johnhendron.net: hendron’s digest - a weblog

I’ve been thinking a lot about school websites. This summer I began an ambitious project to “overhaul” our school division website. The look won’t dramatically change, but hopefully the end-user experience will. I know in sweating now, I’ll be sitting “pretty” later.

Why? I’m building a content management system for our website. This means instead of editing HTML or PHP documents by hand like I do now, a wide variety of people will be able to log-in, enter their information, and see it instantly appear online in some good-looking pages.

I’m not building it from scratch, but instead I’m custom-engineering the system using ExpressionEngine (website). The product isn’t perfect, but it is good, and as I continue to learn about all it can do, I’m more and more amazed.

So, my project is concerned with providing more and better access for our folks to be able to publish online. It’s about keeping “track” of news over time. And with features like self-sign-up mailing lists, it should be more interactive, too.

But this obsession of mine over school websites is not new. It was approaching five years now since I began my work on “Operation Desconstruction,” where I did some research on Virginia school division websites and how they faired.

My ultimate conclusion was that schools were ill-prepared for making great websites. Today, that climate has hopefully improved, and hopefully more research should be done.

What I see a lot are districts who are buying services to control their websites, and you likely know some of the names, such as School Center, Whipple Hill, etc. The idea is a great one, from a business stand point. But it’s also bad for a number of reasons, all specific to the vendor you buy from.

What I’ve found, in general, is this:

• You’re buying a cookie-cutter design,
• It’s easy (like I hope my system will be) to log in and add content,
• The web URLs are notoriously unfriendly and long
• Despite buying the product to “solve” the web “problem,” so many sites are unkept.

The one that gets me is this: the web portals/sites you buy are no better in terms of XHTML compliance or usability or accessibility than many that folks have made themselves. Instead, they’re offering content management (good) and a prettier front end. But in the end, does that constitute a better website?

I’ve long held that a better website does not stand upon proprietary technologies, is current and up-to-date, and visually well-represents the stakeholders. Back in the article I wrote, I quoted Jeff Johnson from his 2003 book, Web Bloopers.

“Developing and maintaining a website canbe expensive. Individuals and small organizations don’t have much money to spend on Web development, so it isn’t surprising when their sites contain bloopers”

Yet, the solution when buying a canned service is not fully resolved. The schools still need to provide content. And I think its unforgivable that their templated designs still contain bloopers. Some of these same ones appear in the examples I cite. I wrote back in 2003:

The results of research on Virginia school division websites revealed that a majority of sites fail to follow the advice of usability experts and are inaccessible to users with disabilities and those using non-traditional browsers (and not simply because they use Flash or PDF).

I think a follow up should examine whether or not the sites are done “in house,” with a management system (free or paid), or with a contracted service. It would be nice to see if the cost of a system (if used) improved usability and accessibility. Another thing to examine would be the timeliness and accuracy of the data shared on the division’s website.