IDSA's new web site

The new web site is, IMO, proof positive the IDSA is about ready to fail. How long has Clive been touting this new site as the be-all, end-all, and THIS is what we get? There’s no content, except what was already on the old site. Everything that should be useful doesn’t work. The fonts are horrible and the information that’s there is unintelligible.

The one question I’ve been asking myself for a while now is does anyone care? Clearly the board has to see that the organization just keeps floundering. Staff left in droves earlier this year, and as I understand it, they’ve been replaced by people who don’t know anything about anything. Have you seen the email blasts for the conference? One called the organization ISDA and every one uses a different name for the conference. I also hear they’ve totally pissed off the educators and others by charging even more money for the same stuff.

My partners talked to Clive in Miami and he was so quick to criticize what Frank Tyneski and Kristina Goodrich did before, saying he’d do so much better. But I’ve seen nothing better. So maybe we should just put it out of its misery.

Link is down.

Yeah, they’ve been having domain issues. I can only guess. It’s accessible for some reason at

http://www.blue-harvest.org/

I asked on twitter, it’s a top priority to get resolved, so hopefully by the end of the year.


I pretty much agree with everything that has been said here. Unfortunately, this new rollout only reaffirms my assumptions about the idsa. After all the recent discussion on these boards I was considering giving it another go. Oh well. :frowning:

It takes 3 clicks to find the membership directory, assuming you know to look for it under “Connect.” Also the Innovation website is on the old template and hasn’t been updated since 2006.

Overall I think it’s kind of a mess. And why is Clive wearing transitions lenses in his headshot? So cheesy! But perhaps most telling is the lack of content on his page called Challenges/Tasks/Vision:
http://idsa.org/content/content1/challenges-tasks-vision

I could go on and on but I’m tired of waiting for pages on the site to upload…

I don’t know where to even start, and know that likely any constructive criticism wouldn’t be accepted any, so I’m not going to bother. Just so full of fail. I had a bit of hope there for a tiny bit of time…

R

PS. What the heck is the red blood spill/surface of mars image in the background of everything?

PS. So glad we opened this new forum from the urging of IDSA members that there would be a good ongoing discussion and fruitful contribution. Aside from a few posts about recent conferences, has there been anything new from IDSA people since March? Maybe I just have my cynical hat on today, but I think it’s well founded. You can’t over-promise and under-deliver time and time again and not expect to be called out on it.

Perhaps it’s one of those times like in the past when a new professional group rises up to take over from the old, slow-moving dinosaur… just sayin’.

Clive writes about the design of the site, dated “19 July 20010”

That said a whole lotta nothing. I’m not surprised it’s a huge undertaking, but I would expect feedback and in progress updates on places like the core forums here would be exactly what they would’ve needed given the past.

R

ahahha and what is that picture? jeez.

That’s just how far advanced the design is…it comes from the future-brought to you by Carl Jr.'s

Screen shot 2010-06-30 at 10.09.54 PM.png
Hahaha! Maybe it’s just the glass of wine I had, but I laughed for a good 3 minutes when I saw this.

@ IDSA Board,

You know guys, I have to say that I am very disappointed in this. We have been promised quite a bit over the past few years and you continue to under deliver. How do you expect us to keep coming back and keep participating if we as professionals don’t feel that you are taking us seriously? I have personally had many conversation with many of you and you all have told me great plans for the future of IDSA but I have yet to see them. My feedback to all of you was to keep your members posted on Core77 on the status of what is going on. I even pushed to have this section of the boards created for you and I have to say…Where have all of you been? Even with the feedback that has been given here on your site, I have seen many of you in the list of users that are online but none of you have posted replies. This is quite a shame.

On to the site critique. When Tim first posted this I went to the site and for some reason it looked more polished then it does now. Given that it is no longer up I will give my critique on what I see now.

  1. First the site looks unfinished. Text bocks are not aligned; title blocks are not legible and running off the page. It just looks like there was not a lot of attention to detail when putting this together. I would go back and comb through it and make sure those details are wrapped up. Come on guys we are designers. We should know these things.

  2. Like mentioned before, the branding of the organization just seems old and tired. Why not rebrand it and give IDSA a fresh start.

  3. Why was this given to a recent grad. I have no problems with young designers doing work for the organization, but shouldn’t you have given this to a branding or web agency to help you reinvent yourself. I think this was way too big of an undertaking for someone straight out of school. Knowing this however I have to say to the guy that did the work, Great effort!

  4. I like the idea of me being able to read about different members, but like mentioned before, why are photos stretched and out of proportion. Seems like an armature mistake to me.

  5. Also as mentioned before the navigation is not really intuitive. This was the biggest problem with the old site so I would have thought it would have been the top priority of new site. I don’t get what you are trying to communicate, where links are trying to take me, and there is so much really old material on the home page that I don’t really want to look at it. Maybe I am still just struggling with why I even go to the IDSA website. Nothing really entices me other than to find out where and when the next conference is and that I could find out on the old site. I need reason and value for being there. What are you providing me that I can not get at the other sites that I have been going to for many years? Why should I be a frequent viewer of your site?

This is just a few comment of many that I wrote down while review the new website. I have to say that you guys really need to start stepping up your game and making due on your promises, or I am afraid you are going to loose all your professional members. Remember a large chunk of your professional member base now has grown up with the web and relies on it for daily needs. If they are not getting their needs from you they will find it from others and they will stop paying your dues as they will stop seeing the value. We need more than just a couple conferences a year. I will also ask that if you are reading this (which you should be and if not that is a bigger problem) than respond to our comments and give your members the feedback that I think we both think we deserve. We have taken the time to write to you, you should take the time to write back.

