While trying to find information about the Yale School of Art’s new gallery, I came across their interesting wiki-powered site. It seems the entire departmental site allows personnel from around the school to make updates. All changes to the site are tracked, wiki style, and visible to the public. Overall it is a really interesting concept from a content management system (CMS) perspective, but in practice I think the site itself is a bit of a design trainwreck. In fact I couldn’t find the information on the new gallery at all on the site.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the CMS space recently, and have come to believe that different types of content require different types of management tools. As dynamic as the web is getting there is still a place for what is essentially static content. In the case of a school this would include building locations, how to apply, degrees offered and other content that changes rarely — reference materials. A staff directory is a more dynamic item, and is best placed in some type of data-driven application, perhaps even where each person is responsible for their own page. Content such as a project team site or a student art show discussion page would fit quite well in a wiki-type tool. I do not think the concept of one-CMS-to-rule-them-all is really appropriate in today’s increasingly diverse web content/application world.
The work by the design firm, Linked by Air, looks interesting. Their blog has an older post mentioning a project to redesign the Whitney Museum web site, with a launch date of February 2009. I can’t tell by looking at the Whitney site if the new design has been implemented, but it will be interesting to see how it comes out.
Yale University School of Art: AboutThisSite
This website is the continuously evolving effort of many people from many disciplines within the Yale School of Art and its wider circles. It is a wiki, meaning that every graduate student, staff person, and faculty member of the School can change this website’s content or add to it at any time
We’re now redesigning Whitney Museum’s website. The new site will launch at the end of February 2009. August has been the “discovery” phase of the project. We’ve been meeting with each department and working group at the Whitney, for about an hour each
Newest Yale Gallery To Showcase International Art
The gallery is located at 32 Edgewood Ave., adjacent to a new studio building dedicated to the Yale School of Art’s sculpture program…”Shifting Shapes – Unstable Signs,” on view through Feb. 27, was organized by Storr and Jaret Vadera, a student in the School of Art.
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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