Posts filed under 'Web Development'
Greetings eduWEBians and other blog readers! It is my great pleasure to be your guest blogger this month, after a great experience at last year’s conference and as a fervent reader of the buzz blog.
I am Melissa Cheater, and I am a Senior Consultant in Social Media & Web Strategy at Academica Group Inc. With this post I am going to get the introductions out of the way, run through my company, and let you in on my background so you can see where I’m coming from with this month’s posts.
Academica Group 101
Academica Group started as a market research firm, Acumen Research, back in 1996. Acumen Research founded the University Applicant Survey(TM), which lead to the College Applicant Survey(TM), which is now the University/College Applicant Study(TM), which we fondly call the UCAS(TM) (pronounced “U-Kass”). The UCAS has grown into the largest applicant survey in North America and surveys 100,000 incoming university and college applicants each year. Since then, Acumen acquired a marketing firm as well as a creative + technology house and was reborn as Academica Group Inc - a Full Cycle Marketing(TM) firm specializing in higher education.
We offer market research, strategy, creative and technology solutions and have provided one or the other or all four to almost every major school in Canada. We run a free daily newsbrief that filters and digests the ten most relevant news stories related to PSE, particularly in Canada - which I invite you to join if it is relevant to you.
As far as technology goes, we love open source. We work primarily in Drupal but have also implemented with proprietary CMS as well as provided hard-code sites. We are the developers of SkoolPool, an applicant community on Facebook(R) with more than 9,000 student signups and a free package available to all schools so that your profile (which is already there, created by students) looks like A, instead of B.
A (Below)
B (below)
Me
I’m young, I’m a millennial, but I’m old enough to remember how to load California Games(TM) in DOS. I started a non-profit youth programming group when I was 17 and ended up being influential in municipal policy and writing for a Trillium grant on Youth Services. Other than Youth, my background is tightly linked to music and community. The Constantines played the first show I ever booked, and they are still one of my favourite live bands.
I started building sites in 1997 and haven’t stopped since. Geocities, to HTML, to Dreamweaver, to CMS & Wordpress. Other than my personal sites, I have worked with non-profits, government, and a several businesses and events. I’m an HTML kid who can throw down in almost any other language if you give me Google, notepad and an Internet connection. I’ve handled large-scale web updates and I’ve worked in an environment where web is a team under a team under a board under elected officials who need 1,000 pages updated in both national languages in the next 24 hours.
My education is media, and communication. If you want some applicant insight, I applied to the University of Western Ontario’s Media, Information & Technoculture program because I had paid for 5 application slots and thought technoculture was a funny word. Once the offers were in and I was faced with four years of accounting or business, I ended up going with the funny word.
I had the privilege of working with the Anonequity project as a rare undergrad assistant, and through this spent two years researching privacy, technology, the internet and public expectations with a national team of leading technology, sociology and law minds. When given my own lead, my contributions to this project rang to social networks (MySpace was emerging at the time), as well as data collection and privacy on children’s websites.
Other than that, I’ve worked with the University of Western Ontario - in the registrar’s office and in HR. I was hired on at Academica Group shortly after these two contracts and have been here ever since. I have spent the last year working closely with SkoolPool(TM). And I am the founding member of our Social Media Services department, where I continue to be.
In exchange for this incredibly long & boastful introduction, here are the slides from a presentation Chris Skinkle & I gave last week at the CAUCE 2008 conference here in London: “Engaging Mature Students in the age of Facebook, YouTube & Wikipedia”
Reach me:
email | web | blog | facebook | twitter | del.icio.us | skype: MelissaAcademica
June 3rd, 2008
In my final post as May guest blogger, I wanted to say “thanks” to all of you who work so hard on your websites, especially the web content managers. In an earlier post I said that your website is your institution’s most valuable asset. Well, I’d like to correct that and say that I believe it’s actually you who should be considered your institution’s most valuable asset. Why? Well, consider this…
According to the most recent statistic I can find on Google and Netcraft, there are approximately 43 billion web pages on the World Wide Web today. Those pages are served by about 158 million unique websites. That’s an average of about 272 web pages per website. Now, according to Google, there are about 758 million web pages representing approximately 5,000 higher educational websites (.edu sites). That’s an astonishing 152,000 web pages, on average, per college site, or approximately 56,000% more pages than the average site on the World Wide Web.
