices which is important for the web designer.  Is we talked about using Frankenstein right from the beginning of each sessions and we got it from the consultant and say, “If there’s a problem concerning concept one we’ll fix design concept one but we’re not going to take pieces off design concept three and sew them one design concept one and create this hideous monster of a design.  That’s just not how a professional Web design is done.”

And if you say that after somebody has already suggested it, it sounds kind out defensive or it sounds like you’re putting them down.  If you can’t get there and say that in the beginning of the presentation or close to the beginning of the presentation. This is not the way you come up with a good, solid Web design.  And most of the time it never comes up.  People never stress it. 

So once we’ve kind of shared these with a lot of different small groups on campus, we posted all three design concepts to our blog on January 2nd.  There were many comments around campus.  We only jumped in and commented if they were gross misconceptions we needed to correct but for the most part we just let people do their thing and they have conversations about the design concepts.  Some people were very nice and some people were very nasty but we just let them go. 

We posted some revised design concepts on the blog and then on February 2nd we posted the final design choice.  And that’s actually how we announced the design choice to the campus is through our blog.  And when we did that we got two comments, they were “love it” and “great choice”.  That’s pretty much all we heard.  We heard from few people through email but for the most part it was kind of a subdued reaction and that was our goal.  I think the reason we chose to unveil three design choices and tried to build all the base support for all three choices.  We tried never to show partiality about it.

And I think that was important for two reasons.  One is if you’re a part of the process, if people are part of the process, it’s hard for them to criticize the project or the end result.  Some of them do it but it’s more difficult.  I think the other reason is the design choice like I said in the beginning isn’t really emotional where people have all these ideas about how serious we should look or how fun we should look.  There’s all these ideas about the institution and they kind of turn themselves out during the design selection process for that.  They get all that out of their system and we finally have a design choice and they’re like, “Oh yeah.  That was good.”  So I think the three design choices that made a big splash was really important to our success here.

The CMS selection process we also voted by the content management system as far as project.  And we chose to handle the selection process very much the same way.  It came after the design selection process.  We thought it was a successful process so let’s just kind of mimic it.  One thing that we did that was a little different is once we narrowed it down, we had some IT folks look at a lot of different products, narrowed it down to two products.  Because we had an independent consultant come in and do presentations for campus, this is not a vendor.  This is where our consultants came in.  And we wrote a script and we said, “First we create a new page in this one and then create a new page in this one." And image it and the impartial presentation coming out into the products.

We did feedback very similar to how we did the design concepts.  We didn’t ask people to compare, we didn’t ask people to pick their favorite.  We just said, “This CMS looks easy to use.  Rate it one to five.  This CMS was easy, rate it one to five.”  Things like that.  And once again we asked people to say something positive about the product.

Turns out we got all these feedback.  It was pretty much dead heat anyway so we still had to make a touch choice.  But when we finally did that we announced it through the blog and once again it was kind of a subdued reaction.  We did have some people say, “Oh shucks.  I wish you had chosen the other one” but that was about the worst of it.  I guess I should say that we did more than just these presentations.  I mean we went to talk to the person at the Law School who managed the Law School website.  So that’s not the only thing that we did but that was kind of how we handled the campus communication.

In the minds of the people on campus when this project started in the fall of 2007 and it finished up in the summer of 2008, July 31st.  And we announced the design concept on February and I think people where on the edge of their seat when we announced that design concept.  They were all thinking how this was going to look, what’s it going to look like.  Once you’ve done that people have become – you could lose some momentum if you’re not careful.

So we did the whole thing to try to maintain them through those months.  One way was look at Facebook and it wasn’t really students.  It was mostly faculty and staff.  And we gave them sneak peaks and told them some things on Facebook where we didn’t put anywhere else.  We didn’t put it on our public website.  We didn’t put on our blog.  We just put it on our Facebook group.  For instance in the Law School design concept.  We put it on Facebook 48 hours early and say, “Here’s a sneak peak of the Law School design concept.”  And I think people who joined this group were kind of the ones who were most interested in this project anyway.  I think it just caused them to feel connected in a way they may not have otherwise.

We did a lot of presentations through this time.  We did presentations to IT center folks which was about 100 people. Our past employees we did a presentation to the department Chairs of the Academic Department of Arts and Sciences.  And we just talked about the process, where we were going and where we were right now.

