Kansas State University Libraries Case Study (Part 1)

by Danielle Cooley

From Hoarder to "Heave-It" in Three Not-So-Easy Steps

Part 1 of a three-part guest post from Tara Coleman, Joelle Pitts, and Harish Maringanti.

Cutting content is tough. And not every strategy works for every organization. But you can go from hoarder to “heave-it” after working through the emotional attachment some folks have with the content they helped create. 

The Kansas State University Libraries Web site before its redesign.

In the spring of 2011, K-State Libraries started a major website redesign. Our website had not truly been reviewed or redesigned in ten years. The look was dated and the content and organization no longer reflected the organizational structure of the Libraries.

At the time the redesign, our site hosted a staggering 3,500 published web pages. It quickly became apparent that a large portion of the pages were created and uploaded during the previous ten years by staff with changing responsibilities and web privileges, thus making many pages obsolete and in some cases, forgotten altogether. Additionally, pages with current authors and content were not promoted or linked from appropriate locations.

The biggest challenge in our redesign was the migration process. Rather than moving everything over, we wanted to take the opportunity to evaluate what we had and decide if it was still needed.

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Intrigued? Stay tuned for Part 2 (the problem and approach) and Part 3 (the outcome).

Have questions? Post below or contact the authors directly:

A little video about content strategy...

by Danielle Cooley

I especially like the part at 1:18 where they take useless content away!

http://www.hotstudio.com Little Bits is a short video about content strategy by the small content strategy team at Hot Studio, an experience design company based in San Francisco and New York. We're small team of content strategists in a world of designers and developers and we find ourselves explaining what we do for a living a lot.

Georgy Cohen on Homepage Content

by Danielle Cooley

The Homepage.

It might be the most politically-charged page on any Web site. As a result, it often ends up being a "more content" nightmare. (See this vintage post on the American Airlines homepage by Dustin Curtis.)

I hope by now we can all agree that's a less-than-desirable outcome. But if putting everything on the homepage isn't the answer, how does one decide what does go there? Georgy Cohen has some fabulous suggestions: 

http://meetcontent.com/blog/planning-for-homepage-content/

Less really is more.

by Danielle Cooley

So says Irene Pereyra in the.net magazine article "10 steps to an engaging interactive user experience" from December 2011:

You may think this is obvious and doesn’t need further explanation. But most sites and applications still manage to get it wrong. The key is to cut down tasks required by users to the bare minimum. I can’t stress this enough. Get rid of all that extra clutter that doesn’t add value, or worse, distracts and confuses the user. Know exactly how you want users to travel through your site or application and then guide the user as if you were holding their hand through the entire process. Again, users want things to be as simple, worry-free and fast as possible. If they can see what’s coming next before even clicking on something, they’ll be happy users.

I'd change the "Know exactly how you want users to travel through your site..." to "Know exactly what users are trying to accomplish...," but that's a sentiment the author gets to in the following paragraph, so I won't nitpick too much.