Site launches are a really big deal for us; we work with only a few clients at a time, so by rights we ought to stop the presses and pop champagne whenever one of our clients’s sites opens to the public. But inevitably new client work (and summer vacations) intervene, and our celebrations wind up being more private.
I wrote a blog post the day the Kenyon College site launched, and had intended to do something more splashy. I still might. We at White Whale are all very, very happy with how the Kenyon site came out, and are very proud of Kenyon’s able Public Affairs staff, who did a great job of implementing our CSS/XHTML designs into a sometimes unforgiving CMS; we’ve been there to help, but most of the finishing work was done on their end. So— Shawn, Patty, Rebecca: congratulations again.
But I’m really writing to talk about something specific that is happening to the design, which in my view is the most exciting thing about it.
At the beginning of this job, we brought the whole company to Kenyon’s campus for three days of meetings to talk about every imaginable aspect of the job. In those early meetings, whenever the conversation turned to including student-generated content on the home page, everyone expressed hesitation about whether Kenyon’s close-knit culture was ready for that kind of open channel. We pretty much assumed that Kenyon’s home page content (text and images both) would be under pretty tight editorial control for the foreseeable future.
When we finalized the site design, we suggested that the photo wall that dominates the home page might allow for the opportunity for student submissions. Although nobody was really sure if people would use it, the decision was made to include a “Submit Photos” link on the captions for the larger photos that result from clicking on the thumbnails. And they decided to give away a gift certificate to the cafe for any submissions they accepted.
And lo and behold, it’s starting to happen! If you click on the very middle photo in the wall (of two graduates); or the sixth photo in the top row, or the last photo in the second row, you’ll see photos submitted by students. This is just the beginning of what will eventually be something really interactive and exciting (and we’re building Kenyon a special page, as a farewell gift, to contain it all).
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