One thing I think we did that was important when we were meeting with faculty members, you’ll see in your handouts, is a sample faculty form.  Where we immediately, as soon as we got these in the faculty rooms and we passed out these forms and said, “Here’s a list of all the faculty members that are involved in this project from the very beginning.  And here’s their names, department and how they were involved.”  Because the faculty are very concerned, at least at William and Mary, about how faculty can be involved in this process.  So you kind of just answer that question right up front. by giving them this piece of paper that says, “Here are all the ways that we’re trying to involve faculty.”  And that kind of heads off a lot of questions they can ask right there.

Another thing we did when we were doing these meetings with people, is we logged individualized mock ups.  It takes a lot of time but I think it was worth it for a couple of reasons.  For instance, what I mean is using PS, I actually spend some time photoshopping to create a mock up of the student’s homepage and maybe even a landing page for the students.  Where I used their text and their pictures which make sense for them and put it in the design concept.  And we talked to them and said, “Here’s what your website might look like” It's not set in stone or anything, what it could look like.  And it got excited for people.  Forming the look of the college’s homepage and they go, “Yeah, that’ll be great.”  You could look at your own department’s website and the new look and it really starts to get the ideas flowing, get the juices flowing and people get excited.

It also helps set up expectations.  As Susan mentioned, we were kind of going from a situation where people can just do whatever they want on their website to a situation where a college will have a vibrant unified presence.  We have a standard navigation, standard layouts and things.  So people would see these and say things like, “So there’s going to be an “Admission” button on our website?” or Admission button on our website.  And we can say, “Yeah, that’s going to be on every one of the colleges’ website pages.  Or if colleges are going to have that.”

And I think the biggest difference there is that because we did these design mock ups, they found situation out in May, or in March rather.  May when we launched the site in July but I think it just gave them some more time to get used to this idea.  Understand that this isn’t the end of the world if there’s going to be this little navigation bar at the top of their website.  So just setting expectations really helps a great deal.

I know it’s a cliché but I’ll say a picture is worth a thousand words.  You can try to explain to people things.  You can say, “It had this box and going to have some pictures in it, a little text, a little scroll and all those.  You’re going to have something that looks like this.  And you can use two pictures of these, what would you like to say and what picture is going to be in it, where do you want it to go.”  So just visually show people things is much, much easier than trying to explain it in words – what this box is going to look like. 

This is the last thing of our communication plan.  It really wasn’t a plan, it was kind of a an end thing that we had at the very end but I think it was critical to the success of this project and that is stop communicating.  What I mean by that is of course we can be still blogging but we did slow down.  We blogged probably once a week or so because we started to actively remove ourselves from situations where people can raise their hand and say things like, “Couldn’t CMS do X, Y and Z” and it turns out X, Y and Z are these huge pieces they’re focusing on that no one’s mentioned to us before. 

So we decided to kind of actively take ourselves out of situations where people are going to ask things like that because we realized if you show someone a mock up, they expect they’re going to change that mock up even if you’re only six weeks away from launching the website.  If you say, “Here’s the mock up”, they know it’s not done so they think “Oh!”  They’ve got the red pen and start marking it up.  We can’t do that.

So we just realized there’s no real way to explain that to people.  They just have an expectation.  We’re not going to change it so we’re just going to try to withdraw ourselves from situations where that’s going to happen as much as possible.  There’s a blog entry that says – a website is like a term paper.  At some point you just have to brew your coffee and sit there and start writing it.  There’s only five people in our Web team at the time so it took everything we had to launch this website on time as it was.  So I think this was unexpected but really important thing that we did.

So all these communication points took a lot of work.  It was a lot of work so one of the pay offs I think – we did launch on time.  We launched within budget.  But even more than that I think we succeeded in creating a situation where people understood and respected the process and therefore they respected the results.  They didn’t necessarily agree with the results all the time.  People did come and say, “I wish you chose another designer.  I wish you chose another CMS.”  But for the most part they were very nice and really respectful about it because they understood that a decision was made by asking for help, a huge number of people helping with this decision.  It was transparent so they understood how the decision was made and therefore for the most part were very respectful on how we did this.

So even if they disagreed, they didn’t come bursting in our office saying, “How in the world did you go get this development?  Why did you do this?”  So that was really positive and another thing is did bring us all quite a bit into institution.  It’s good for the university to have some Web presence. It was also good for the team with all the hard work that we do.  And we produced a great deal of work.  We participated more in the strategic communication for the institution, it's a whole mountain, so it was good for us in college. 