Using these facts and figures, and excluding only the largest e-commerce and media related websites, it’s clear that there are no harder working individuals on the planet than you!
Given the extraordinary effort you and your team make on a daily basis, I have yet to find a single one of you that wants to complicate their job further with burdensome technology. My work revolves around your web content management software (CMS) needs, and over the years I’ve seen a lot of web CMS technologies make a lot of promises. The biggest failing of most of these technologies is that they often make managing content more challenging than before — not something you need!
So, our goal at OmniUpdate has been to keep our web CMS extremely easy to use; yet powerful as a technical engine. We designed it in 2001 exclusively for higher education; consequently, we understand how different your problems are from business and e-commerce sites. Our design ensures WYSIWYG ease of use for everyone involved, plus complete separation of content from design, version control and roll-back, content repurposing, and all the specs even the most hardened techie would love.
Why is this CMS approach important? Consider the fact that:
- IT staff benefit from a standards based approach to web CMS. XML and XSL are the backbone of Web 2.0 and at the very core of OmniUpdate’s templating system.
- Administrators benefit from the ability to control permissions and manage actions at a department and/or individual level — it’s a powerful capability (and very important) to decide and implement “who can do what” on your website.
- Recruiting, admissions, public relations and marketing staff benefit from all the communication and messaging features previously described earlier in this series: blogs, RSS, video, online chat, etc. (Yes, one CMS can do all that!)
- Decision-making committees appreciate a user-based pricing model that is scalable with flexible terms, and would like to purchase one product that delivers all the previously described benefits and functionalities.
OmniUpdate is used today by website heroes just like you to update the content on over 450 college and university websites. And there’s no doubt in my mind that YOU are your institution’s most valuable asset.
I look forward to meeting you at the eduWeb Conference in July.
Lance Merker
May Guest Blogger
CEO
OmniUpdate, Inc.
lance@omniupdate.com
May 30th, 2008
As I mentioned in an earlier post, it’s never been easier to shoot, and edit video. So, why is it so difficult to put video on our websites? Playback quality, browser compatibility, and other complexities make it so challenging that we end up doing something we really shouldn’t — putting videos on YouTube and using the embed code to display them. Go ahead and admit it, we’ve all done it! It might not even seem that bad of an idea, right? Not so!
Posting video to your campus website using YouTube can pose a problem. Your video production will be YouTube branded. Furthermore, if you click on the video while it’s playing, you’re redirected to the YouTube website. Allowing your visitor to be redirected to an external website is clearly not good marketing strategy. You may never get them back.
To keep in control of things, OmniUpdate is now offering a free service called Transcode-It. The idea is to make things really easy for you to take any video and play it right in your web page. Like this…
View the video playing in a fictional university web page.
Transcode-It is a free service that allows college web professionals to quickly convert any video, then upload and display it as a high quality Flash video embedded right in any web page. It’s as simple as inserting an image into a document. Feel free to try it right now at http://www.transcodeit.com/.
Transcode-It requires no software installation and creates a video file that plays on all modern browsers (Windows and Macintosh). Your resulting video will not be branded by Transcode-It, and will not redirect viewers away from your site.
In the spirit of community, we at OmniUpdate hope that colleges and universities will find Transcode-It a helpful service. We offer it as one more tool in your arsenal for reaching that often unreachable audience.
