Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/59881
The Newest Utility The Internet is now an inextricable part of life for those in the market for management education. In fact, Web sites have become commodities, like automobiles, says Wayne Marr, dean of the School of Management at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. "People view the Internet as a utility, like electric- ity," he adds. In November 1995, Marr and partner Hal Kirkwood ranked Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management recently began a major branding initiative, which administrators wanted to communicate clearly through the school's new Web site. A key feature on the home page is a prominent image window. When users first visit the home page, designed by Ripple Effects, they are greeted with the school's brand slogan, "Discover this place. Shape your world," followed by a slide show of images of Owen students. effort to become more comprehensive, many business schools have made their sites unnecessarily overwhelming," says Ho. Even worse, such tactics may drive away the central audi- ence a business school most wants to attract—first-time users, who are often prospective students. This group most often comes to the site to experience the school visually, via images, quick-read links, and bullet-pointed information, not to read lengthy blocks of text. For this audience, says Ho, a Web site's top-level pages should be airy and simply organized, with links leading to more detail for those who want more information. To best achieve that balance between simplicity and useful- ness, many business schools are turning to external vendors to redesign their Web sites with their users in mind. For instance, Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management in Nashville, Tennessee, worked with Ripple Effects last year to completely redesign its site at www.owen.vanderbilt.edu. The site is now the linchpin of the school's marketing strategy. The school's brand, exemplified by the phrase "Discover this place. Shape your world," permeates the entire Web site, through images, content, and Macromedia Flash presentations. The goal for the redesigned site was threefold, says Yvonne Martin Kidd, the Owen School's director of marketing and communication. The school wanted its site to help prospec- tive students make the important decision about their educa- tion, enhance the school's new branding campaign, and con- nect with each visitor on a personal level. "We wanted the site to be easier to navigate, program-centric, and user-centric," says Kidd. "The Web is the way people make decisions these days. We need to drive people to our Web site so we can help them make those decisions." 32 BizEd JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2005 the best and worst business school Web sites, judging them by criteria such as navigation, content, and usefulness. At the time, business schools with an online presence had increased to more than 200 from about 30 in only six months. Dead links, incom- plete faculty listings, scant informational resources, and woeful- ly out-of-date content plagued many sites, says Marr. Only a few, such as those run by MIT's Sloan School of Management, Harvard Business School, and Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management, earned high praise from Marr and Kirkwood. Those sites, says Marr, were precur- sors to the modern b-school site, complete with faculty biogra- phies, media pages, directories, research databases, course cata- logs, virtual campus tours, and online applications. Efforts such as those by Marr, Kirkwood, and Ho would be much more difficult to accomplish today, they say, now that business school Web sites number in the thousands. In addi- tion, the designs of today's business school Web sites have begun to converge, becoming almost indistinguishable from one another, says Marr. "Business schools are finding the sites they like best and replicating them. I don't mean to say they're all beginning to look the same—but, well, they are." IESE wanted its new site to be user-friendly, bilingual, and decentralized so that each department can maintain its own content. Launched last September, the redesigned site is targeted especially to first-time users, who should come away from their visit with a concise yet comprehensive idea of IESE's mission, brand, and programs, says IESE's Larisa Tatge.