The Web is a fluid medium that can energize and communicate a message with agility and power.

My job is to produce a Web site that reflects my client's unique identity and creates a meaningful connection with their online visitors. By leveraging the Web's evolving technical and aesthetic standards, I define the shape of a site, based on it's core purpose, and make it stand out on the Internet.

Background

Duncan Gibbs is a professional with ten years experience designing and developing web sites for corporate and non-profit organizations and individual clients. His master's degree in Educational Technology focuses on multimedia production with an emphasis on learner psychology, making him an expert in user-friendly interface design.

Behind the Firewall

Corporate Web Publishing: Notes from a producer

This is not your MySpace page


Friday, October 24, 2008

Recently I've noticed a trend from content contributors for our enterprise Web site. When submitting a PDF brochure or fact sheet to be linked on the site, they've been identifying the pages that they, themselves, visit most frequently--as opposed to pages with related subject matter or even pages most frequently visited by their targeted users.

My hypothesis is that this tendency is influenced by social networking sites. People have become used to personalized home pages on portals like Yahoo and account-based home pages on social networking sites. "I uploaded the letter from my friend in Iraq. Go to my MySpace page to read it."

Here at work, one of these content contributors is accustomed to directing online users to the contact page for their business unit. Their business unit recently published a handout on a specific business topic. There are pages on the Web site focused on that topic. Yet, when the handout was submitted to our Web team, the request directed us to post the handout on the business unit's contact page. When I asked about the business objective, the answer was "that's the page they're used to going to."

I managed to persuade the contributor that the stronger business case would be to link the handout to pages with related text and graphics that supported the message of the handout. That may seem like a no-brainer, especially when you're reading the scenario laid out here. But we are creatures of our environment. We are influenced by the media surrounding us and the forms it takes. It's a simple but important part of Web producing to be aware of those forms and influences.