Lance Merker
Guest Blogger, May 2008
CEO
OmniUpdate, Inc.
lance@omniupdate.com
May 27th, 2008
George Bernard Shaw once said, “The problem with communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.” Such is the case for traditional forms of advertising when it comes to prospecting a student population. High school students just aren’t getting the message because they are becoming unplugged from TV, radio, print, and even email. They TiVo or DVR past commercials, and get their news, sometimes inaccurately, through online social communities like MySpace and Facebook. Information, both good and bad, spreads like wildfire via blogs, RSS feeds, chat and private email sent through social networks.
What’s a college to do? Embrace the change!
Your website is still your most valuable marketing asset. And, when used in combination with some truly amazing Web 2.0 technologies, one of the most powerful as well. Consider for example:
1. RSS feeds are an extremely effective and easy-to-add form of communication. Feeds can be directed by students to their preferred medium, such as a cell phone (through text messaging) or to a Facebook account; these can even be used to communicate urgent messages in a crisis situation. I’ll expand further on the value of this feature later.
2. It’s never been cheaper and easier to record and post video to a college website. Rich media is engaging, commonly shared, and expected by your audience.
3. Online chat gives your staff the unique opportunity to speak one-on-one with a student, perhaps providing that nugget of information that might just be the key to influencing his or her enrollment decision.
A content-rich and well-managed higher education website will contain some, if not all, of these features. If your website has not progressed that far yet, you’re not alone–most sites aren’t there yet either. But, keep moving forward. Remember the old saying, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.” Start a pilot today of just one new Web 2.0 technology!
Lance Merker
Guest Blogger, May 2008
CEO
OmniUpdate, Inc.
lance@omniupdate.com
May 20th, 2008
The phrase “Content is King” has been around for a while, but it still holds true. While website design is intrinsically valuable, visitors aren’t searching for design—they’re looking for information. They arrive by typing in a URL, choosing a bookmark, or clicking on a link. The aesthetics of the site has no bearing on their initial arrival. Once there, of course, imagery and graphics help. But, lacking the “right content,” a visitor will quickly leave, and perhaps never return.
For your college or university, the need to provide prospective students with quick access to current and relevant information is intensified. This generation moves fast, thinks fast, and wants their information fast. According to a recent study by Noel Levitz, James Tower and NRCUA on the E-Expectations of high school students, 66% and 61% of A and B students (respectively) rated website content more important than the multi-media experience, and 73% of all students wanted their desired information to be just a few clicks from the home page. These findings are significant when you consider that another 2006 Noel Levitz study on institutional E-recruiting practices found that according to 40% of campuses, 20% of their electronic applicants had made no prior known contact with the institution before applying.
So, what’s the takeaway here? When it comes to your website, content matters! And, when it comes to recruiting, you need to make sure that the really important stuff like academic programs, tuition tables and financial aid—the stuff that decisions are made from—can be found right up front. Good content, complemented by helpful navigation and attractive design and imagery is the foundation of a great website. Add to the site marketing mix some social networking tools, such as the previously discussed blogs, and you’ve competitively spiced up the offering.
Other tools such as RSS and rich-media add real content value too, but we’ll save that discussion for another day…
Lance Merker
Guest Blogger, May 2008
CEO
OmniUpdate, Inc.
lance@omniupdate.com
May 13th, 2008
Yesterday I was chatting with my colleague Cory Cone (about Bodyworlds, painting, and a bit of work) and he asked me why we weren’t using more web apps across our enterprise — or if we had thought of doing that. (When I say “web apps” here I am talking about web apps offered to higher education institutions by folks like Google and Microsoft.) 
My lame answer was that yes, we have been thinking about it and, well, there are some complicated reasons why we haven’t done more of it. (When higher ed administrators don’t have a good answer, you know, we say that the answers are many and complex.) Some of those complex answers have been hashed out thoughtfully over at the CIO forum at EDUCAUSE.
This morning I was reading a post by Floyd Teter over at ORCLville about an experiment he is conducting this month “of attempting to go an entire month without using locally-based apps for anything.” (Speaking of web apps and Oracle: my wife told me the other day that when I say “I was talking to Oracle the other day . . .” she imagines that I am having a serious work chat with the LinkedIn wizard guy at right.)
