Tangibility Wrapped in Usability

That's what good websites have turned into. They are no longer "online brochures" as they were in the 20th Century but a place where users can go to get some measure of "tangibility" or what the product or service is like, in a form that is easy to use and digest [usability]. It doesn't have to be pretty anymore, it just has to be effective. Are YouTube and Google pretty websites? 'Nuf said.

We created our first college consortia website in December of 1995. Netscape was up to version 2.0 and no one was using Internet Explorer. The big search engines were Alta Vista and Lycos.

Our first website was created to post the findings of the Minnesota Private College Distance Learning Planning Study. Sort of rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? We had taken a year off from our administration position at the University of St. Thomas to travel to all of Minnesota's private colleges and interview presidents, academic deans, librarians and anyone who was interested in promoting distance learning.

Whatever distance learning meant before our study, it mostly meant using the internet during and following our study. We held a conference at the University of St. Thomas' Minneapolis Campus to discuss the findings that we posted on our website. Over half the 35 participants in the study attended and they all had read the website, which became the starting point of all discussion.

After this experience, it became clear that this medium was going to permanently change higher education for the better. We immediately started creating degree program and institute websites for the University of St. Thomas. A year after that, we went to work for a private college consulting firm and started to create college consortia websites that promoted alumni outcomes research findings. We kept on making webs for the degree programs and institutes.

In 2003, we branched out on our own and have been involved with not only creating and maintaining college consortia websites, but marketing them to their audiences using various E-marketing tools. We also consult for the same private college consulting firm on web topics including website evaluations.

Today, it has become clear to us where this is all going, as far as internet technology is concerned. Physicists today talk about "background-independent" theories, and we talk about "Operating System, Computer Platform and Browser Independent" web systems. There are several to choose from and we chose an open-source Content Management System [CMS] that promises to revolutionize web-making for non-profit enterprises like private colleges. The cost of any our projects is paying for the expertise of the person who knows how to setup, install and maintain this open source system.

Contact Us to find out more about data-driven CMS and how it turns web pages into database fields and vice versa.