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Innovation at Yale

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Over at Marketing Profs: Daily Fix, Elaine Fogel recently riffed on the fact that many university sites have become almost impossible to navigate, due primarily to a proliferation of poorly-organized microsites:


“It seems that universities are on a different planet when it comes

to keeping up with Web site design and development. I’ve been doing

research for a client project and what a shock! Microsite, upon

microsite – it takes a GPS system to navigate through them. Whether

your kids are reaching that point of no return – college – or you’re

just browsing to find resources, many of the university Web sites I’ve

visited in the past few weeks leave much to be desired.”

Two of the worst offenders cited by Elaine are Stanford and Berkeley — two West Coast institutions of higher learning that one would have thought had it all figured out when it came to Web site design.

Meanwhile, Yale has been working on an interesting little experiment that puts Stanford to shame — the designers at the School of Art have turned their home page into a wiki:

“The School of Art’s new website proves that you really can please everyone. The catch is that you can only please them one at a time. The new website is a wiki: it allows students, faculty, staff and alumni to add or change content at will. Even better for a community of visually oriented people with strong artistic opinions, the wiki allows participants to redesign the home page, as seen in these examples.The site was developed by Tamara Maletic ’01MFA and Dan Michaelson ’02MFA.”

[image: Yale University School of Art]

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