I still don’t know the answer(s) to Cory’s question. We are pushing so much of our administrative work to web based systems that we host, could/should some of that go to free-ish web apps that we don’t host? I don’t want to open up a new debate (see the EDUCAUSE link above for many reasons why and why not to do it), but I do think it is a good question to keep asking and keep trying to answer it.
Thanks Cory for asking the question (again), thanks Floyd for sharing with us (again), and thank you all for reading.
Ted Simpson
March Guest Blogger
Director, Technologist, Dragoman & Project Manager
Maryland Institute College of Art
tsimpson@mica.edu
March 25th, 2008
I just read a post over at the Oracle AppsLab blog about the Do It Yourself (DIY) spirit in web development. It makes reference to the recent report that Computer Science enrollment is down. You can read up on this also over at the Chronicle of Higher Ed. Jake at Oracle argues that web development has become so easy to pick up on your own that you can just jump in and start building applications.
As a true DIYer in higher ed technology (I have a degree in English), I agree with him in part. I find that one of the most difficult parts about applying technology in higher ed is the human factor: that you actually have to convince (repetitively) people to support, use, and plan for technology. On the other hand, a strong foundational knowledge of technology applications is often advantageous. This past year I served as PM on a couple of big projects; they were successful and I did an OK job, but the experience convinced me that I had to go get some solid education. I ran into a number of snags that could have been avoided or minimized if I had had a better understanding of networking, infrastructure, web development, and any number of other topics. So, off to school I go.
What do you all think?
(Side note: I would be remiss as a MICAn if I did not mention DIY: Design It Yourself. Read it and enjoy; I am looking at a painting right now that my daughter painted at one of Ellen’s DIY events.)
Thanks for reading.
Ted Simpson
March Guest Blogger
Director, Technologist, Dragoman & Project Manager
Maryland Institute College of Art
tsimpson@mica.edu
March 9th, 2008
Join us at this year’s eduWeb Conference, at the Trump Marina Hotel in Atlantic City, for the 1st Annual eduStyle Higher-Ed Web Awards on Tuesday, July 22nd. 
This is an EXCITING event for all of us at the Conference and we ask all of you who read our blog to submit an entry (it’s FREE) for one of the 35 categories that the judges at eduStyle.net will be awarding “the best of” for higher-ed websites.
Also, CollegeWebEditor.com will be presenting in partnership with eduStyle and it’s author, Karine Joly, will be our Closing Keynote Speaker this year.
The 35 winners will receive a discount on their Conference registration, so go find the websites you want to submit and visit the eduStyle.net Awards web page for further information.
Don’t forget to submit your proposal to present at this year’s conference; take that website redesign that you’ll be submitting for an award and create a presentation around it. Or look at our other suggested topics and then fill out the Call for Papers form for as many ideas as you have; this is great opportunity to impress the boss (think “annual review”) and others at your institution about the wonderful work you’ve been doing…so promote yourself!
See you in July!
Shelley Wetzel
February 19th, 2008
When I started as November guest blogger, I promised frank talk about web content management systems. Well, with a few hours left in the month, I want to make good on the promise.
Of all the web technologies, CMS causes the most visceral reactions and intense debates when I talk with web people – bar none. It’s a perennial love-hate relationship. Put two college web pros together in a room, and the first question usually is: What CMS do you use?
So let’s acknowledge the essentials: CMS is a necessity. It’s the glue that holds your website together. It provides the tools to manage a compelling site. It supports diverse website ecosystem (email marketing, analytics, etc.).
But, why is such a web “necessity” also a “necessary headache” on many campuses? What causes many CMS initiatives to fail in some way?
Welcome to The CMS Myth. Understanding it can help make your CMS project succeed.
What’s The Myth? I see it as a fundamental gap between the promises of CMS vendors (“Easy to integrate and use!” “Affordable!”) and the reality web pros experience in the trenches. This isn’t saying vendors are at fault. The Myth is more dramatic: CMS success is NOT about the technology. It’s about your plan, people and process.
