I'm quoting him again: Gerry McGovern's latest New Thinking:
"Quantity is generally a dangerous thing to pursue on the Web. Even if you can maintain the quality of the content, if you increase the quantity, you inevitably make it more difficult for people to quickly find what they need."
I certainly have that problem. Especially now as more people are interested in seeing their own interests reflected on our site. I can easily give everyone a page if they produce the content. But is it a good idea? If we want the site to primarily serve three audiences, then should we be putting up information for a sixth and seventh? Should we consider other ways of reaching that audience?
"Most people I meet who have created overly large websites have done so because they want to help as many people as possible. They publish content because they think that somebody might be interested in reading it at some time. These are noble objectives but they nearly always lead to hugely inefficient websites."
Is this an issue for us as editors? If you see that viewers are getting distracted by too much information and too many choices, what do you do? If you see that you can't keep up with updates or that contributers (who you once begged to publish) aren't keeping up, what do you guys do? Do you leave that up to someone else? Does your CMS bug people electronically? Does that work?
I once took an entire program's site and placed it elsewhere on the server (the impound lot) so it was no longer publicly available because their content was so old. They didn't seem to mind. Probably because no one had responsibility for that content in their job description. Eventually new content was produced and several pages just dropped.
We have a statement in our policies that applies: "Pages or sections containing inaccurate or outdated material may be removed by the college Web communication manager. Removals will be preceded by notification to the publisher." Do you have policies in place to handle this?
Posted by bullwink at May 9, 2005 2:05 PM