I don’t have a lot to say about the Virginia Tech tragedy, mainly because I don’t feel like my two cents are worth much. Based on working on a residential campus it has certainly been a troubling thing to think about for me, but me talking about young people, gun control, video games, etc. just doesn’t seem right.

I do, however, feel as though I can talk about how Virginia Tech has handled the matter online. I’ve been watching very closely as the last few days have unraveled, as vt.edu is the only real way that the general public can have a connection to what happened. We have contingency plans in place for hurricanes here at Eckerd and have had to use several of them before, but I can’t even imagine trying to handle something like this. You just can’t plan for it.

The day of the shootings the homepage was redirected to an IP, my guess is that they did this so that they didn’t have to replace their homepage, they could instead just redirect to a copy of it on another server. The homepage contained only one small news story, a statement from the President and a few sparse links. Gone were Admissions, Academics, Student Life, everything. I thought this was exactly the right response, leaving your homepage as if nothing is going on sends a message and I think the fact that they were willing to drastically alter it showed that they were doing their best to respond appropriately.

On Tuesday more news stories and information about their convocation appeared, but the sparse links remained. They were updating extremely frequently, which again is to me the precise thing they should have been doing. I am sure their University Relations and Web Communications teams were working pretty much around the clock to control the one media channel they could control.

On Wednesday the homepage underwent another transformation into the screenshot you see above (click it for a larger view). Once again I think their team made an incredible decision in creating a memorial right there on the homepage. It is again primarily a source for news and information, but now contains the names of some of the victims, photographs from the convocation and the main links have returned in a footer. I really think this shows a great deal of respect and reverence.

Other related items of interest are the tragedy section, the convocation streamed live, and the higher ed outreach page.

It may seem odd to be analyzing web design, but this is the kind of stuff I think about at work. I don’t know that we would have been able to handle it as well as they did. I was quoted in Computerworld in a story about sms text messaging as a way to alert students to emergencies. I definitely feel as though our decision to purchase an sms system gives us a great advantage, but what didn’t come across in the article was my concern that there is no guarantee technology would have changed what happened – you’ve got to have a lot of infrastructure, good cell numbers and smart staff to know when to use it. Interestingly enough the day after that article was posted, a public relations staff member from Virginia Tech responded letting Computerworld know that they do in fact have a text messaging system and they used it. It is an interesting revelation because the blogosphere (ugh) has been rampant with people saying e-mail notification wasn’t enough.