Higher-Ed or All Ed?
Posted October 21st, 2008 by Stewart Foss
We have had some recent submissions that have included some quality high school sites. We have held most of them as pending while we had an internal discussion about whether or not eduStyle should include high schools, but one slipped past us and has quickly become the most popular site in the last 30 days.
On our “About” page we describe eduStyle as:
“a web design gallery dedicated to higher education websites and powered by higher education web design professionals. “
There may be things we could learn from each other, but high schools out number higher-ed and they could quicky over take the gallery changing the focus of the gallery. So community, what do you think? Should we open the door to high schools sites? Should we limit to higher-ed only?
About the Author
Posts by Stewart Foss:
Q & A with Bates College – 2012 Best Overall Website
03 Aug 2012 in Articles&Awards&Design&Q&A
Print style sheets: 4 good examples and how they could be great
19 Jul 2012 in Awards&Design
The 2012 eduStyle Awards Nominees
29 Jun 2012 in Awards
And the nominees are …
17 Jun 2011 in Awards
Nominations are now Open
25 May 2011 in Awards
Nominations Update
20 May 2011 in Awards
Who Do You Support in the Browser War?
23 Sep 2010 in Articles&Design
5 Star Ratings
16 Sep 2010 in Features
Managing Abuse With Our New Terms of Use
03 Sep 2010 in Features
6 Higher-Ed Examples of Mega Menus
02 Sep 2010 in Design
October 21st, 2008 at 4:24 pm
I would love to see all Ed sites on edustyle. But.. Have you seen most high school web sites? Most I have seen are created by a high school “graphics” class. I would just hate to have edustyle get flooded by _junk_ for a lack of a better word especially because I am not sure how much edustyle can influence the high school to change because of limited resources.
Just my two cents.
October 21st, 2008 at 4:29 pm
I agree with Nick, and I think this could be a very interesting discussion.
I think all Ed would be nice as there still a lot of commonalities with them and higher-ed. With that being said, as Nick pointed out, most high school sites are garbage, being created by in school students as part of class projects. Of course there are exceptions to every rule, as in the case with Ashville School mentioned above.
In the end I’m not sure if I have an opinion just yet. While there are a lot of really good sites on here, there is still a large majority currently that need a lot of work, and I’m just not sure adding in hundreds of other “junk” websites would be a good thing.
October 21st, 2008 at 4:33 pm
That was our biggest concern. Because we don’t filter the sites for quality (only relevance), there’s a chance we’d get flooded with garbage. On the other hand, we’d miss out on sites like Asheville.
October 21st, 2008 at 4:41 pm
I am not sure how I feel about this. What does it really mean to be dedicated to higher education? If the purpose of the site is to share successes and failures with the intent of refining the craft of producing websites for higher education, I would not see any harm in broadening the submission of different sites. Of course, that is only true as long as there is a useful parallel that would allow high school web sites to be shown within EduStyle.
As a professional, I am more interested in learning what others are doing right and what the industry perceives as best practice. If opening up submission to high school websites is only going to flood the list with a myriad of lack-luster or poor quality submissions with the intent of showing “look how bad this is”, then I say no way. If on the other hand, the submissions are more selectively scrutinized to show successful designs, I think this may present some real opportunity and benefit.
October 21st, 2008 at 4:50 pm
I agree that it would be nice to see high school sites if they are quality. Perhaps if there was a section devoted to high school websites? Not sure how much extra work would be involved, but it could be an option. Also, the presence of a site where high school people could see what’s possible, it might spur more onto pushing their students/administrators to doing more with their sites.
October 21st, 2008 at 4:56 pm
I’d say if you started accepting them, there needs to be a filter criteria in the gallery.
The catch here is that secondary vs. higher ed have very different needs and requirements. While visually we might share things, I’m not sure if functionally there’d be much we’d take from each other. You just need to decide what would better server the edu environment. Maybe secondary ed needs it’s own “style” site all together.
October 21st, 2008 at 5:15 pm
**This comment is made by Andy the user, not Andy the admin** I’m torn I think that we could open it up and receive some great sites but as we tend to “call ‘em like we see ‘em” that could lead to some comments like “we are a small school with limited funding.” I guess unless the designer is the one who submits it the shcool probably won’t know about our comments.
October 21st, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Please keep this to only higher-ed websites. I don’t design for high school. If people are interested in that kind of thing, maybe you should open up another website for high school designs.
October 21st, 2008 at 6:42 pm
I think it’d be great to have a separate site for secondary education. With feeds, it’d be easy to do crossover sidebars on each site so we don’t entirely miss new or highly rated things on the one we’re not looking at.
October 21st, 2008 at 6:51 pm
My concern would be that high school sites and higher ed sites have very different purposes. I know that our primary audience is perspective students, giving the info they need and want, and really “selling” our product. I would think that unless they are a private school, high school sites are more about dispensing information than selling their product. So that said, I would be in favor of keeping it higher ed or having a distinct gallery separation.
October 21st, 2008 at 6:59 pm
I’m actually not in favor of adding high school sites. I think their goals and audience are very different from what we’re trying to accomplish. Unless they’re private, they’re likely not trying to “sell” their school and looking for “applicants” and “admissions.” They likely don’t do much, if any fundraising. I’m sure there are some similarities, but I think the differences far out-weight it, and I’m not sure as a higher education Web/marketing professional I’d gain any insight from being able to see their designs in this gallery. I think they should be separate.
