Ludwig von Mises Institute Consulting Wrap-up
Last week, I wrapped up my involvement with a media reorganization and redesign project for the Ludwig von Mises Institute as a consultant. I worked to restructure the hierarchical media management system with the help of their webmaster David Veskler and then re-worked some of their large categorical designations, and worked my way through several hundred files correcting, updating and parsing metadata.
Then, as I had proposed in my initial pitch to the organization, I began working on a massive overhaul of their media homepage. Currently, the page looks something like this:
Whereas, I strongly believe that if the institute wants to start seeing their ideas disseminated to the general public more effectively, when a visitor clicks on “Media”, it should take them to a page that looks more like this:
The problem with the page as it is now is that there are only two (rather inconvenient) ways for a visitor to get a good understanding of the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s mission:
- Know what media file you’re looking for already and browse or search through the folder navigation to find it.
- Randomly start poking around and watch or listen to multiple hours of media until you find something that resonates with you, is meaningful and gives you an understanding of the ideas on economics & philosophy from the Austrian School viewpoint.
Obviously, if you are unfamiliar with the existing media, or if you don’t have the time and/or aren’t particularly motivated to sift through hundreds of hours of lectures, seminars, interviews, documentaries & audio books, then you will be missing out on all of the wonderful ideas and research offered by the Institute.
I find this a shame as someone who cares about the fate of the ideas and who is a lifelong supporter of liberty - so professionally, I pitched a solution.
The second image above is just a mock-up, but with the help of a really fabulous HTML/CSS guru, Aristotle Esguerra and again, the Mises Institute’s webmaster, I managed to create a fully functional version of that mock-up ready for implementation on the Mises Institute website. The benefit of using something similar to the mock-up, is that instead of having to poke around to find whatever happens to come up, the staff at the Ludwig von Mises Institute can carefully select media to feature. This way, when a new-comer visits the site, they will be exposed to the best arguments, the best quality presentation and up-to-date commentary specially chosen by the people who know the material best.
Since the organization is in a lot of ways a public policy advocacy group, it’s crucial that they not only have high standards for their research & arguments but for their presentation as well. Their President, Llewellyn Rockwell, recently noted that a 29,000 respondent BBC poll found just 11% of the population is sympathetic to their ideas… So it’s quite clear that there’s no time like the present to start really caring about how their ideas are disseminated - and the BEST way, by far, in our modern culture, is to understand and fully utilize multimedia.
Whether or not they ultimately decide to implement my designs and recommendations will be up to them, but I’m hopeful, and I am excited to help other similar organizations meet their full multimedia potential in the future.