Full disclosure: Along with some colleagues in ISITE Design’s CMS Practice, we launched a new blog at the Gilbane CMS Conference in Boston this week. It’s called The CMS Myth (www.cmsmyth.com), and it’s purpose is to shine a light in the dark corners of content management and to address the reasons behind most CM project failures.
The CMS Myth strongly believes in the power of web CMS to be a key enabler for achieving higher education online success. Done right, a web CMS can be the nucleus of your web strategy and lift up all of your online initiatives.
Everyone talks about adhering to best practices with their CMS, but in reality, many best efforts fall short.
So, to provide some baseline concepts to think about if you’re heading down a CMS implementation path (or, if you already run a CMS):
- “Content management” is a business process and a discipline; CMS is a software tool. You need both. But don’t equate one with the other.
- If you haven’t established a clear and coherent web strategy, get one. If you don’t have a strategy, don’t get a CMS. A CMS is not a web strategy.
- A CMS doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s a central part of a diverse website ecosystem. It’s frequently the glue that holds together various applications. So, think beyond the CMS.
- Plan ahead and document your plans for your web CMS. And when you’re done, plan some more. There’s no such thing as too much planning before you tackle a CMS project.
- All vendors say their CMS is easy to use. If you buy that, then also be prepared to invest in user training and mentoring – and potentially lots of it.
- You’ve probably spent way too many hours (months?) researching CMS features, price, and other criteria. Sick of sifting through RFP responses and feature matrix comparisons? Turn instead to trusted market observers (e.g. CMSWatch, Forrester, Gartner, Gilbane) who’ve done the heavy lifting and can deliver a valid short list of CMS systems that would meet your needs.
Certainly this isn’t a comprehensive list of things to consider to avoid CMS-related pitfalls - there’s a vast range of concepts to live by. But it’s a place to start and a chance to reflect before diving into a CM project. Best of luck for your online initiatives in 2008.
David Aponovich, CMS Strategist
ISITE Design
November Guest Blogger
November 30th, 2007
It sounds weird that my last post for the month is about the beginning. But you have to start somewhere. You’ve heard it many times that the site that you are helping to manage is larger than most on the internet. O’hare air traffic controllers have an easier job at times. So when and how do you know it is time to overhaul the site, redesign the site, or just make a few tweaks to improve the site. Too many times, a site is completely redone only to end up similar to what was there before.
Here are a few tips in identifying where you stand.
- Does the design represent your institution initiatives. If you have a brand in place, does the site follow that brand in tone, message, and look? If not, you may be looking at a simple face list and content adjustment. If you are not hearing complaints about the site, then massage the presentation and message, and the site is ready to go.
- Is a favorite phrase on campus, “I can’t find anything on the site”. Your content may not be bad, but your search mechanism and/or navigation labels may be out of whack. Time for some simple usability testing to identify how severe the situation is. Pull some site visitors in and have them run through key tasks. You need to understand what a site visitor wants to accomplish before you can really hop into a redesign. Download my Ten Minute Usability Test and watch about 30-50 visitors to get a good gauge. Also, reevaluate your search tool. See if the results pages are pulling outdated content, too many results, or irrelevant links.
- Has the site become jumbled chaos? With open authoring, many times so many people have open control of the site without an understanding of audience need or institutional direction. If it is time to reign in the management of the site, start with the people involved. Again, an overhaul may not be necessary, but some general guidelines and training programs may need to be put in place. Identify the people that need to be involved in the site first, then determine how messy the situation may be.
You may get the hint that I am trying to avoid an overhaul. There are universities that need to start from scratch. But this should not become an every-three-year occurrence. Plan for long-term management of the site. Adjust community involvement. Make the starting point an evaluation of the absolute minimum that needs to change on the site.
It has been a fun month of contributing to the eduWeb Buzz blog. Thanks for reading
Eric Hodgson
Independent Consultant
hodgson.eric@gmail.com
September 28th, 2007
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