Looks like it is now fixed, I eat my words! :open_mouth:

That’s what surprised me the most too. MAYA Design was behind the rebranding and site many years ago, why not use an agency now, when online presence is more important than ever?

To build a site like this, you need:

Creative Director: overall design
Interaction Designer: personas, wireframes, prototypes
Information Architect: organization, navigation, taxonomies
Usability Engineer: user testing
Visual Designer: visual concepts & assets
Editor/Copywriter: writing
Photographer: headshots, reporting
UI developer: code front end, HTML, CSS
Backend developer: coding all else, IT
QA: testing
Webmaster: daily content management

Was this student responsible for all of these roles?

Since INNOVATION is apparently the crown-jewel of IDSA according to the most recent survey, it would think to grow that staff and place IDSA.ORG under their responsibility. Treat it like the online magazine it is.

I completely agree!! This is a much bigger undertaking than giving it to a recent grad that may or may not know much about web design. Also who manages this site? Is there someone that is in charge of daily management? This was one of the biggest problems with the last site given that content came from many different sources.

BTW, I know you guys are thinking we are all cynics and only come out when you are doing something wrong, but I was really hoping for this to be a hit, because I think you had more people than you think you did routing for you. I had all intentions of praising you with the new site design.

At the least I think we all hoped for some involvement, participation, etc. Isn’t that why this section was set up in the first place? How can you attempt to represent a profession without consulting with you very membership/potential membership?

R

Hey guys,

I know there’s a lot of unhappy folks out there right now and personally, I share your disappointment and frustration. But we are all well aware of the current state of the website and all of it’s being addressed. This continues to be a mammoth undertaking and in a perfect world, it wouldn’t have been released just yet. But the reality was that we needed to launch the site in support of the announcement of our IDEA award winners and our commitment to Fast Company. It just didn’t make any sense to invest additional effort in an old website that would soon be inactive anyway.

So here we are, working on a website that wasn’t really ready for primetime, warts and all. We have invited our Chapter and Section leaders to start compiling their won lists of what’s broken (some is more obvious than others) and everything will be addressed in time. Eventually we hope to involve all of them in the refinement of the site as each of them will take ownership of their respective areas of the website.

The bottom line is this: keep it up with the criticisms, suggestions, observations, etc. (We can take it, just try to keep things constructive and professional as opposed to launching personal attacks on IDSA staff and/or board members.) Just because we don’t respond to every comment doesn’t mean they aren’t being heard. It seems more logical to spend time working to fix the problems as opposed to just discussing them here on Core.

That’s not to say that your comments are valuable (they are), it’s just that we’re picking our battles. I’m sure you can understand that.

Thanks,

w

Thanks for the repl, Warren. Helps put things in perspective. I’m sure the dialog here will still continue and of course we always welcome your participation

R

Sorry you haven’t had more direct response, but we’ve all got a lot on our collective plates…

Thanks for understanding.

w

  1. Also as mentioned before the navigation is not really intuitive. This was the biggest problem with the old site so I would have thought it would have been the top priority of new site. I don’t get what you are trying to communicate, where links are trying to take me, and there is so much really old material on the home page that I don’t really want to look at it. Maybe I am still just struggling with why I even go to the IDSA website. Nothing really entices me other than to find out where and when the next conference is and that I could find out on the old site. I need reason and value for being there. What are you providing me that I can not get at the other sites that I have been going to for many years? Why should I be a frequent viewer of your site?

Yup, and thanks for chiming in Warren, that makes sense. It’s tough putting out something unfinished.

I give the recent grads who worked hard on this site credit, good job. I have worked with Drupal and it is a bear, IMO. There is a comment made about the huge undertaking of the site overhall, it has 3500+ articles. It seems like in an effort to transfer all the legacy content and shoehorn existing meta data into a new, but equally complex, organizational structure, the real valuable goal of a redesign (making the site relevant and accessible, not simply updating the appearance) was lost. And in the storm of old content, I’m lost.

Maybe, the IDSA should start over. Reboot. Start new, simple, small, intuitive and add old content as needed if it is relevant. Right now there are too many arbitrary sounding, seemingly duplicated tags/categories/etc. with everything interlinked and scattered about. Too much clicking. Give me 5 well designed, content rich pages, and then you are starting somewhere:

  1. Designbytes: is like a blog. Designbytes is a good newsletter, the web version could be more up-to-date, could integrate a twitter scrape
  2. Innovation: about the magazine, and maybe a featured article or two. The IDEA would be here with decent photo galleries.
  3. Events: A running calendar of national and local events, maybe links to flickr photo pools from past events.
  4. Education: Student resources, list of chapters, schools, connect with Facebook, featured students that link to coroflots?
  5. About IDSA: Firms, Cities, Members(+Fellows), IDSA history. Distill everything in the about section here.

We can do better.

(I’d also like to throw in a suggestion for the some type of continuing education webinar/resource in the future as mentioned in Yo’s sister thread. That’s a role I could see the idsa filling, short of accreditation.)

I’ve said before that the problem of how to get busy professionals, or some of these highly offended posters up off their own keesters and contributing to the solution seems like an exercise in futility.

I’m not complaining, but…until IDSA isn’t a volunteer based non-profit any longer, I don’t see how these criticisms can possibly be addressed.