Monday Sessions
These Kids Today:
Usability testing with parents of new students and new students. Parents are slower, read more, but detect BS text faster. Students are fast fast fast, read with their fingers. Even split between searchers and browse-then-search-ers. Don't wait until the end to do usability studies.
The Accessible Video Interface
Great Flash tools for making video interface with captions. Captioning is a lot of work, and the "video better be worth the effort". Like that.
Supporting Web Presence with IT Comm Partnership
Cornell created virtual organization with IT staff dedicated to working on main campus site underneath the Director of Web Communications. They sold the idea of the partnership from bottom up, but obviously, the two directors work well together and have true collaborative relationship. Not sure such a virtual organization would work as well here, but it's possible.
Adding Google Maps
Mostly basic, but showed Geo-coding (based on addresses), and ways to tie into a database. Alumni locations based on Zip code locations and DB of alumni addresses. Way to do a campus map is to store data in DB and generate client-side JS code from that. Easier to maintain and update.
Lessons learned from Redesign and CMS
Used consultants to redesign site for political reasons.
- Everything is political
- move project buy in as high as possible
- Go where the money is
- Use the mission statement to cough up money
- Recruit money from all benefiting depts and units
- Develop your principles before you start
- scope
- goals
- target audience
- cost
- timeline
- Think of campus and site strategic direction
- Think of your infrastructure
- Do you have the people to support/implement project?
- Better to out source?
- Bus. processes are your problem too
- bad processes will bite you at every step
- Use Web Standards and ADA to your advantage
- Develop clear expectations
- Get campus on board (fac senate, etc.)
- Get Exec committee to sign off on visual design
- Conduct usability studies
Pretty standard stuff
-site's ugly
-content's out of date
-audience has changed, etc.
Tuesday Sessions
Higher Ed Web Development Gets Flattened, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the New World Order
Mark Greenfield is at it again with thought provoking ideas about how our jobs will change in the next five years. I wasn't really impressed though. Focus on crowdsourcing, outsourcing, contracting, etc. Interesting tho, the idea that menial stuff will be outsourced so that IT staff can focus on bigger issues. Maybe.
Building a Cohesive Website through a Collaborative Process
U Nebraska at Lincoln
Typical success story - they had buy in from the very top. Pres decided that they needed a unified look and feel and put someone in charge but let them determine what the structure, process and organization would be.
Put together lose network of web "developers" (mostly content editors). Came up with design standard. Developed time line for enforced implementation of standard. A few stragglers, but backed by Pres.
Monitoring Your Web Identity - Jay Collier
Interesting talk about all the different places information about your campus appears on the Web. From news sites to YouTube to blogs, social networking sites, Twitter, etc., etc. And how to use Google Alerts, RSS feeds and other tools to keep track of all of this chatter. Interesting stuff, but time consuming.
The Illusionist: Pulling Web Content out of Thin Air
How to write content for a client Web site when the client gives you no content. Very sad that some people are reduced to this. Pretty basic stuff. Pull stuff out of the catalog. Get print copies of the viewbook. Link to the campus directory. Pathetic that some people have to resort to this.
Google Analytics and Higher Education Web Development
Off the cuff presentation of the basics of Google Analytics. Nothing new here.
Content Management System Round Table
Pat and I hosted this. Interesting to hear other people's experiences. Not too favorable impressions of Collage and Ingeniux from campuses using them. Higher level of success from the few campuses that went to round two and had a better understanding of their needs and processes. Jay Collier expounded on their "one stop" open source solution (name??) that included, wiki, blogs, and all sorts of other tools as well as WCMS. Not the way we want to go. Good reports on Hannon Hill from the people who are using it.
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