Throwing money at it

Generally it’s great to be offered money. Yet one of the trickiest questions for me to field is: “we’ve got £5000 to spend on the website by the end of this term; what should we do?”.

There are two reasons this is a tricky one for me.

The first is that I don’t think money will buy the things that will ultimately make the site better for users. The websites I look after are simply not as useful, clear and focused as they could be by a long stretch (although some are trying). Making them better involves a lot of time and a lot of effort – really thinking about what the site is for, reviewing everything that’s on it to make sure it should be there, editing each and every page so that it’s accomplishing a purpose, monitoring and evaluating and feeding back in and starting the cycle again – but not very much money at all. The offer to throw money at it feels at best like an attempt to take a shortcut through all the hard slog; at worst, like sidelining the site itself in favour of some whizzy new expensive gadget.

The second reason is that, with the current proliferation of free online services, I struggle to think of a single thing that we would want to do that we couldn’t at least try out for free. Sure, it’s nice to engage more with students, to book events online, to have forums and discussion groups; but we can use Facebook, Eventbrite, Google Groups to accomplish all this. And, yes, there’s something to be said for buying in a bespoke system: it’s likely to be more secure and more customisable, and it will reduce dependence on third party services. But that kind of system needs careful consideration, both in the choice of product and in what we want to do with it. At the moment we’re still exploring what we can do with our online provision, so I see more value in pilot schemes to try out a concept using free services than in buying in something we may never use.

Sadly, I mostly see sums of money being spent on bolt-on gadgets, usually, if I may be so cynical, something a director can get a name for bringing in. It’s not that I mind having the bolt-on, if for no other reason than that the publicity surrounding it will likely bring more traffic to the website.

But our websites are, at a very basic level, failing our users; and what they need is time, thought, and effort to change them. I wish people would stop trying to throw money at them.