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 agree we need a standard model, and consistency across sites will only help users browsing across the entire campus. And even with a similar “template,” you can customize very small details to make the site feel very different.
But while I appreciate the positive comments toward our websites, as web developers we look at code, and I know from experience that the code for the SoMAS site is ugly. Working with it as it is is a waste of time, particularly to make it more mobile friendly. On the flip side, starting from scratch and incorporating a responsive design is a no-brainer, but there is still an expectation of a similar look and feel to the site’s previous design.
Anything that can make the transition easier is very appreciated, so I look forward to collaborating on Unity!
Glad to hear it Mark, I am a strong believer in simple, clean designs built upon even cleaner code.
I think we are fortunate that many of the designs which are prominent throughout SBU are well suited for updating to a responsive layout. Your SoMAS site, might be a bit more difficult =)
Pingback: | SBU Web Partners