October 21st, 2008 at 7:25 pm
I certainly don’t know if a community similar to this one exists for HS web designers – my guess is no, and I think it somewhat unlikely that one forms in the near future. HS web is a completely different ball game, with considerably less importance placed on web presence (for many reasons). Subsequently, design efforts on that level are often disjointed shoe-string operations, although notable exceptions definitely do exist.
In light of this, I don’t think that welcoming the few HS web designers who might actually be interested in receiving feedback on their work or participate in the discussion here would be ill-advised. Nor do I think it should be contraindicated to submit fine examples of educational websites merely because they don’t belong to a Higher Ed institution.
As Mattie said, however, I don’t think there would be a tremendous amount of value in submitting poorly designed HS sites by the truck-fulls… if only because @ericstoller is actually a robot capable of doing this at previously unimaginable speeds, and he would undoubtedly flood eduStyle with “quality” examples in no time just to secure his #1 spot… which is presently in jeopardy.
So, in closing: (1) HS web designers should be able to submit their own work if they wish to receive feedback, (2) all of us should be able to submit HS sites that we feel deserve discussion and (3) someone at OSU should finally “fix” @ericstoller’s DNS settings, like I asked for MONTHS ago….
Thank you for your time.
October 21st, 2008 at 7:44 pm
So would it be fair to say we don’t accept high school sites as a rule, unless they measure up to a certain quality level? Anyone have ideas how we determine that? It would have to go through a more rigorous submission process. One idea is only a top 100 user (or staff) can submit them. Or only users who have a minimum karma rating (what we use to rank users). What do people think? Any other ideas?
October 21st, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Although it pains me a great deal, I have to agree with Maggie’s comments…everything except the part about me being a robot
I think Maggie’s karma should drop given her lack of imagination when it comes to how fast I can submit “awesome” sites
October 21st, 2008 at 8:53 pm
Maybe we could have our really good designers adopt a crappy high school site. We could then mentor them into good design and then poach them for our higher-ed schools when they are grown-up designers. Anyone want to adopt a newbie?
October 22nd, 2008 at 1:27 pm
If you’re going to open up to other education, I think you’d be better served making a separate site for it and providing connections between the two. edustyle has become one of my favorite destinations for higher ed design because of the niche that it represents. Dilute the niche and you will do the same to the user base. Great to see the site growing at such a rate that issues like these are drawing attention and lending to the greater discussion. Keep up the great work!
October 22nd, 2008 at 5:16 pm
It seems to me the Asheville site is a lot more like a higher ed site than a typical highschool site would be. They have admissions information, alumni information, and seem to be “selling” their school through student/parent/instructor testimonials. I don’t have a suggestion for whether or not highschool sites should appear in the gallery – just noticed that this type of highschool site seems more like a higher-ed site to me (and is really a great site, as well!) Maybe that’s the reason it is so popular, and other more typical highschool sites really wouldn’t be as popular because they would be much less relevant to higher ed designers.
October 22nd, 2008 at 7:02 pm
why cant you do all? at some point, you have to question your criteria for selection of sites anyways. It would yield a better result to include a good 2/3 of well designed sites that excel in certain areas. and then show the other 1/3 sites that are bad and these are the reasons why. That way you don’t limit yourself to an type of education which shouldn’t be the focus of the “Edu” gallery. Show all types of “Edu” and sort through the bad ones and keep most of the good ones.
Isn’t that the whole point of the niche education gallery this is? Show what is good and focus on that and show to a lesser extent the ones that are bad? Not single out ones that should or should be allowed based on the area or level of education they focus on?
October 26th, 2008 at 6:30 am
Well, I think we’d learn more from having high school websites than not having them.
I think we’re not thinking we are mentors.
Let’s help the high student tasked with doing a website. He/she is a colleague in our future.
And, let’s help the computer teacher (or whom ever) who was asked to make a website for his/her school. He/she is our colleague and deserves all we have.
Maybe we simply need a “critique” area for new website designs and for designs from newbies in the trade.
October 30th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
The answer is simple: Start a sister site for “Secondary Education Web Sites”
November 10th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
I’m working on a high school website, and I come to eduStyle because there are so very few high school websites that are well done. When you look at design or information architecture high school websites are not cutting it.
There is no resource like eduStyle for people working on high school websites. I’ve searched high and low for one, but it doesn’t exist. I’ve started a page of “better than average” high school sites for other people who might be searching for something similar.
I’ve visited hundreds of high school websites searching for good ideas, and the one thing that really strikes me is that nearly all of the good ones are produced by a handfull of firms. SilverPoint [ http://www.silverpoint.net/ ] created the Asheville website, along with around a hundred others.
I think that if you started including good high school websites, it would end up as a gallery for a handful of design studios. I don’t know that that would be particularly helpful to anyone.
If you do include high school websites, greater editorial control would have to be in place.
January 30th, 2009 at 6:35 am
[...] has been discussion here in the past about whether or not High Schools website should be included in eduStyle. The majority of the opinions were heard were that High Schools needed a place of their own. I was [...]
February 10th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Aslong as the galleries are separated I don’t have a problem with it.