Trends and Judges’ Report, CASE Awards of Excellence for Websites

This year, I chaired the judging panel for the CASE Awards of Excellence Judging for websites. The judging was hosted by Roosevelt University, Chicago—a shoutout to Lisa Encarnacion, director of university outreach, who made all the arrangements for us, and to Lesley Slavitt, vice president, government relations and university outreach.

This year, 15 judges convened for two days in March for the judging. The judges represented American and Canadian colleges, schools, and universities, public and private. The panel included people with experience in design, web strategy, web content development, admissions, student recruitment, web technology, and marketing. We also had a number of consultants on the panel, one of whom spent years working as a high school counselor. More than half of the judges have won national CASE Awards of Excellence for their websites. (Typical panels that judge other categories in the Awards of Excellence competition number about six to eight.)

There were 56 complete institutional sites entered in Category 10A [Complete Institutional Websites] this year and 94 sites entered in Category 10B [Individual Sub-Websites]. This year we awarded a Grand Gold and two Golds. In Category 10A, George School won a Gold for its redesigned site. And in Category 10B, Xavier University won the Grand Gold for Road to Xavier and Nazareth College took a Gold for FlightoftheFlyers.com.

Short list of Award winners for 2009; more details about each in the Judges’ Report for 2009.

What makes an award-winning institutional website? Here were some of the important elements we identified this year:

• • a sound strategy

• • sound information architecture, navigability, usability and search

• • good 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

• • evaluation plan; appropriate results

We also ask whether the site does something particularly interesting or unusual. We’re not very interested in sites that merely look good. It’s easy to make a site look good, but is the site great at what it’s designed to do? If a site looks good but isn’t well-organized or lacks coherent messaging, it won’t get an award. Competition in this category is very rigorous, and winning is difficult.

Managing Conflicts of Interest
Judging panels for other CASE Awards of Excellence categories top out at about six people. There are a number of reasons why we invite such a large number of people to participate in judging this category. First, building websites is a complicated undertaking and we want people with different kinds of expertise in the room to comment on issues such as audience appropriateness, usability, design, and other issues as they came up. Second, we have a lot of sites to review and having a large group of people makes this process go faster. Third, having a large group of experienced people with strong opinions ensures that a broad range of opinions is heard. Finally, the large group ensures that conflicts of interest do not emerge in this judging.

We take conflicts of interest extremely seriously. Several of the judges represented institutions that had websites entered in Category 10, and several mStoner clients entered sites in this category. Judges with a relationship to a site being judged do not participate in viewing the site during the first “elimination” round; if the site survives this round, judges are expected to recuse themselves from judging the site, are not allowed to comment on it, and are asked to leave the room when the site is being discussed during the final round when awards are given.

Trends
I’m sorry to report that the judges were underwhelmed at what we saw this year. One remarked, “I felt as if I was looking at websites from 1997. I was disappointed and surprised at how bad they were.”

Some sites we explored are clearly reaching for “wow,” but wow in and of itself isn’t enough. Without functionality, wow quickly becomes annoying. We noticed a lot of gratuitous elements that had no purpose and/or were not useful; examples of bad design; and many generic websites. One judge remarked, “I don’t see many best practices emerging this year.”

It was particularly galling to see sites that completely lacked any sense of branding or even a sense of place: the institutions could have been anywhere. For example, we looked at one site from an institution on the California coast and couldn’t find a single image that showed us where it was located.

And as important as authenticity is today, many of the sites we looked at seemed to lack authenticity. Authenticity was one of the elements that people liked about George School’s site, as well as Northland’s and Nazareth College’s Flight of the Flyers.

Another shortcoming overall was a decided lack of great content-we saw very little excellent writing or video on any of the sites we viewed. Too much of the writing was characterized by the usual university-language clichs. Sites need to be edited-and not just for misspellings (we observed far too many). And, often, excellent content was buried deep inside the site: this is good content used poorly, where one had to stumble upon it in many cases. This is not only a waste of time (and/or money), but also attention: visitors want good content!

One judge observed, “When I’m looking at your site, all I have is what is on the page. Don’t assume I know who you are; or where you are.” [Note: one of the strengths of the award-winning site for the George School is that the site provides a sense of what George School is, in words, images, and video.]

There were a number of sites that did a nice job in tying real-world experiences into the web—particularly Nazareth University’s Flight of the Flyers site. This site, McGill’s Six Word Stories site, IUPUI’s Events Calendar, and The Road to Xavier were particularly good at engaging visitors with the sites and encouraging them to share information in a variety of different ways and on different platforms, including social networking sites.

Some final comments:

• • One judge noted, “What’s with the small fonts?” It wasn’t just older judges who complained about the lack of readability of small type on websites.

• • We noted that a lot of sites used Flash and provided no alternatives, so they were inaccessible.

• • We noted that many of the people who entered sites this year hadn’t spent much time thinking about how to evaluate the results of the all the work that went into their site. There were some clear exceptions, two of them being George School and Xavier University. At Xavier, a robust analytics toolset allows people on campus to monitor how the site is being used and respond to groups or individuals appropriately. Bravo to these award winners—and to others who thought through this key step to making a site “effective.”

• • Many of the entries were a bit cagey about the use of consultants in the redesign process. Some of the winning sites were designed by on-campus teams; others were designed by consultants. We’re not particularly focused on how much a site costs, but on how good it is and what kind of results it gets. Please credit consultants for their work and be transparent about the share of the costs allocated to consultant fees when you prepare your entries. We’ll recommend that, next year, entries that reference consultants but don’t break out their costs be eliminated.

Additional Resources

Short list of Award Winners for 2009

Judges’ Report for 2009

Judges’ Report for 2008