Monday, April 26, 2010

Are They Done Yet?


OK, I get a lot of crap from people about not being too bright, and someday I'll come up with a snappy comeback to that, but at least in real life I'm not dumb enough to bother our designer about the new templates, even though everybody is waiting for them.

Seriously, I field like four calls or emails a day about when they are going to be ready. I just assure people that we are working very hard on them and they'll be available just as soon as we can get them out there!

And yeah, we actually kinda knew this would happen, but we really didn't have a choice. With the pressure to get the home page out by D-Day, we had to start tossing parts of the redesign project overboard reassigning things to phase 2 of the redesign project. The departmental site templates was one of those things. Originally, we planned to have them ready to go with the home page, but there was no way to make that happen, and as a result we live with the consequences.  Hopefully, the wait will just make people more appreciative. Yeah, right.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I bet it can get tiresome having to answer all the same emails, but consider yourself lucky that you have departments that want to update. By in large, our departments on campus simply don't want to update. They feel they know their audience the best and think that they want things like scrolling marquees, auto play muzak and framed site structure. Okay, that was a bit of hyperbole, but you understand.

Billy Adams said...

I bet it can get tiresome having to answer all the same emails, but consider yourself lucky that you have departments that want to update. By in large, our departments on campus simply don't want to update. They feel they know their audience the best and think that they want things like scrolling marquees, auto play muzak and framed site structure. Okay, that was a bit of hyperbole, but you understand.

robinteractive said...

If any of your physicists are astronomers, you may have made someone mad....

We all run into these situations. I've found keeping a 3x5 card of names of people that asked these questions, then following up when things are ready to go, can make a very positive impression. Sometimes follow-up makes a more positive impression than being ready out-of-the-gate!

teamsiems said...

I nominate "Phase 2" as the catch phrase of FY10. We've pushed more changes off to Phase 2 this year than any other year I can remember. We redesigned 9 sites in 12 months and at least 4 of them had a Phase 2.

We start with a template in our CMS so it's available, but we sell our web services and the throw the templates in for free.

http://it.tamu.edu/