Hello everyone,


I've been following this strand with interest. It seems that the problems
are common to most of us. Here are my personal thoughts:

Why brand a site?

Well, why brand anything? A loaf of bread is a loaf of bread and a pint of
mink is a pin of milk and an education is an education, isn't it...

If Rick won't accept a magazine as a good analogy, then let me suggest
another - Penguin paperbacks. When they started they had a clear brand.
Orange covers with the penguin logo, a white strip and the book title. The
design was not exciting, but it was clean and functional and strong. You
could look at a bookshelf and see a Penguin book at a glance. It didn't
guarantee the contents and the writers were left to get on with writing the
books, but the books were designed and produced by professionals. Over time
green covers appeared and line drawings, and author photographs were added.
Then we had the black covered classics and blue Pelican books and colourful
Puffin books, full-colour covers, silver covers, and so on until the
penguin logo is about all that's left of those first designs. Yet they are
all recognisable as Penguin books and you still know where you are with
them. And you still have a relationship with the brand.

This is what Universities want to do - to create an "image" of themselves
over the web. If you get a book published by a professional publisher you
will expect an editor to edit it, a designer to design it and a marketing
person to advertise it. True, a publisher might let you do some
illustrations for your book, if you're good enough at it, but the final say
rests with the publisher, not the author. So why don't we expect it to be
different for the Web? The only answer I can think of is that most
university web mangers haven't had that sort of support service up to now,
so they don't expect it.

By branding we want to "wrap" the academic's work is good attractive,
functional design which tells the user, no matter if this is their first
look at what a university has to offer, or their thousandth visit, that
this is the reliable and professional work of a member of a respected
educational institution.

Branding should tell the user who you are, where they are and how they can
get where they want to be. This effects information too. Yes, it's sticky
ground, but that just means it's harder to ignore. People leave and
departments move offices. It is not hard for a contact on a departmental
page to get out of date and annoy a user. Not often, but once or twice is
too often. The point about admissions is that there should be no reason why
the centrally held information cannot include what the department wants as
well as standard core information, nor does the contact have to be central,
but the details themselves don't need to be stored within a single
department's web site.

The problem with the army of "unpaid volunteers" who "prefer to do some of
their own design" running the site is severalfold. Firstly, to be blunt,
they are not always good at web design. Secondly, they can often be too
"close" to the pages to see them in a wider context. I can recall hearing
one person explaining that he absolutely must have a picture of a field on
his home page. His department did fieldwork - it was what they were about.
So he had a big picture of a big empty,  ugly, muddy field smack in the
middle of his home page - on landmarks or features to catch the attention,
no nicely photographed sky, just an empty field casually photographed. I
wondered how many students had changed their minds about going to another
university, swayed by that picture of a field... Thirdly, they can go for
gimmicks over usability. This is a real bugbear with me. I was looking at
one of our sites today. Flashy Photoshoped up graphics, with pop-up
Javascript windows, but turn the graphics off and it's a blank page - not
an alt tag in site! Accessibility zero. Forthy, is the curse of the digging
men. Yes, it's those people who fill their professional departmental web
pages with "under construction" signs "Don't look at me, I don't known what
I'm doing" semi-jokey comments and digging men. The buttons which lead to
"service currently unavailable" notices are so satisfying for a visitor
(sarcasm). Kylie Baxter commented that sites she rates highly are those
which "gave a sense of what the dept was really like". Maybe there is a
case that a department that appears so incompetent should be allowed to
wither and die of it's own accord, but the problem here is that the failure
of one department effects the whole university. Also, there seems to be an
assumption that branding ipso facto removes the vitality of it's content.
It's a danger, to be sure, but not an inevitability. There is no reason why
a nicely branded site cannot have an impressive "ambience" too. I suspect
that if you looked at your favourite web sites you would find them both
branded and pleasant (the BBC has already been mention, and while not
faultless, it is not dull).

Branding can mean partnership not dictatorship, but at the end of the day
it is the university that pays the bills and the university's reputation
which is on the line. Is it unreasonable for the person paying you to say
"put this bit of code at the top of each of your web pages, and this bit at
the bottom, and within reason the middle is yours"? In terms of evolution
of web brands we may well be back with orange Penguin book covers, but with
a little co-operation we'll move on and we are trying to move on from the
Victorian pamphlet.

Laurence Cornford
Web Team
The University of Sheffield