Ultimately people have different views of the world: some prefer something that works well and couldn’t give two hoots what it looks like; others are willing to sacrifice some utility for something that has more visual appeal.

For techies, an organisation’s “brand” would be enhanced by easy access to the information they want in the way they want it. I vaguely remember a blog post critiquing Ford motor company’s website a few years ago, saying that a (utilitarian looking) 3rd-party car info site did more to enhance Ford’s brand (as it gave prospective purchasers the comparison info they wanted) than did Ford’s own site, full as it was with shiny, but ultimately meaningless, lifestyle statements and photos. I can’t find the link – sorry

I’ll not comment on the contents of your post as institutional marketing of, as James describes, ‘big, complex businesses’ isn’t my main area of work. However this is an area of interest to many of the IWMW 2008 participants, so I’d welcome people who attended the event (and those, such as Owen, who didn’t) to contribute to this debate.

I’m absolutely with you – as I hope was clear from my post – about the value of companies such as Precedent. I’m unconvinced, though, that most large institutions see, or are wholesale bought into this value. The interfaces that you have with these institutions could well be with those people that have, but I’m really not sure they are representative of the wider community.

I’m only too aware (having done it for seven long years..) that actually the issue is not “just” about brand awareness but about lack of strategy; it’s about organic rather than managed growth. Having a holistic view of “what the website is for” from an institution perspective is probably the biggest challenge that these institutions face. Working with museums, it was hard enough: how do you build a strategy with no money, few resources and no idea where the “value” is held? In HEI’s it is even harder: I don’t know of a HE website manager who could give me a one sentence elevator pitch about what their website does, where it is going or who it is for. These are still – often – wild, unmanaged landscapes that attempt to cater to everybody from student to academic to postdoc to funding body. They usually fail. This is through the fault of history rather than anyone in particular, but I think the current “trust landscape” means that it is more important now than ever before to focus on these strategies.

Under the hood, I still don’t think many web teams see the value of brand. I know most techies don’t. I fully understand (and sorry, it was unfair of me not to mention it!) that you were having to pull together an ad-hoc presentation at the last minute – but overall, I think it would have worked better if the conversation had started with the question “why brand is important” rather than anything more complex.

I’m not going to justify why we were invited to speak at IWMW (you’ll have to find that out from the organisers). But I will point out that the intention was to do a two parter with our client from the University of Southampton – and when she was unable to make it at the last moment, we had to improvise a different kind of presentation.

You say that ‘brand and design don’t necessarily sit comfortably or naturally with many university web teams’ but that hasn’t really been our experience. Universities tend to have large web presences, much of which is made up of research and other materials created and managed by semi-autonomous Faculties, Schools and Departments. Those responsible for these materials often come from the academic side, and do often have reservations about marketing and brand. But corporately most University websites are managed by marketing and communications departments, and tend to be staffed with web professionals (who have often come to HEIs from the agency side or the private sector).

Modern Universities are – amongst other things – big, complex businesses. Most have dramatically expanded their capacity in recent years in order to create the financial strength to sustain their many activities. University websites are critical to these business strategies, and have to perform to the University’s needs as a business. That is, they have to recruit students, raise funds, promote ‘third stream’ initiatives (knowledge transfer, ‘spin out’ enterprises, consultancy, continuing professional development and short courses), forge strategic alliances with other partners and act as a shop window for the many other business activities Universities have (Science and technology parks, conference facilities, movie locations, catering, creches – even functions such as wedding venues).

Academic web publishers may – and, in my experience, often do – grumble about the University being ‘taken over’ by suspect private sector brand and marketing thinking. What they often aren’t willing to see is that the ongoing viability of their activities depends, critically, on the University’s ability to promote itself in increasingly competitive markets.

I doubt there was a single institution represented at IWMW this year which isn’t working with agencies on their brand and website development (indeed, we’ve worked with many of them ourselves). Understanding the connection between brand and web is a hot issue for University marketing departments and many of the conversations I had suggested that sharing some of the tools we’ve developed to facilitate this (like the SAFE matrix) was much appreciated.

I started but never posted a very grumpy blog post about the hoops I had to jump through to try and get a postgraduate prospectus sent via the Soton site. I had to *register* for their site just to request a prospectus, the form had usability errors, and the request form was written as if they’d never met someone thinking about postgraduate study.

Everyone who makes a website should be forced to use the website, and that includes anyone dealing with brand.

This was my first IWMW, so I didn’t have much context to go on. Compared to the museum conferences that I’m usually found lurking at, it felt fairly tech-centric (in *audience*, not speakers) to me. There again, I’m completely new to the whole HEI scene so the whole thing is a learning curve and I could well be wrong.

One of the things I’m fascinated in is the cross-over between look and feel and tech: where this happens, why it doesn’t happen sometimes, what the technologies bring to the equation and WHO does the work… Ultimately, I feel it’s about being able to spend time focussing on strategic aspects of what we happens in institutions rather than necessarily the tactical stuff. Alison W talked quite a lot about this and brought some interesting thoughts to bear.

Ultimately, there is somewhere a correct balance whereby institutions can function effectively but within a framework of brand / marketing / technical strategy. But in my experience, this framework is usually either non-existent or in a delicate, pre-pubescent state that suffers every time a “requirement” comes along.

In the past I attended IWMW as the head of the ‘tech’ part of the web, with my colleague who was responsible for the marketing/design aspects – we were based in different depts in the institution, but clearly had to work closely to deliver the institutional website.

Whereas there was a time when IWMW was about the tech aspects of the web, I would say that by IWMW 2005 there was a strong marketing/design aspect to the workshop, and that there was a good mix of people attending – I felt that in 2005 IWMW really acheived a dialogue between the different approaches that people brought to ‘institutional web’. I don’t think this necessarily resulted in agreement about the issues, but I thought that it was a great venue for moving on the conversation and working towards more mutual respect between the two approaches.

Perhaps this has changed (I haven’t been to IWMW since 2006), or perhaps you just went down the pub with the hardcore techy component. If the majority of people really had SQL and Repositories high on their wishlists it seems that perhaps the people attending have changed – possibly this points to a maturing of the web as a medium and so those techies who were interested in HTML and CSS now leave this to the non-techies and the CMS, while they move onto pastures new?