Nichole dropped me an e-mail after today’s meetup and asked:

I would argue that you could not make all sites look too much the same
because of how the sites are used and who the audience is.  For
example the audience and content of the library site is completely
different than ours.  Right? Wrong?

Certainly the overall needs of the site must dictate the look and feel. I feel I was pretty clear in saying that One size will not fit all.

But, there are major issues around our designs now that could gain some immediate benefit from some standardization: 

Logo Usage: Looking at the examples today you can point to a large variation of the same logo all saved at different qualities. Then comes the sub-branding issue, how should we be sub-branding ourselves. The University style guide gives some suggestions but from a web perspective these idea’s seem antiquated. Generally on the web we want to avoid create images whenever possible and instead use text so that the content can flow / scale more smoothly and be as accessible and searchable as possible.

By having our sites function more uniformly, we will be serving our users better by making the experience more familiar. I think the “Search Bar” is a good example to point at as something that works drastically different across our sites that might be benefit from a more uniform approach.

From a navigation standpoint, the red main nav bar is already a pretty standard piece, but why are we styling the elements differently inside them? These small inconsistencies point to area’s where we as an institution seem out of step with each other.

Chris Hartigan mentioned to the group that as a whole we aren’t in horrible shape and I agree. However we are a bit dated with our templates and as we move forward to looking at more responsive web, there will be many area’s where groups will need to make decisions on how to proceed.

For the most part these layout decisions are very structural and should be invisible to our content creators. But looking more at the content itself its important that we make it easy for our content creators to generate clean, functional and beautiful designs that serve our end users needs. A unified style guide will help with that.

When we talk responsive design, these small issues multiply 3-6x as the number of breakpoints increase the number of design decisions / patterns required.

In short without a standard model in place we (web designers) will be spending more time reinventing the wheel and less time adding real value.

I would like to thank everyone who made it out for today’s Acquia presentation, especially Chris, John, Jacub and Jordan from Acquia.

The energy felt in the room throughout the session was quite positive and I am sure that the conversations which occurred today will help push our collective progress forward faster. I hope that you all walked away from the experience with something valuable and that we will continue to collaborate moving forward.

Unity Demo can be found at http://united.dev.sinc.stonybrook.edu:8082 — this is a local dev box and occasionally will go down. By Mid-Jan expect to see a more robust site / style guide.

I’ve already made some back-end changes — I have decided to move the Unity project to its own public repo on GitHub. This decision was made primarily to remove as many barriers toward getting started as possible.

I look forward to our future chats!

Two themes, SBU-2012 and SBU-2013 have been created and are available for use on your You.SBU blogs. These themes replace the DoIT 2012 and DoIT 2013 themes. This rename would have caused your site to break if you were using either of the DoIT themes. We apologize for that, but we want to get the nomenclature correct before we start rolling this out to the wider community.

The themes themselves very lightly modified versions of WordPresses popular twenty twelve and twenty thirteen counter parts. I would argue that the SBU-2012 theme is a bit simpler to get started with, where as the SBU-2013 theme gives contains more features & customization capabilities.

I imagine there will be a few more updates to these themes as we work out the wording and iron out some more styling details, but moving forward these changes should not impact your daily blogging or your blogs operation.

We are also looking into creating additional options for other WordPress sites templates and designs. Stay tuned for more information regarding that in the weeks to come.

In this blog I am hoping to build a community which will discuss some of the challenges and opportunities facing our University’s web strategy and presence.

Look to learn more about the tools, platforms and thought process that we use in our projects and hopefully learn a few tricks you can apply to your work.