Nick DeNardis | .eduGuru

Author Archives | Nick DeNardis

Nick DeNardis - who has written 23 posts on .eduGuru.

Nick is the Associate Director of Web Communications at Wayne State University by day. By night he hosts the video blog EDU Checkup where he reviews higher education web sites live. Nick is an active member of the higher education web community and is an officer of Refresh Detroit, a group of web professionals whose goal is to promote web standards, usability, and accessibility.

The Content Editor’s Missing Manual

Thursday, June 17, 2010

9 Comments

A few months ago I wrote about how to train content contributors, this article is a little different. It’s meant to be a resource you can point anyone publishing content to the web. The goal is to explain why the web acts different than Word, a general outline of creating semantic documents and how to [...]

Book Review: Delivering Happiness

Monday, June 7, 2010

6 Comments

A few weeks ago Tony Hsieh gave bloggers the opportunity to get an advance copy of his newest book, Delivering Happiness – A path to profits, passion, and purpose in exchange for a review and the ability to give away a free copy of the book. I have been a big fan of Tony and Zappos of [...]

Spring Cleaning: Finding your lost sock. The guide to content audits.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

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Spring Cleaning: Finding your lost sock. The guide to content audits.

So how long has it been since you did a Web content audit on your institution’s homepage? A year? Two? Never? I’m not talking about just surfing from page to page making sure everything checks out but a real content inventory of every page and inspection of the content quality.

QA on Higher Education Web sites. How to do it and what to look for.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

8 Comments

Running a web office I see a lot of sites, quality assurance is part of every minute of my day. Everything I see goes through the same quality checks otherwise we don’t launch it. Tools and people will come and go, quality on the other hand is the one thing in a web office that [...]

Best practices for training content contributors

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

4 Comments

The driving force of any web site is the content contributors, the people who know every detail of their department and hold the key to student success. These are the people you want publishing web content. What they have is value, the closer you can get them to the content creation process the better.

Where is the fold? Google browser size vs. actual heatmap

Thursday, December 17, 2009

8 Comments

Where is the fold? Google browser size vs. actual heatmap

Google released a tool yesterday called Google Browser Size in effort to show how users with various screen sizes see your site. They also wrote up a blog post about it.

[Results] State of the University Web Department survey

Monday, November 23, 2009

12 Comments

253 Total Responses First and foremost I wanted to thank everyone who took the time to fill out the survey. The feedback from this has been amazing and I know everyone has been anticipating the results. These results will help others shape and make informed decisions about their web environment. I have a feeling most of [...]

When advertising on Hulu (pre-roll ads) goes wrong

Thursday, November 5, 2009

2 Comments

Advertising your institution on a number of sites via text, banner, or even pre-roll videos ads has become ever more popular as the shift from print to digital takes hold. There is one downside to this change though, loss of context control.

Don’t lose your identity – Create an effective print style sheet

Monday, November 2, 2009

4 Comments

Making a Web site flexible is an art. Not only does your site have to look good cross browser on screen but also scale down gracefully for a mobile phone or print.

5 min survey: State of the university Web department

Thursday, October 15, 2009

11 Comments

5 min survey: State of the university Web department

Last week myself, Michael Fienen and Karlyn Morissette had the privilege of speaking at the HighEdWeb 2009 Conference. I can’t explain how great it was to see so many higher education web professionals, I feel humbled being around so many awesome people doing great things.