So .eduGuru has completed seven months of service and it’s been an incredible journey.  I’ve been tossing the idea around about guest authors for a while and thinking of new was to expand the blog and today I’m excited to announce this blog is taking a new direction, afterall three heads are better than one!  .eduGuru was an ambitious name for a new blog to take, but hopefully it’s lived up to the name and because there are Higher Web Gurus out there all over the place it’s time to expand our coverage to take that into account.  Also I won’t lie writing and trying to create three worthy posts a week is really hard work for one person.  So without wasting any more of your time by me rambling on about the obvious reasons why it makes sense to grow this blog into a multi author platform let me introduce you to the two new Gurus! Read the rest of this entry »

Finally yesterday my luggage arrived at GSP Airport four days after I last dropped it off in Philly.  It was a short lived time of rejoicing.  It’s been a challenging weekend as I visited my family and going through my father’s will and discussing moving issues and passing on his car; he won’t need it as he can never drive again.  Just a quick update, my father has been diagnosed with brain cancer and it’s a form that is not curable.  The good news is that we are looking at years of time with him instead of months.  He’ll be starting radiation treatment in a few weeks and I’m sure that will be challenging for our family.  As he tells me and I couldn’t agree more, “It will be alright”.  Everyone, thank you for the prayers and offers of assistance. So let’s get back on reflecting on this conference and my takeaway points three, four, and five. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently reread Steve Krug’s masterpiece, Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, that is a must read for anyone who works directly or indirectly on a website. This classic is one of the few books that is so practical and universal that it applies to anyone dealing with the web from a designer, developer, or programmer to a marketer or a content writer. The practical approach of keeping everything as simple and as easy as possible for users is something that is regularly forgotten about as we attempt to make websites more advanced, more interactive and add features. The hard-line truth is if a user can’t figure out how to use your site like you intend then it doesn’t matter how wonderful your site is.

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A while back I read a post over on SEOmoz about popular web browser toolbars and their value from a web developer or internet marketer perspective. It was a wonderful article that I highly recommend. This article had me thinking, this list is great but what about Higher Education professionals? I’ve been working on a list and actually had a conversation with Chris Strauber our Web Service Librarian about it. Somewhere deep down I guess I kind of feel like a web person putting together a list of Firefox add-ons that you use is sort of a requirement, right!? For the most part many of these are the standards that everyone has installed, but hopefully you will see something that that you just didn’t know about. So here is my list.

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Ok so this was really launched last week, but most likely you wouldn’t have known unless I told you.  So introducing the redesigned Wofford Newsroom!

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Just a quick post.  I just finished compiling Wofford’s analytical data for March.  Since my Google Analytics training I’ve been setting up a lot of different profiles so next month I should be able to pull out some other specific data like off-campus visitors.  We are also installing the tracking code on our blogs this week so that should provide much more interesting data than what Feedburner currently gives us.  If your new to my blog and want to understand more about what I’m trying to do with this tracking you might want to check out, An Intro to Web Analytics - Wofford Monthly Web Analytics Summary - Feb 2008. Read the rest of this entry »

For the last five months I’ve been putting together a monthly web report for Wofford.  This report has been a way to frequently monitor and track our presence online and keep track of our effectiveness.  I distribute the report to everyone who I think will read it, the more people who understand what is going on online with Wofford the better. Read the rest of this entry »

What is the difference between the following two pictures?

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