CASE Web Award Winners 2008

Each year, a group of opinionated and experienced professionals with varied backgrounds gathers to answer this question for the CASE Circle of Excellence Awards Program. I’ve led this judging for the past ten years. This year, I was joined by 14 people representing schools, public and private colleges, and universities in the U.S. and Canada for two intense days spent reviewing the 132 sites entered in CASE’s Category 10. (For the record: 33 complete institutional websites and 99 individual subweb sites, for specific areas like admissions, alumni, etc.) Competition in this category is very rigorous and winning is difficult. 

Here are some of the key elements that constituted an award-winning site in 2008, as identified by the judges: 

– a well-founded strategy – sound information architecture, navigability, usability and search – engaging content, effectively deployed across the site – effective management of the site – appropriate look and feel, distinctive to the purpose of the site and consistent within the site – appropriate use of technology and adherence to standards – an evaluation plan and convincing results

In our evaluations, we look for sites that do something particularly interesting or unusual, instead of sites that are merely attractive. It’s easy to make a site look good, but is the site great at what it’s designed to do? Even the best-looking site won’t get an award if it isn’t well organized or if it lacks coherent messaging.

Video: This year, we saw that the apparent web-wide absorption with video has reached colleges, universities, and schools. We viewed a significant amount of video on the websites we judged. One reaction to this plethora of video is: so what? Too much of this video, like too much of the writing on college and university websites, seems uninspired. The video equivalent of dull writing involves badly lit and badly shot talking heads saying boring things. But this is really the first efflorescence of video on college and university sites; I expect that we’ll see many changes in the years to come. 

Accessibility: We saw an increased awareness of accessibility, with institutions providing transcripts for video and generally paying greater attention to standards across the board.

Social networking: We didn’t see much evidence that social networks or other Web 2.0 features were being used very effectively. 

Photography and Content: We saw a significant amount of great still photography this year, but a decided lack of great content. Too much of the writing was characterized by the usual university-language cliches. And excellent content was often buried deep inside the site. 

Organization: In general, sites are better organized and there’s more consistency in interface and navigation across a given site, making it easier for visitors to navigate around it. Still, we saw some sites with confusing menus (or too many of them)—a clear step backwards. 

Tracking and Assessment: The judges agreed that we’d like to see more evidence that institutions are considering results when they begin to redesign and launch a site and more evidence that they have established a rigorous tracking program. Here’s an observation from the 2006 judges’ report that (still!) bears repeating: 

… we still don’t see enough serious attempts at assessing how effective websites are. How can an institution justify spending hundreds of hours of staff time-and thousands or tens of thousands of dollars-on a website and not know how effective it is? Honestly, we don’t care if your site has won other awards or if people say they like it. [Which is not to say that we don’t pay attention to comments and results from usability testing when they make a point relevant to your award entry.] What’s important is that you can demonstrate that you set measurable goals and that your site has met or exceeded them. 

Integrated communications: We did see increased evidence that websites are being developed as part of an integrated institutional marketing and communications strategy. The University at Buffalo won two awards this year—a Gold for its Greener Shade of Blue site, which served as a showcase for a semester-long campaign to tell the story of UB’s environmental leadership. The site is a model in every respect, but in particular because it brought resources into a coherent whole that would not have been possible without the Web. 

In all, we agreed that, while institutional web design has come a long way, there’s still a long way to go. We look forward to seeing more of what’s to come.

Here’s the Judges’ Report for 2008 with award winners and comments about each of them.