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Steve Krug on University Web Development

Published 9 Nov 2005

This excerpt from Steve Krug’s keynote presentation at HighEdWebDev 2005 just made my morning (via Collegewebeditor.com):

Top 9 reasons why it s*cks to be you

Corporate expectations in a non-profit budget
Stakeholders who can be petty and whiney in ways that wouldn’t dare in the real world
Find and implement a CMS in your spare time, and herd kittens into using it
Sub-site/fiefdom hell: We want our dept/school/project to have its own character
Multiple audiences
Homepage death match
Deans less likely to force everyone to the site-consistency line than CEOs
Tons of dynamic content of variable quality and enormous importance — to its creators
Cool-factor arms race to stay competitive

Seems like number 3 is my task for today…

Filed under University Web Development

Commentary

Matthew Pennell writes

Nov 9 at 09:43 PM #

Some of those ring true for non-uni development too – 4, 5 and 6 were a major headache during the recent redesign of our corporate site…

Andrea writes

Nov 10 at 07:42 AM #

Matthew: I believe it. Lots of the issues with Uni sites come from their being so large with so many stakeholders—I’m sure there are corporations out there that are in the same boat on that front.

I love the term “Homepage death match”—for me it sums it up perfectly. Now I will at least have a fun visual in my mind when I am dealing with it… :)

Pat writes

Nov 10 at 08:28 AM #

Wow…that is so dead on it’s scary.

Pat writes

Nov 12 at 11:42 AM #

Just today I was in a conversation where My Yahoo! was used as a reference as to the types of features we need in our portal. Point #1 strikes again.
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