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Vote on Oct 14!
Nov
3
(2006)
Well, THAT didn’t last long…
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: rants.
We launched the new website the other day, after many weeks/months of planning and implementing. It’s only about half-way to what the Big Vision is for where we wanted to go, but it’s still much better than what we had. I’ve received a lot of feedback (blog comments, IMs, emails, Ouija messages), and every single comment has been extremely positive. It’s a well designed, (relatively) well structured site that is an order of magnitude more usable than what we had before.
But we’re going to have to step back, due to complaints From Above. Usability and design aside, it’s caused a lot of gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands, because we weren’t 100% faithful to the official style guide. Optics trumps usability and innovation.
I’m not sure if I’m going to get spanked for saying anything public about this. It’s just so frustrating, having been a part of a long, exhausting redesign and reimplementation process, only to have users and observers love it (yay! that was the goal) and The Man (ironic, in this case) telling us to knock it off, or else.
In the short term (i.e., for the weekend) we’ve just tweaked the front page. But it looks like we’re going to have to shelve the design, and migrate to the somewhat more limiting official template.
ps. to the spamass that’s been hammering my site all day long, PFO, you pathetic leech. this is not the day for that crap.
Comments
9 Responses to “Well, THAT didn’t last long…”
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Damn, I hate it when that kind of thing happens.
When I worked back at VUW, we hnd brand guidelines and what not. There was a standard template, but if as long as you stuck to the guidelines (which weren’t hard to stick to) you could ask the web team (part of marketing, I was part of IT) for approval.
I got a non-template design approved for the wirelessVic site just by saying “hey, is this ok?”, however I didn’t deviate that much (for an example of the then template see the SAELC site). Overall as long as you got permission you were fine.
D - This sucks. Sorry to hear about it. Have you tried showing the data (user feedback) to the man?
It sucks. C’est la vie. I would say that it’s very cathartic, but that’s about the limit of it… The brands, management, lawyers trump all of the things that matter. I actually to some extent have an appreciation for both sides of the coin…
Don’t let it get you too down … you and your team did an amazing job and even though it was short lived, you showed our community how good it can be. It does suck though.
Just say, “Oh, we’re sorry, it’s locked in now, it would take months to remove it.” heh.
As someone who developed a template that became a campus wide template I actually feel your pain. I can only speak for UW’s template but it was not designed for every use. It was as simple design for a particular type of site but it get applied to *everything* and it drives me crazy sometimes. Some people have interpreted what I designed and applied their limited web experience and knowledge… and well you know how uni politics goes
The upside is the consistancy and XHTML/CSS layout. The downside is a lot of sites have a false sense of accessibility and usability as they believe the template does it all.
Sad that all that work is wiped out… no one would accuse academia of being innovators on the web
Oh, well. We tried. At least the official style guide lets us choose two whole colors to decorate the entire site with!
Yeah.
wait - we get TWO colours? Well, that changes everything!
maybe we can leave your theme in as a user-selectable option?
ushxv