Bates College was the winner of the Best Overall Website (both People’s Choice and Judged) and the People’s Choice winner for Best Homepage in this year’s eduStyle Awards. We connected with Ethan Wright-Magoon, the Digital Creative Director at Bates, to ask him and his team a few questions about how the site came about.

What is your role at your school?

I am the Digital Creative Director. I am the leader of the WebTeam here in the Bates Communication Office. The WebTeam is Ethan Wright-Magoon, Chris Bournakis and Nicholas O’Brien. Of course, we couldn’t have done any of this work without all of the support and inspiration from our colleagues in the Bates Communications Office, and Information & Library Services!

Can you give us a little background on the site and how it came together?

The site was part of a complete redesign of our online presence and also our offline/printed materials.

The new Bates.edu is a complete redesign from top to bottom. We basically razed the online campus. Then, we redesigned and rebuilt every site.

Was it completed internally or did you involve an outside company? Either way, tell us about the team that worked on it.

We had some outside help with the initial IA. Once IA was complete, the WebTeam of Communications, and the Systems Development & Integration Team of Information and Library Services worked in tandem.

Is the project using a CMS? OR what technologies are involved in it.

100% WordPress – WOOT!

Did you have any sources of inspiration for the project?

We try to stay as open to inspiration as possible. When every higher education institution is keenly aware of its peers’ work, there’s a risk of solving familiar problems with familiar solutions. So we stay mindful not just of our peers, but of other industries and fields. One day we’ll be inspired by a bicycle manufacturer, the next by a random developer who found us on Twitter.

What were some of the biggest challenges of the project?

The single biggest challenge was determining whether or not the new site should go live. To successfully overcome this challenge involved thoroughly explaining to all stakeholders just what a website is. i.e. A website is never done, and therefore never perfect in any given moment. Rather, a website is a moving solution, shooting towards a moving target. The idea of a website isn’t to actually hit the target, but to get a close as possible. Once everyone saw that, we got the green light.

Any lessons learned that you could share?

WordPress Custom Post Types (CPTs) are your best friend! Also - Follow the lead of your institution’s students. Students are encouraged to experiment and find happiness — to apply themselves without regard for precedent, and to do what they love. We couldn’t agree more!

How has the community reacted?

Open arms. Pitchforks. Cheers. Happiness. Yes, in that order.

What was your/your team’s reaction when you learned that you were nominated for an eduStyle Award?

Honored. Freaked Out. Stoked. Inspired. Joy. Vindication. Yes, in that order. We made a typical Bates move with our website by taking a calculated risk based on our core beliefs. Watching that risk unfold has been trying at times, so it’s nice to have eduStyle affirm our hard work and beliefs.

Do you have any favorite sites from the other nominees (either in your category or outside)?

Most higher education websites look like higher education websites — we like the sites that aren’t afraid to adopt current web themes and motifs. After all, our audiences have more experience on the web in general than higher education’s portion of the web. Our current favorites (in no particular order):

- Colorado State University English Department 

- EIU Admissions

- Regent College

- Texas Tech University

Congrats on the awards, they were well deserved.

The team from Bates celebrating the launch of the new Bates.edu with some suds at a local hangout in Lewiston.

 

I noticed on Twitter a tweet from Adrian Roselli:

4 of 5 @eduStyle higher-ed RWD award nominees have no/poor print styles: printshame.com/search/label/e… Voting closes in 8 days: edustyl.es/MEUk7w

— Adrian Roselli (@aardrian) July 19, 2012

I’m glad he brought it up. Honestly, in developing the list of nominees, we don’t evaluate the print style sheets. Maybe we should. Having either  no print style sheet or a bad one can be a real source of frustration for our users. As Adrian points out on his blog, print styles have been around for over a decade, so there really isn’t much of an excuse for not getting this right. In my presentation on responsive design at the Higher Ed Experts Responsive Web Design Summit, I pointed out that print style sheets are likely the first experience that most of us have had with the principles that make up responsive design. I remember my discovery of print styles almost 10 years ago, I spent hours trying to get things to print out just right.

So we thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to look a few of the print styles from the list of nominees for this year’s awards and dig into what is working and what could use some work.

