I had the chance to talk about redesigning websites with three other faculty members at a great conference in Houston last week. More than 50 people heard ways to conduct research for your site, do usability testing, work with a vendor, handle stakeholder feedback, select a redesign team, and more.

There was good discussion about process and ensuring that your redesign sees the light of the day.

The biggest user complaint about most websites and intranets is, “I can’t find anything!” Our ability to produce content has outstripped our ability to retrieve and reuse it in a timely manner.

As we’ve learned from the new social media sites (Web 2.0), people not only like but need visual cues. The biggest social sites YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace are all very visual; chalked full of multimedia.

GlobalIncidentMap.com is mostly visual and in fact buries traditional navigation and information architecture by instead presenting a home page that is dominated by a highly interactive world map. The site is described by the creators as a tool to “give the public, law enforcement, military, and government individuals a new way to visualize, and become instantly aware of terrorism and security incidents” across the world.

So, we've taken the plunge. On Tuesday the communications office at Colgate started using a a blogging platform for posting and distributing our stories, and -- this is the cool part and potentially scary part -- we've opened up our stories to comments.

We hope to create a dialogue and build relationships among those interested in Colgate through the comment feature.

Here is the blog, which we've designed to mimic our main site to a large extent, while hopefully utilizing the power of blogs in an efficient way.

I know plenty of universities are using blog software as content management systems, but I don't know of any using the comment feature. If you know of any, please share.

Although both leading personalized user portals have been around for years, the two search turned portal turned Augustus Caesars have been upping the ante for your eyeballs.

The ongoing war is being fought with content and Web 2.0 as the delivery mechanism. Both My Yahoo! and iGoogle are personalized portals that allow the users to choose the type of content, layout, design, and tools that appear on the home page.

This spring iGoogle was redesigned and enhanced with new tools including Google gadgets (Google gadgets are interactive mini-applications like personalized, weather, etc. for your desktop – the same gadgets that inspired the gruesome Windows Vista gadgets).