Of course, the real proof is the website itself.  So this was the Web before and this is our homepage today.  This was the “News and Events” page before and the “News and Events” page today, the “Academics” page before and after the redesign.  Okay, we did do an all new information architecture and all the new copy and the old copy that we have.  And it certainly didn’t help us with our content development but embedding that copy and getting it approved by faculty members was a process probably as tenuous as the design process.  And Susan did that almost entirely her own so she can answer the questions that you have about that.  This is our CMS before and after.  And the final we put together with the tool, and today.  So that’s all.  If you have any questions or anything, please let us know.

Audience 1:  How did the administration communicate to the colleges that this is something that will be accepted by all?  You've seen where a college will present a redesign but then there are some colleges that would say, “Forget it.  We’re not with you.”  How did they go about communicating that? Are they consistent.

Susan Evans:  We didn’t have to communicate that.  They all wanted to participate.

Audience 2:  Can you repeat the question?

Susan Evans:  Sorry, yes.  The question was, I think, how did we get individual colleges and graduate schools to participate in this university wide effort instead of maintaining their own separate Web presences.  I mean these individual conversations that I had with deans and vice presidents at the beginning were telling them that we had a project underway.  That was going to redesign the William and Mary Web presence.  That I had a budget, that I had funding that I could use to bring the graduate and professional schools into that same Web project.

We did offer them complementary Web page designs.  They did not have to match William and Mary exactly but they had to have – we call them a sibling look.  We wanted them to have a sibling design so they had a custom homepage – Law, Education, Marine Science, grad school and Business.  And then their subpages also were identical to the colleges except for color scheme.

So there was only one, our Marine Science program was the only one that we had to finally say to them, they were about to go out and buy Contribute.  And once I knew they were about to go out and buy some software I said, “You guys don’t even know that we’ve been talking about this, we’ve got a budget.  We really want you to be part of this but you probably need to know that you’re going to have to do this.  So let’s go meet with the Provost.”  Because I didn’t want them to go out and spend money and then find out so I basically said to the Provost, “I’ve exhausted the depths of my charm with these folks.  And they’re not going to do it and they’re about to go spend money so we better tell them that this isn’t a choice.”

Audience 3:  Of the five people that were on the Web team, how much time I guess would you say was spent between those people in terms of over the entire life of the project?

Susan Evans:  It wasn’t bad in the beginning.  [Laughter]  No, I mean the way it started out was that we were going to have a lot of help from our University Relations colleagues and it ended up that we did not get a lot of that help.  So we ended up five of us on our team.  Now we did have a very active advisory committee that was very supportive.  But in terms of rolling up the sleeves and doing the work, it was five people. 

And the one real thing that I regret is that at the very end it was just way too many hours.  I would say the last eight weeks was probably, almost for everybody, seven days a week and more than an eight-hour day.  And we didn’t find out until early July, I said to our consultant something about our launching.  He goes, “Yeah.  People don’t usually announce the launch date.”  I was like, “What?” because I already had.  Mainly because you get to the point where you don’t want it to last any longer, I mean within two weeks ahead of the launch we knew we were going to launch something.  We didn’t know if we would have everything.  We ended up having everything.

So I would say the last six months for sure it was almost 100% everybody’s time.  But we have other responsibilities.  We have the campus portal; we managed the list servers for the college.  We do all the Web training.  We were still supporting our homegrown content management system and homegrown Web template systems.

Audience 4:  How people did you say were on your team?

Susan Evans:  Five.

Audience 5:  I have two questions.  First is that you had spoken towards redesigning for faculty and students as your primary audience.  We might do something similar where our primary audience was prospective students but generally speaking we’re talking about external audiences.  Some of the push back came from the campus community themselves and especially current students for example found themselves somewhat disenfranchised from the website.  First, talk about that just a little bit.

The second question that I’ve got is after you’ve done your central redesign and you move into the faculties and other areas on campus and you talk about the roles and others, do you put through the entire process again with central resources the same information gathering or information architecture, usability, process that you used?

Joel Pattison:  I think the first question was redesigned for external audience but how did our model stick to that and how we managed that.  Anyway, I was talking about strategic planning I said if we handled that issue.  Those were the issues.  Some people came in and found out this is redesign is really for prospective students.  And some of the internal departments were carrying this and were kind of disappointed by that.  So we made it very clear that we wanted this for everyone, for people that had worked everyday.  College as well.