Princeton – Your Path to Princeton

Your Path to Princeton is nominated for Best Prospective Student or Admission Site. With all of the sites we looked at, we looked for a good example of a page that you might actually want to print for our evaluation. In this case we chose the Learning at Princeton page. The first thing we notice on the print page is that the entire navigation is included. I can’t really think of any case where you would want this to happen. The side effect of this is that the content of the page gets pushed down half a page (that’s gonna kill some trees). Once you get to the content though, it is great. They include the font styles, so the headings maintain their color and font and the paragraphs have nice spacing. Our suggestion:

#section-header, #region-sidebar-first { display: none; }

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln is nominated for the Best Overall Website. For UNL we looked at their About the University page. It is pretty good. It includes a nice letterhead and the font and color styles from the web version of the page. The links revert to default font colors, which is ok but considering they are not clickable once printed, not exactly necessary. I’d suggest either switching the link colors to match the paragraph font colors or  using a little CSS to append the link urls, so that they make sense to include in the printed page. Our suggestion:

a:link, a:visited, a:active, a:hover { color: #000; text-decoration: none; }
a:link:after, a:visited:after { content:” [link: " attr(href) "] “; }

 The Open Medical Device Research Library

OMDRL is nominated for both Best Research Site and Best Responsive Site, and was actually one highlighted on Print Shame. We looked at their About page. I think Print Shame was a little hard on this one, I think it is a pretty good example of a print style sheet. Maybe they were expecting more because the site is responsive, I don’t know. The only real complaint I have with this one is the large white space at the top of the print page. It takes up roughly 1/4 of the page and offers nothing. This is where you might expect to find a nice header that many of the other sites include. The thing is, they have included the logo. The reason it doesn’t show up that most browsers disable background images when printing. One quick code change and this is a nearly perfect print style. Our suggestion:

#logo { content:url(/images/logo_omdrl.png?1322691341); }

University of Notre Dame

The University of Notre Dame is nominated for Best Overall Website, Best Use of Photography and Best Responsive Site. For this site we looked at the Leadership page in the About section. This is the 1/5 from the list that Print Shame compiled that did have an adequate style sheet and I honestly think this comes as near to perfect as can be expected from a print style sheet. The design includes a nice letterhead, styles that match the web version and they have appended link urls to all of the links in the page. The only really picky thing that we could find is that some of the links are relative and to a non-technical person this might not be clearly a link. So maybe better idenitifying the links would help. Our suggestion:

a:link:after, a:visited:after { content:” [link: " attr(href) "] “; }

Last thoughts

I’m glad that Adrian raised the issue of print style sheets. They take a little extra time, but can save our users from some real frustration. Have you spent some extra time to develop a nice print style sheet? Have you identified any best practices when developing print styles? We’d love hear your thoughts and see some more good examples in the comments.

We’re pleased to announce the nominees for the 2012 eduStyle Awards, sponsored by Demand Creativity. This year marks the 5th anniversary of the eduStyle Awards. We have moved many of the categories up to 5 nominees from 3. So this year there are 73 sites nominated in 20 categories. The nominees represent 53 schools. To recognize the changing landscape of web design we have added a category, sponsored by HigherEdExperts.com, for Responsive Design.

We’re working on some very exciting changes to eduStyle over the next few months. As part of the roll out of this year’s awards we have completely rewritten our screenshot system. While most of you won’t notice a change, it was huge and lays the foundation for some significant changes that we’re working on. The first, that will roll out in the next few weeks, is the end of the approval system (yipee!!). Instead of approving new sites, we’re moving to a system that auto approves so that your site will show up in the gallery immediately after you submit it. Stay tuned for more big changes.

We’re please the announce the nominees for the 2011 eduStyle Awards. The nominees include 50 sites that represent 46 different schools in 19 different categories. This year there were over 900 eligible sites, and the volume of high quality nominations made it very difficult to narrow each category to only 3 nominees. The entire community of higher-ed web designers and developers deserve recognition for raising the quality bar for higher-ed web design. Congratulations to all our nominees. People’s Choice voting begins today and runs until July 15, 2011. The winners will be announced August 2nd, 2011 at the eduWEB Conference in San Antonio Texas. When you vote in the People’s Choice we’d suggest that you actually visit the sites being considered, screenshots just don’t do many of these sites justice.

Nominations for the 4th Annual eduStyle Awards are now open. This year there are over 900 eligible sites and 24 categories. To nominate a site visit the nominations page and click the “add nomination” button. You can nominate any site in up to 5 categories. Nominations are open until June 10th and the final list of nominees and categories will be posted on June 17th.

NOMINATE A SITE

Changes to the CollegeWebEditor.com blog categories

This year we have decided to make some changes to the blogging awards. We will be retiring the Best Higher Ed Blog Award and instead be launching a new award focused on the Best Higher Ed Blog Post. This is a community award so it does not necessarily go to an institution (as all the other awards do), but can go to any post on a higher-ed topic that you feel is award worthy.

NOMINATE A BLOG POST

Due to the overwhelming response to our call for submissions this year we are going to have to push our nominations start date back slightly. We got over 600 new submissions during a single week. That represents about 12% of all submissions that we have ever had … ever. So needless to say it has overwhelmed our approval process which was already feeling a little broken.

What next?

