ULI: The Joys of Membership -- Not That There's Anything Wrong with That
Okay, call us the cowardly lion. We've been, you see, not to the Land of Oz, but to the Web site for the Urban Land Institute (ULI at www.uli.org). ULI is, deservedly, a highly respected organization. Accordingly, we found much to admire on the ULI Web site. Alas, we also came away with two truisms for the cyber age: 1. Membership, indeed, has it privileges, but the lack of it sorely vexes the excluded, the information-hungry cyber-rabble. 2. Lack of speed, not speed, kills.
First things first: This will not be a superb site for information surfers if you're not a ULI member. Membership is the key in getting the whole informational enchilada. Accordingly, if you're a ULI nonmember surfing this site, you'll become painfully accustomed to seeing this phrase, popping up with a regularly that recalls 1962's Amazin' New York Mets: "This area you are trying to access is only for ULI Full, Associate and Student members." On the other hand, to evoke the phrase that the "Seinfeld" folks catapulted into uber-familiarity: "Not that there's anything wrong with that." Indeed, association Web sites by nature usually exist largely to serve members. The other side of that coin, however, is the importance of Getting the Message Out, letting the mammoth world of the Web know exactly who you are and how much expertise you have on hand. ULI certainly has considerable expertise (as this reviewer knows from experience). And this site does a solid job of letting you know just who the association is, what it stands for and what it offers. (And, as you might imagine, the site will readily sell ULI's reports, which are meaty and many, to members and nonmembers alike.) That, obviously, is fine and good - that is, unless you're not a member and you're searching for just the kind of expertise for which ULI is noted. In that case, you're simply stuck up a dead-end cyber-creek without a paddle. Not That There's Anything Wrong with That.
That caveat aside, nonmembers nonetheless can find some quality information here, though you'll have to hunt and peck to unearth it. A particularly fertile nonmember informational area can be found in the site's "Issues" section, which has subject matter grouped under the headings of "Finance," "Housing," "Retail," "Office," "Transportation," "Smart Growth" and "Urban Revitalization." Selected parts of those sections are available to members and nonmembers alike. The finance section, for example, includes news and commentary about activities in the public and private real estate capital markets. The area is updated monthly by ULI Visiting Senior Fellow in Finance Stephen Blank, who spent 25 years as a senior officer with several Wall Street investment banks' real estate investment groups. An example of the kind of information in this site section: "Equity REIT Strategies in a Capital-Constrained Environment," an authoritative, crisply written piece by Kenneth T. Rosen and Matthew J. Anderson. That article, however, points out some of the site's technical problems, at least during our test drive. After successfully accessing the article on one visit, our attempt at accessing it on another visit were greeted by the message that (you guessed it), "This area you are trying to access is only for ULI Full, Associate and Student members." Go figure. Nonmember users can also find some informational gems in the ULI site's section on smart growth. During our test drive, for example, the site was offering a PDF file of the ULI booklet, "Smart Growth: Myth and Fact," which "investigates eight common myths and counters them with data and examples of development and public policies that work."
This site section also offers nonmembers "Smart Growth News" (SGN) a weekly report from ULI that's available at no charge by e-mail subscription. Each newsletter issue contains 25 to 30 abstracts of articles culled from major national newspapers, business magazines, Web sites, national and international wire services, and periodicals focusing on housing, development and real estate. SGN only provides abstracts, but they may at least point you in the right direction to find some of the detailed information that you want. There's also a searchable archive of SGN past issues. Both members and nonmembers also have online access to "Land Use Digest," ULI's monthly newsletter, which as the site explains, focuses on "current industry trends, research results, market data, planning and development innovations, legal developments, consumer surveys, industry rankings and a host of other topics important to land use professionals." There's also a separate "Land Use Digest Europe." Online archives of both newsletter versions are onsite. A lot of the bite-sized content nuggets in "Land Use Digest," however, are skewed toward the retail and residential sectors. That, however, may be what some users are looking for. Not That There's Anything Wrong with That.
Our test drive was marked by significant navigational woes. One was the site's loading speed, which seemed to match the steamy, racing pulse of Millard Filmore's presidency. ULI has recently upgraded its site, intending, it explains, "to take advantage of certain Web technologies," including Java Script, the latest Netscape/Internet Explorer versions, at least a 4+ browser, and at least 800 x 600 onscreen pixels. Those technologies, though, may not help you at all, at least in this incarnation of the site's upgrade. The loads are agonizingly slow. Some of that problem seems to rest in some very attractive pages that may simply have too many images for cyber-comfort. And some of that problem may rest in the sometimes-nettlesome network system on which this lowly reviewer labors (which not even Pinocchio would claim is without its periodic major glitches). But the site's current problems run deeper than that, as we learned when we test drove the site again two days later, this time on a top-of-the-line broadband system. After typing in the site's address, we repeatedly received the 404 error message - "The document you requested could not be found" - even as the ULI site's Java Script was trying to kick in. Not only that, we were then repeatedly booted off the Web for "performing an illegal operation" (in this case, a stack dump). Perhaps that bug, which seems to reside in the Java application, will be fixed by the time other users access this site.
Some site problems, though, are beyond a simple technological fix. The most significant we found: simply knowing where we were and where we wanted to go. Many first-time surfers will likely find it difficult to ascertain exactly in which area of this site they're currently located. As you click through the content areas, you'll often find little hint of where you've gone (which, after all, determines where you're going). That difficulty is compounded by the fact that the "Site Map" icon appears only sporadically -- and in no predictable pattern that we could discern. In addition, the site doesn't have another disorientation-alleviating feature: a master search capability that scans all the available information at this address. Those issues, though, may not be problems for member users who are well versed in this site's layout. And perhaps the overall key in understanding the ULI site is that it's advertising-free. And perhaps that means that this site really doesn't NEED hits from the surfing plebian masses. Not That There's Anything Wrong with That.
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