We’ve joined the Carnegie team! Find out more.
Alert Close close
Intelligence
CASE Circle of Excellence Judges’ Reports for Websites and Interactive Media

Intelligence

CASE Circle of Excellence Judges’ Reports for Websites and Interactive Media

Jun 18, 2007By Michael Stoner

The websites in Category 10 were divided into two groups this year—one for the overall institution and a second for special-purpose sites (i.e., student recruitment, alumni, etc.). As you probably know, it’s easier to build a great site for a specific target audience than it is to tackle an institutional website. This year, we had some terrific sites that won awards (my favorite, as I noted before, was Choose CU, the University of Colorado-Boulder’s portal for admitted students. But, overall, we found the quality of entries underwhelming. Here are the most common problems we noticed:

Some sites we explored are clearly reaching for “wow.” But wow in and of itself isn’t enough-without functionality, wow quickly becomes annoying. Another shortcoming overall was a decided lack of great content-we saw very little great writing or video on any of the sites we viewed. Too much of the writing was characterized by the usual university-language clichs. And, often, excellent content was buried deep inside the site.

More comments in the report, here.

Category 12, Technology Innovations, was new this year. Though we didn’t have a large number of entries in this category, we had some very good ones. We were looking for ways in which institutions were changing paradigms:

What’s different about each of the award winners is that they are using technology in creative and interesting ways. We know of few, if any, alumni magazine staffs that are blogging, as is the University of Chicago’s. And Virginia Tech’s podcasts are part of an active program-the movement of a traditional AV group to the web. These are both innovative approaches. And the Gold award winner [Stuff2Do from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay] demonstrates some of the best aspects of Web 2.0‑and it demonstrates that creativity, hard work and a Macintosh go a long way.

The report is here.

Don’t look for inspiration or models within the entries submitted under Category 11. The entries this year were not inspiring, to be kind. For what it’s worth, the report is here, though if you’ve read this paragraph you’ve read the report. Hint for those who want to enter next year: it all you’re doing is burning a video to a DVD or a CD-ROM and sending it, enter it in the video categories and not in this one!

On a personal note, I’d like to thank my fellow judges—as opinionated a bunch of professionals as I’ve ever dealt with! I find the discussions we have to be the most inspiring learning experiences I have all year long. I’m profoundly grateful for your insights and your ability to express them and to challenge assumptions that I and everyone else makes about our work. Thank you for your participation in this process. And a special thanks to Malinda Miller-Huey and Joanna Bertand at the University of Colorado-Boulder for hosting this year’s judging for Category 10 and 12 and to Joanne Catlett at CASE who manages the awards process for CASE for making it so rewarding to be involved in the judging.

UPDATE

Here’s a comment I received by email after I posted this entry:

Thanks for your recent blog post (“CASE Circle of Excellence Judges’ Reports for Websites and Interactive Media”). Although there are many other factors one should use when judging a website, those you and your colleagues used make an excellent starting point for those wishing to evaluate their website. The comments included in the judges’ report are useful, particularly the subjective observations such as the “we still don’t see enough serious attempts at assessing
how effective websites are.” That amazes me, too.

I’d love to have posted this as a comment to your blog but you have some weird have-to-register-and-registration-is-moderated thing set up. Sorry but I’m not going to jump through hoops for the privilege of posting a comment.

Kevin Guidry
[url=http://www.mistakengoal.com]MistakenGoal[/]

My Reply
Thanks for your feedback: I’d be happy to post this over your name. I hate to have to require registration for posting, but we’ve had spambots visiting us and posting comments that I can’t repeat (nor do I want visitors to experience them!), and this seemed to be the best way to manage things. I spent several hours one day deleting their comments and they were back the next day and did it all over again.


  • Michael Stoner Co-Founder and Co-Owner Was I born a skeptic or did I become one as I watched the hypestorm gather during the dotcom years, recede, and congeal once more as we come to terms with our online, social, mobile world? Whatever. I'm not much interested in cutting edge but what actually works for real people in the real world. Does that make me a bad person?