We’ll be working hard over the long weekend to get everything approved and hope to begin nominations Tuesday May 24th in the morning. When nominations open we’ll be sending out an email to all of our registered users.

Thanks

To consider how these awards have grown over the last four years has been breathtaking to me. Thank you all for your support of the awards and for your patience while we try to dig out.

So to say yesterday was hectic would be an understatement. While we weren’t hit with a major natural disaster here, we did have some severe weather which made it difficult to complete some of the things that need to be done for the full launch of the eduStyle Awards nominations. So let me give you an update of where we are at and how the process looks this year.

Pre-qualifying phase

The eduStyle Awards, by design, require involvement from the community. While that has made for diversity in the sites nominated it has also lead to an administrative nightmare to manage. Last year we had over 2000 nominations to filter through. This year we have changed the process slightly to minimize the load for us. The changes still reflect the will of the community, but should simplify the nomination process and limit the load on us in building a list of nominees. So here is the first major change, sites are pre-qualified to be included in the nomination phase. Here is what your site needed to make it through the pre-qualification:

1. To have been submitted between April 30th 2009 and March 30th 2010 AND:
   1. have either a minimum of 3 “my style” votes after subtracting the “not my style” votes OR
   2. if they don’t have 3 votes to  have been submitted after February 15th 2010 OR
   3. have been selected as a Noteworthy site

To have 3 my style votes is an indication that to some level the community likes the site. Sites submitted before February 15th have had lots of time for the community to voice their opinion. We feel that we have been generous with these requirements. What this means for us is that instead of over 1000 qualified sites there are approximately 450 of the best sites in higher-ed. This should also make it easier for the community to find and nominated sites as we have been able to put together a page listing the qualified sites.

*Update: We’re reasonable people. If you have a concern about your site not being included in this year’s awards, please contact us and we’ll try to accommodate.

Special Cases

Best Higher-Ed Blog Award & Best Higher-Ed Blog Award – Rookie of the Year

Because these awards are for sites that are not necessarily maintained by a college or university, the process is slightly different. To nominate a blog for either of these awards please visit the Best Higher-Ed Blog Nomination Page. To qualify for the rookie of the year award the blog must have started in the last 2 years (between April 15, 2008 and now).

Best Mobile Site & Best Email Campaign or Newsletter

We’re still working to get these into the gallery, watch for them in the next few days.

Sites that are not yet approved

We’re also working to get these added to the gallery and when approved they will immediately make it into the eligible site listing page. If you have submitted one of these sites, watch for an email from us to let you know it has been approved.

Things have started to roll for the 3rd Annual eduStyle Higher-Ed Web Awards. In order to qualify for this year’s awards you’ll need to submit your site by March 30th. This year there are a few notable additions which have required us to make some changes to our submission form. We have added categories for Best Email Newsletter/Campaign and Best Mobile Site. You’ll see the new categories available on the eduStyle submission form. Make sure you select the right one, we get literally hundreds of new site submission in the weeks leading up to the awards and we don’t want to miss yours. In order to submit an email newsletter/campaign, you’ll need a web version of it available to submit. To submit a mobile site you’ll need to upload a screenshot of the site (how to take a screenshot on an iPhone/iPod Touch or Android Phone).

Nominations being April 15th. The details of that process will be posted then.

If you are company, please consider helping us by sponsoring the awards. There are real time & expenses involved in doing the awards and your support can help us continue this important annual event and keep it as open as possible. It is also a great opportunity to show your support for the community of 4200 higher-ed web professionals represented by eduStyle. There a limited number of slots available.

Now go submit your favorite higher-ed sites.

The winners of the 2009 eduStyle Higher-Ed Web Awards, sponsored by finalsite, and CollegeWebEditor.com Blog Awards were announced yesterday at the eduWEB Conference in Chicago. Congratulations to all of the nominees and winners. With over 2000 nominations this year, these sites represent the best of higher-ed web design.

See the full list of eduStyle Award winners.

Thanks to Innogage and Jadu there is video of the event.

Reactions

In the coming months we’ll be posting some interviews so you can get some of the back story of what went into these amazing sites. A few of the winners have posted some of their reactions to winning:

• American University
• Washtenaw Community College
• .eduGuru
• You can follow some of the reaction on Twitter.

UPDATE

• Reaction from one of Imperial College Bloggers
• College of William & Mary

We have an amazing list nominees and judges for the 2nd Annual eduStyle Higher-Ed Web Awards. This year’s  response to the People’s Choice voting has been incredible (we passed last year’s totals in 4 days). Thanks to everyone who has been helping us by spreading the word. Due to an amazing list of nominees we still have some really close races in many of the categories and the winners will be decided by votes cast today. So if you haven’t voted, your vote could be the decider. So go vote and spread the word so that we can honor the best of higher-ed web design.

Tell your friends on Twitter