Where Do You Come In?

Suppose a major bureaucracy. Many levels, and each level with plenty of detail. Think of, let's say, Plymouth, since they are out of business, now. We can talk about them without any one particular Pointy Haired Boss getting too upset. So, Plymouth.

You have an entire car company, with all the online concerns any company would have. Here is how to reach us. Here is where to go for a new car, servicing or parts, and so on.

Now think of each of the products, there toward the end. The minivan, the little Neon, the hot-rod Prowler, the Breeze young-family car. Each of those are independent enough to need their own Web sites, under the umbrella of the Plymouth site, itself.

The way Dreamweaver is organized, the Webmaster of the Plymouth brand site would have access to the whole thing, whether or not that was A Good Idea. You then create sub-sites for the gal who does the minivan, and another for the guy who does the Prowler and so on. The Neon Web person would have complete and total access to all of the Neon site materials, but could get no higher, could not affect the overarching Plymouth site, and could not monkey with the minivan pages, either. But the Plymouth crew, by merely opening up a folder, can get into the minivan pages, the hot rod pages—all of it.

You can create completely separate sites, and string them together online with different URLs. There are DNS tricks for colocating Web sites under one umbrella. The thing to take away from this is that there are ways around all of this, but it isn't always easy to see which one is best?

Plymouth itself was owned by Chrysler, so should the URLs be http://www.Chrysler.com/Plymouth/Neon/? Everything in the Neon folder would then be available to anyone who could work in the Plymouth folder, and everything there would be available to anyone working in the Chrysler folder. What about sub-sites like http://www.Plymouth.com/ or http://www.Neon.com/, then?

It ain't easy, bein' me. But we're working on it.

What has happened in the past is that we have had too many cooks in the kitchen. Too many ideas of what constitutes Good Taste, too many different levels of education and experience, too many different ideas of what is Good and what is Good Enough.

We are working on streamlining that, now, improving the workflow, the commonality of styles in writing and punctuation, navigation, the voice of the site, if you will. It's going to be an interesting project and I am looking forward to seeing how it all turns out.

Work continues apace on a new design for our own umbrella site. Committees are meeting to discuss whether this change will be radical, or more evolutionary. We have tested some preliminary mock ups for first impression scores and talked about things like whether we need [fill in your favorite feature, here]. At one point we even discussed whether we needed to redesign the site at all.

A lot of that is good and healthy. I come down on the side of those who would hate to think that we would adopt a look and keep it for a generation. The Web is too new for that, and nearly everything about it is changing. In the past we have changed designs not merely because we were bored with whatever is current, but largely due to changing technologies and user expectations. The first few generations were just link farm sites, gently pointing people in a very boring way toward whatever information they were looking for that we actually had, online. But we quickly got better.

There have been rapid improvements in display technologies, and today screens are wider, taller and offer more vivid colors. But they are also, thanks to mobile technology, smaller and narrower and offer fewer colors. Transmission speeds, by and large, are faster than ever before. And the user expectation has gone up. If we can place the current temperature and forecast in the corner today, then why can't we put my scholastic and social calendar on the first page, tomorrow? I have European Novels at 9:00am, Economics at 1:00 and then nothing until Pledge Night at 6:00pm. Other sites already do things like that. Shouldn't we be at least a cool as other sites?

There's almost never a dull moment.