BIAD, the Birmingham Institute for Art and Design at UCE BCU, has a new website.
There are a couple of nice things about this. The most obvious is the extensive gallery of graduates’ work which serves to show off the grads and their alma mata, though links to their sites would make it really useful. The second is the news page which appears to cover a whole range of activities connected to the institute from colaborations with IKON, public lectures and events and new publications by staff.
While it might not be obvious, this new site is pretty much a blog. Indeed, it’s using Drupal, a powerful free content management system that understands the best things about weblogs. This also means they have RSS feeds – a first for an academic website that’s ostensibly all about the PR. No idea who’s behind it all but, compared to the parent site it’s a breath of fresh air.
via Nikki Pugh
I’m impressed that there are staff and research sections to the gallery too, but wouldn’t it be great if a departmental/campus site like this could leave the prospectus-type stuff like the about and courses pages to the main BIAD site and instead solely feature the events and work being produced?
Go on! It’s nearly there! .ac.uk or .org, not .com!
Though I don’t think the look of it is up to much (the .titles remind me of the Birmingham Artists website, and the colours are unpleasant), content-wise it’s interesting.
I think it’ll give current and prospective students a much better idea of what’s going on, who’s who and, I suppose, more of a sense of belonging to a community. It certainly helps the faculty come across as being progressive, which I guess is pretty important for an art school.
Not convinced this is a new site. BIAD’s original site is still available:
http://www.biad.uce.ac.uk/home.htm
As is the centralised version.
This site, I beleive, is specifically from the Fine Art dept.
These are interesting comments and I don’t expect I am the only person from BCU reading.
A new BIAD site wouldn’t be using anything other than Sharepoint as the CMS, thats the policy now unfortunately.
That reminds me of something funny that Jared Spool said at the dConstruct conference this year:
“For those of you who haven’t heard of Sharepoint, Sharepoint is an amazing way to destroy a business. Building an intranet using Sharepoint is like having a friend take you to a lumber yard and tell you ‘everything you need to build your house is here – get going’”.
Well the BCU Intranet has been redone using it, it might work one day :P
Drupal slightly unofficial. Marvellous! Credibility rating going up…
Wondering vaguely about comments elsewhere that Drupal is superb for co-blogging and community stuff who would we like to see providing the content for the site? …
(that should be Drupal plus slightly unofficial, but the symbol didn’t register)
“And we shall judge them by their content management systems”
Proverbs, 12:52, or some shit
I’m sure this site was done a while back, but the Fine Art department may have only just gotten around to launching it. Anyway, David Osbaldestin is the chappie behind it.
Who is this David Oz!? He’s clearly a master when it comes to sculpting a site out of Drupal.
I like the big drop shaddowed text – very nice. Not sure about the colours and the feathering, but it looks like a nice working site.
Students/faculties should organise more of these independent sites to show off work and research. They provide a much greater insight for propestive students than the offical biad/bcu sites.