Archive | Web development

Learning How to KISS

As I sat at my desk recently looking at parts of our site that need attention, thinking about page layouts and design concepts, a thought came to me. This is not a new thought, nor a groundbreaking one. It is, however, an important one that I think a lot of us, especially at smaller universities [...]

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[ Survey ] Getting to Know Our Catalogs

Everyone has one. We all face the same basic challenges when it comes to moving this once exclusively print document to the realm of the web. Let’s share some information and start looking more deeply at this challenge. Your feedback will be greatly appreciated, and we encourage everyone to forward this survey on to those [...]

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#heweb10 - Managing Projects in Web Development

Daniel Frommelt (@Frommelt), University World Wide Web Coordinator from the University of Wisconsin, gave a sobering statistic in his presentation of Web Development Projects: people only retain 50% of what people say only an hour after a meeting. Two weeks later, they only remember 25%.

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Got Centerpiece? So Does Everyone Else.

Well, HighEdWeb has come and gone yet again. Year after year, I find it continues to be a worthwhile investment. In case you didn’t get a chance to drop in on my presentation this year, I was able to con a kind friend into holding a little Flip cam the whole time through my crazy [...]

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Homepage Centerpiece Survey

At HighEdWebin Cincinnati I will be giving a presentation on the role and strategy surrounding centerpieces on home pages in higher ed. This information will be used in a 100% anonymous manner to reinforce and inform certain points that I will be making. The information you provide will be extremely helpful in ensuring [...]

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Content Strategy Roles and You

For all of the web shops out there that are already set up with eight different people devoted to the content strategy process for your university - see you later. You probably don’t need to worry about today’s post. For the rest of you (by which, I think we’re still talking about nearly everyone), well, [...]

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Redesign Your University Website According to xkcd

I’m sure most of you saw the University Website xkcd comic last week and shook your fists in the air. The front page of a university website is a battleground, no doubt. Dylan Wilbanks posted a good reaction to the comic on his blog and Steve Kolowich covered it extensively in Inside Higher Ed.

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Online Cataloging Done Right(ish)

I think that out of any web project I’ve ever dealt with in higher education, online cataloging has got to be the biggest white unicorn of them all. If you scour the web for them, you’ll discover that examples of ‘good’ catalogs are few and far between (and you’ll note I’m certainly not putting my [...]

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How Luther College is using Reason

For the past decade Dreamweaver and Contribute were the primary web workhorses at Luther College. InEZ Publish, an open-source content management system (CMS), was chosen to process admissions applications. The following year EZ Publish was decommissioned, and the entire admissions site and home page were moved into a commercial CMS, which failed to [...]

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Calculating Engagement: What Do They Want?

We’re all a flurry in our respective endeavours: creating dynamic content for our site, working on optimizing our text for search, creating opportunities for offline efforts to sync with online communities. But have we really stopped to consider how our target truly wants to receive content? How will we determine if what we created and [...]

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