Earlier today I posted a question on Twitter:
Standard site templates: http://tinyurl.com/a9ytm9 says nay, I say yea. How vote ye?
Responses came quickly:
danjohn1234
danjohn1234 @yelvington a resounding yea from me on templates. Content trumps design always. The content should set a mareket apart, not the design.gmarkham
gmarkham @yelvington voting yea with some ifs: if totally customizable and if (the big one) under local control/decision-making.Ben LaMothe
BenLaMothe @yelvington Could you elaborate on your yea vote? Do you think it's OK to have 20-some titles each have essentially the same look/feel?Seth Long
greenergrad @yelvington std templates are a good starting point when introducing new concepts and tech to newsrooms. long term, though? nay.Will Duncan
imagetic @yelvington i honestly think not having your own CMS/web-team is long-term suicide.Ryan Sholin
ryansholin @yelvington I double-dog-dare @benlamothe to support more than 20 or so sites without some standardization of templates.Elaine Clisham
eclisham @yelvington If most standard designs didn't suck so badly
I asked because I happen to be working on a project that will include standard templates. There are some good arguments for using them, including:
- Economy. This is not a good time to be staffing 100 newspapers with 100 talented Web designers, even if it were possible to find 100 talented web designers, or to be plunging 1,200 or so people into endless design debates. (This is based on my experience that at least a dozen different people think they're key decisionmakers in every design process.)
- Best practices: There actually are some, and adhering to them is a good idea, particularly in areas like usability.
- Advertising network requirements: You can't make money from networked advertising if you don't follow network standards.
- Supportability: When your design genius moves on to a more respectable job playing piano in a bawdy house, the poor saps who were left behind may need to change or fix something. It would be good if others could figure out how the design works, and how it was implemented.
Actually, I think Elaine should win the door prize for identifying the real problem, which is designs that suck. Unless you either have way too much time on your hands or you're working on a term paper for a journalism class, you're not likely to be pulling up a couple of dozen newspaper websites all belonging to Megalomedia Corporation and comparing them to see if they're different. It's far more likely that you visit one and conclude it's a godawful mess, without regard to whether it's a shared design.
Around the turn of the century, a big newspaper company called Knight-Ridder, or KnightRidder, or Knight Ridder, depending on which way the branding engine was blowing, rolled out a standard site design that many regarded as an abomination. Its biggest sin wasn't that it was ugly (although many of us thought it was), or that it was common across many markets, but rather that it locked all the K-R sites into an "online news" design that was incapable of reflecting the actual online news content. Although the situation improved somewhat in later revisions of the production system, the negative image stuck in everybody's minds.
Done well, a standard site design can provide flexibility from day to day and can be "skinned" and customized to match market requirements while still delivering the benefits of standardization. I think Jay Small's work in this area at Scripps is a good example, and Chris Muldrow and Bill Blevins unquestionably cleaned up some horrid random designs by implementing solid standards at CNHI and Gatehouse.
In our redesign work at Morris, to be implemented on our new Drupal-based publishing platform, I'm hoping that we can nail down best practices and standardize the parts that ought to be standardized, while handing editors and community interaction managers a new level of day-to-day control so that presentations can effectively celebrate content.
Some frequent design errors that I see are:
Excessive decoration. This often happens because an actual graphic designer got pulled into the process. The Web requires a gentle touch with a focus on usability.
Unsustainable/unsupportable content requirements. That design that seemed like such a lovely idea when it was built out of Lorem Ipsums and random stock images may be a cruel master to serve day after day after day when the actual content doesn't rise to the requirements of the layout.
Failure to reflect a content vision. This may be due to a failure to have actually have a content vision (maybe the 80 percent case, judging from a look at American newspaper sites), but it also can come from leaving the designer to wander around and guess.
Failure to prioritize, and its cousin, failure to say "no." Now that a lot of folks at the newspaper realize the Internet is actually important, they're all demanding a chunk of homepage real estate. That's how we wind up with 110 links and 45 images and a 2-megabyte download before a page will render, and it's how we -- oops! Where's the search box? Didn't you say we were going to have blogs and forums? How in Hades can I buy an ad on this site?
Failure to realize that a homepage is not a site design. A news website is broad and deep, and it requires careful thinking about how to organize the infospace -- a working navigational taxonomy. It requires a realization that a large part of the audience doesn't enter through the homepage. It requires attention to the details that tie together disparate bits of content and functionality around contexts. I'm looking at item X. What other items might be of particular interest to me?
Comments
Further thoughts too long for Twitter
While I largely agree
Another view
http://www.andydickinson.net/2009/01/13/print-organisations-will-need-to...
Template inheritance
Inheritance
Right. Inherit, then override (if you have a legitimate reason). The system we're deploying, based on Drupal, does exactly that. The harder question is: What's a legitimate reason for deviating from the standard? My experience, unfortunately, has been that design discussions tend to entangle ego and personal preference with a minority portion of business reasoning.
Templates
I think another question that