Adventures in Cyberspace

I have only recently analysed my disenchantment with the Arts Hub site, which Gemma discussed in our first class website briefing. I have never really taken to the facelift which was voted most popular in a design contest, particularly for a vehicle purporting to represent the ‘creative career community’. But it is the design and navigation of the site that I find cumbersome. From the home page it requires two clicks to reach a story which we may or may not be really interested in after the abbreviated introduction.

A large advertisement on the front page for a degree in arts and entertainment management takes you off-site to Deakin University’s site. This is a distraction.

When you enter ‘latest news’ there is a useful function ‘browse by sector’ which allows you target the kind of news you’re looking for but still you have to enter two clicks to reach the news, and consider an in-your-face comment function before actually reading the article.

And something which is inexcusable online is having outdated copy under ‘latest news’ and ‘profiles’.

News is a mixture of RSS feeds from different national and international newspapers, press releases and arts hub articles. It is impossible to decipher the source on first viewing the link, which might be sourced as e.g.(Australia). Members are emailed a weekly e-bulletin “The Front Page” which is much simpler to navigate, once you’ve scrolled through the ticket giveaways, you can click directly through to articles of your choice. Reviews of mixed quality precede latest headlines.

The drop down menus are an irritating feature though, here they are not cluttered, relatively clean and clear and not too difficult to navigate.

Events are classified by sector without much art in presentation and do not indicate the paucity of content available, mainly only advertised events seem to get listed.

At least the advertising is generally well connected to the intent of the site, although printing deals on the home page represent a more tenuous connection.

Profiles are a good way of recognising some of the performers who are doing good work but are scarcely visible in mainstream media. Again the selection and quality of these profiles varies and they are left online after their currency e.g. a forthcoming season has ended.

Of course, for the subscriber the jobs listings are an important feature, but while you can browse by category and location there seems to be no distinction in job coding between opportunities, volunteering and paid jobs.

When this service was conceived by David Eedle and Fiona Boyd nine years ago it was a break through in communication for the arts and creative services community. Although its content, particularly free content, and collaborative opportunities have grown and developed and its services have increased in reach, the accessibility of valuable information for arts workers seems devalued by a sprawling focus.

This leads me to a question: why is Arts Hub currently targeting lapsed subscribers with special deals?

Another website I’ve been looking at is www.cvent.com/. With the proliferation of event management companies in Australia, it takes a focussed approach to cut through the clutter.

This US based company emailed me a lunch invitation to a demonstration of Cvent event management prowess and a colleague a meeting request to a webinar to discuss web survey best practice. The slick website (which unfortunately does include some drop down menus, but uses a variety of techniques to sort and semi-customise information) relates to a suite of integrated web products from a ten year old company, including event management software and supplier network, as well as web survey software and strategic meetings management and email marketing.

Their recently launched freely available database of US and more locally based meeting suppliers is surprisingly impressive. I wonder what the cost is to the ‘supplier’ They also make good use of YouTube and have made some provision for collaborative content inviting comments in response to self-promotional blogs and a Twitter following. They claim to have helped diverse customers manage over 150,000+ marketing campaigns, events and web surveys. Of course, this statistic glosses over the nature of the ‘help’. Perhaps they should be the subject of a web survey.

It is interesting that both these websites have evolved over a similar timeframe (one fundamentally product based and the other services based) originating in different countries. Both have expanded on a global scale – Arts Hub has expanded into the US and the UK and Cvent is now multinational in its reach. They have utilised different approaches to expanding technology towards the creation of free content and a dynamic user interface.