I think part of it too is that our website before had not been updated in eight years.  It was in really bad shape.  It was really out of date.  It was not all in the top of the page, and you click for navigation you get a 404 page or you get a page that says, “New starting in 2006”.  So we launched this and we really liked this new site.  We’re really proud of our school and this site makes us proud of our school.  It has new photography, some stories about our college.  And I think it’s not too overt.  We try not to overt about it.  For the most part we took a U-turn.

Another thing we did was put at the very top you see this “information for, please select”.  If you roll over that you’ll get all these gateways.  These are gateways only for internal audiences and were just aggregation of links and information for our people.  I don’t know if I can be able to show you. We kept to that, we’re going to have this little spot just for internal folks right on our page.  And we had a little thing on that page is that this page is for you and if there’s anything you want us to put on here, if there’s anything you want us to do, you have a form to submit to.  So that’s another thing we plan to have.  Question two I’ll put it on to you.

Susan Evans:  Question two was did we go through the same process with – yeah.  What we did, we did strategic planning for each of the graduate and professional schools with their constituencies and small groups, bringing in their students and their faculty members.  And we had the same design choice process and we’ve done that already for all except Business, where we’ve just shown Business their homepage design concept that they’re going to be choosing from.  And we had the team, my team, got responsibility for the William and Mary Web presence just before we launched which is a good thing because we would’ve had a hard time not staying involved.

But anyway, we have committed as a team, and I’ve gotten two additional positions, that we’re going to use the same very high tech process with everybody else who’s left.  So we’ve got to get Education launched, we got to get Business launched.  We’ve got 35 departments in Arts and Sciences.  We’ve launched Psychology when we went live in July. We had been at the Arts and Sciences departments in the middle of October.  So we’re just going to systematically bring in, we finally counted, there’s probably almost 200 websites that we need to bring into the new design and we’re going to do it before the end of August.

So we’re going to meet with individual groups, talk about their IA, talk about their content, help them choose photography because people just –it’s too hard.  They can’t do it on their own, most of them.  And the people who think they can do it often can’t.  So we decided that this is the one point in time where we can say to somebody, “If you want to be part of this great, new, beautiful look, if you want to use this content management system, you need to rewrite your copy.  You need to reorganize your content.”  And we felt like we had that opportunity to go ahead and do it. 

Audience 6:  Can you talk a little bit about how it was facilitated.  What else they did and didn’t do?  How much did they bring accounting in?

Susan Evans:  Sure.  I think I can say that.

Audience 6:  And what might change?

Susan Evans:  Yeah.  One thing that surprised us is you learn an awful lot during the RFP process.  After you hear the pre-camp presentations and go though writing the RFP, you almost could stop and go, “OK.  We know what to do right now.”  And even had a couple of folks say to us, “Your team can do that without a consultant.”  But mStoner helped us with design, information architecture.  They handled all strategic planning.  They helped us with messaging on the site.  They helped us with the technical implementation in choosing the content management system.  We purposely wanted to hire a consultant that didn’t have a product so we separated those two out.  And they did write a lot of our top level copy which was a huge benefit.  It’s hard for people to figure out your way to the Web sometimes and if they can see an example, they can model that a lot easier than they can on their own.

If you don’t mind, let’s talk afterwards about the project budget.  I could give you a sense.  And the other thing we did from the RFP process, actually pre-RFP, we talked to a bunch of consultants.  They’re pretty good at telling you, based on the size of school you are, whether or not you have graduate programs, whether you want to buy a CMS, they’re pretty good at telling you what the budget is going to be.  And they were all right on the money about what we ended up spending.

Audience 7:  Did you factor SEO into this process?

Susan Evans:  Well if you consider the free Google search, yeah.  I mean it’s funny.  Our information architecture, well we didn’t really have one before.  Things were so bad that we’re just throwing everything away and get rid of a lot of the crap that was on our legacy Web servers.  And putting together an architecture that made sense and navigation that made sense.  And the search almost immediately, with the free Google search, was 10,000 or 100,000 times better.  Somebody on my team is probably better to answer that question but we’re going to continue to work towards improved search engine.

Host:  Thank you for a great presentation.

[Applause]

Announcer:  For more presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference visit HighEdWeb.org/2008 or sign up for our podcast and feed at HighEdWeb.org/podcast.xml

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