governance

Standardization and Large Web Sites

Very large sites supporting a large number of units/stakeholders can easily turn into a hodge-podge of styles, user interface elements, and quality. One of the toughest discussions with clients, however, is why they can't do more customization (even if one of the core requirements of the system is to help enforce standardization). What are some of the reasons *not* to standardize:

• specific business needs of different groups (not to be confused with a group just wanting to differentiate itself somehow, for instance with a different look, that does not help the web visitor at all)
• professional development (for instance a developer might be interesting to do a mashup)
• personal expression (liking particular colors for example)
• experimentation (don't know in advance what's going to "stick," so try a variety of things)

In my opinion, the first and last reasons are the most compelling (and the third not being a good reason at all for an enterprise-wide system), although one of the problems with experimentation is the frequent expectation that an experiment could quickly be rolled into the normal standardized platform (that's probably a post on its own!). Here are some reasons *to* standardize:

• consistent brand for the user ("am I still on the same site? Is this high quality content?")
• consistent UI for the user ("do I know how to use the site?")
• better support for new site admins or transition of support between sites
• single sign-on. It's confusing for a user to have various accounts with the same institution.
• standard statistics. Different statistics packages can have entirely different ways of counting something as basic as a page view. Standardizing no a statistics package can help ensure you're comparing apples to apples in your web analysis.
• better search. If everyone does their own thing, then there may be more fragmented information which would mean search results aren't as good.
• stability / support. As anyone who works with software/systems knows, the more functionality or special customization you put into a system, the more effort it takes to maintain it. Also, the system will probably be less stable. This one is also very tough to discuss with a client (and another probable future blog post) since they tend to only see their particular need.

Some possible methods of standardization:

• Governance. There needs to be a group with the power and influence to say "no" to requests that undermine the quality of the user experience of the site at large. This ideally is not the technology group since there would appear to be a conflict of interest.
• Clearly define exactly what is inside the standard and what is outside.
• Technology. The content management system used to manage the site can be set up such that users can only make changes that comply with the standard.
• The right level of customization. Standardization shouldn't be an excuse to totally control every aspect of everyone's sites or to not allow any innovation.
• Hooks into core shared functionalty. You may decide that a single sign on for users of your site is desirable. If so, then perhaps the system could be set up with an API such that tools developed and commissioned by other groups could work with the core functionality.
• Standardized access to data. Ideally, you could define a standard method of each system exposing its core data, that even people outside the institution could utilize for mashups, etc. By providing the data in a simple XML API, this could facilitate both internal and external usage of data.
• Another potential approach is to have separate branding for the official, blessed content and for the organization-centric content. For instance, you may have multiple units in your institution all looking at the topic of taxes. Ideally you would have one official web site that makes sense of your institution's view of taxes overall, and preferably this would pull information from all the units. The various units still may want their own site, but this is less useful for the end user -- so perhaps these units could have their own sites branded differently (and perhaps all requiring a standard link back to the official site) to clearly indicate it is the view of a particular unit with your institution.

Of course, all of these are easier said than done when trying to get a large number of units into the same system, but perhaps some of these could be initiated even after a large suite of sites have been implemented in a central content management system.