Last Sunday night the 81st annual Academy Awards took place awarding Oscars to actors, writers, animators and other movie industry people. Personally — I could care less — I didn’t watch a second of it!

On the drive in this morning Phil and I were talking about awards shows and it got me thinking about industry awards — and more specifically website awards. There are lots of websites that are there only to showcase and/or judge other websites. EduStyle.net is a great example. Webmasters post there site designs for the community to critique and users can vote with a thumbs up or thumbs down. EduCheckup.com does video reviews of university websites — here is a review of the current tyndale.ca. Of course there is also the webpagesthatsuck.com awards — don’t want to win that one!

Now if Tyndale were to win an award — what would I want the award for? I do like our design, we have some pretty good copy. Most of our recent photos have been stunning. Our php and html code is clean and correct — what about awards for these? Well those are all fine and good — but the award I would cherish the most wold be an award for usability.

David Beyer of the Academica Group said it best when he said

“In order to make Tyndale’s web presence a success we must understand and follow website best practices and this key guiding principle — websites must answer the needs of the users first.”

» Continue reading “Website Usability – and the award goes to…”

No— Nehemiah is not a new member of the web development team — in fact — I don’t think he has even heard of the “web”. You see, Nehemiah lived some 400 years before Christ. I guess I am really here to introduce The Nehemiah Project — not Nehemiah himself.

The Nehemiah Project is a project to rebuild the foundation of Tyndale’s main website. Like in the story of Nehemiah (a biblical character from the old testament) — the foundation of Tyndale’s website needs some attention.

Over the last number of years there has been tremendous growth in prospective students using the Internet to aid them in their choice of post-secondary schools. Keeping in step with this trend, Tyndale has been investing great efforts to provide our future students with the information and site features that they both need and want. We have grown.

Tyndale started it’s web presence in 1996 with a few pages explaining who we were and how to contact us if you had questions. Today we have about 14,000 items indexed by Google and somewhere in the range of 6000 – 7000 pages of information — all being managed by 40+ web content managers.

With rapid growth comes increased complexity. Although our current home built content management system (DPA) has served us well over the years — but we have out grown it. It is time to rebuild.

I am introducing this project to you today, but it has been in the works for about a year now. We have gone through an extensive Request for Proposal (RFP) process. We received, reviewed and ranked a number of great responses. Along with the Web Steering Committee, we selected our vendor. We have initiated the research and are reexamining all of our Information Architecture (I/A) — we are well on the way to a successful relaunch of www.tyndale.ca

Watch this blog for more information on the project including updates and opportunities for you to give feedback.