Rescuing Troubled Web Sites

Businesses and organizations often learn the hard way about how to operate a Web site that is clean, responsive, easy to use, safe, secure and effective. Following an all too common scenario, someone in-house has the idea and soon a page is launched. Other ideas percolate and another page is attached, then 10 or 20 more. Soon a developer is hired who, all in a rush and without a real plan, adds other features. Later, undocumented patches and other quick fixes manage to keep the thing online.

At some point, people in the organization begin hearing complaints. Or they start worrying about who might be able to tap into the site and contact its visitors. Or the site crashes, once, twice or many times. Perhaps it is all but forgotten and grows stale, or needs to be migrated--which is difficult at best, because the site is so entangled with undocumented programs.

Finally, the in-house IT team decides that a new site must be built from scratch, and a company specializing in building sophisticated e-commerce sites is brought in.

User-Group Site Evolves
In 1997, the International Alliance of Avaya Users (InAAU) launched a Web site where members could find newsletters or other product information pertaining to the telecommunications company. By 2000, however, the site was so out of date it became confusing to navigate--labels didn't match content and entire sections had lost their identity. So the InAAU decided to transform the site.

The company hired Boulder, Colo.-based XOR, an e-business solution provider with 350 employees, to build a new site. As part of a two-day discovery process, InAAU leadership--all volunteers--realized that they could run the not-for-profit organization through a portal of the Web site, in effect as a virtual office. They also realized that the main draw for the 3,500-member organization--the contacts and information exchanged through conferences--could happen instantly year-round online.

With XOR, the InAAU found its match.

"I sometimes don't know the Web terms," says Pamela Fueshko, telecommunications director at William Paterson University, Wayne, N.J., and InAAU board member. "[XOR is] able to interpret what I'm saying and help me to understand what things will mean down the road. They suggested things. They have vision."

"You have to discover what [clients] really want, what their goals are," says Len Beasley, XOR's director of information architecture.

Why would users of Avaya products want to keep in such close touch that their organization went through an eight-month cycle to build a dynamic site for members?

Telecommunications professionals within companies, educational institutions and government are engaged in tasks entirely separate from their fellow staffers, which contributes to their isolation in attempting to resolve the issues that might arise during a complex telecom installation.

"It's important for me to reach out to other users via chats and forums and to get live feedback on all kinds of problems and issues," Fueshko says. "I'm forever tapping into my counterparts at universities all over the country asking what to do in this or that scenario. The back-and-forth is phenomenal. Usually in universities we are holding things together by the skin of our teeth."

She says she finds that hospital telecom directors running Avaya installations are also active networkers.

"Before, the site was strictly brochureware," Fueshko says. "Now, it's really going to make it easier for the organization to function. We now have a place to maintain our minutes, financials and other reports. For members, real-time information is the greatest benefit."

An upcoming feature of the new site is "Future Needs," where users may submit responses, complaints and suggestions about Avaya products. The submissions are reviewed and codified by the user organization then submitted to Avaya and discussed with an Avaya team. The company then formally responds to the InAAU, and, in some cases, commits to future product development or changes requested by the user organization.

"We used to do this on a once a year basis," Fueshko says. "It's important to me that we will get immediate information to and from Avaya, and then out to members."

Accessibility Now
iCan, Birmingham, Mich., launched its Web site in 1998 to provide online information and services for people with disabilities. As the company grew, changing as it shifted its business model, iCan found more than once that its unstable, designed-by-afterthought Web site had to be completely scrapped.

The challenge was rendered more complex by the company's commitment to Web site accessibility for people with disabilities--such as having audio components for all site text--and the huge backlog of 10,000 pages of information it had not been able to load onto the site.

Then iCan landed a contract with General Motors to provide information on accessible vehicles for people with disabilities. In addition to being on a tight time frame, the agreement was cash on delivery--and iCan was short of cash. The company brought in Esoftsolutions, Plano, Texas, for development backup. Esoftsolutions provided development manpower to meet the six-month time frame for the iCan-designed site and, believing in the company's future and mission, allowed iCan to pay in installments stretching over one year.

iCan.com now function as a one-stop community and marketplace for its visitors, providing employment and political information, product recommendations and sales, as well as social channels. The company has also branched out to offer awareness and workplace training.

Because of the accessibility issue, iCan.com went through three iterations before finding satisfaction with its present design. Previous developers "struggled because they did not understand that accessibility is cheaper to build in from the beginning," says Mike Wagner, iCan's CTO. "It's glaring how little designers would have had to do in the beginning to make the Web site accessible."

To create its own accessible design, iCan went back to basics, designing a straight HTML site, labeling the graphics with descriptive text and identifying superfluous graphics.

"The biggest challenge for us was dealing with vision impairments," says Mike Pokas, vice president of e-services at Esoftsolutions. "Getting the site to speak back to you was the biggest problem we had to solve."

Now the federal government has promulgated Section 508, supported by the Federal IT Accessibility Initiative, which requires in part that federal Web sites be accessible to people with disabilities. The federal standards are similarto the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C's) accessibility standards, which have been adopted by the European Union and various countries. iCan's Wagner believes that both the government and W3C standards provide nearly 90 percent accessibility.

Wagner complains, however, that the federal standards do not provide a clear roadmap to accessibility.

"I call it the trial lawyer full-employment plan," he says.

Following their successful collaboration, iCan and Esoftsolutions have created a partnership to advise and develop accessible sites.

"I've talked to very knowledgeable developers who have no idea that people are listening to their Web sites," Wagner says.

He estimates that less than 2 percent of Web sites are accessible.

Esoftsolutions' Pokas looks forward to additional accessibility development challenges.

"You have to come up with an accessibility methodology, with procedures, steps and a checklist so that every time you go in, you know what to do and can take the right steps to make the project as streamlined as possible," he says.