Brian Piper, from the University of Rochester, shared a plethora of golden nuggets to help all web content creators understand how to improve the impact of their efforts. His primary point was to look at all of the content generated by your institution and determine which elements were meeting their goals. He suggested that everyone […]
Author: Catherine Donnelly
Catherine Donnelly helps to manage social media and web content for the Interdivisional Marketing & Communications – Enrollment Management creative marketing and digital communications group at the University at Buffalo. Previously she served as the Integrated Marketing Communication Manager for Roswell Park Cancer Institute. Her background is in technical writing and editing with a strong focus on healthcare and university marketing, content management and video production.
Eric Turner from the Mt. San Antonio College focused on ways to manage accessibility challenges in documents with a hands-on demonstration of an “easy” way to remediate PDF files. Turner kicked off his presentation with the definition of web accessibility (content is perceivable, operable, understandable, robust, and conforms) and a reminder about how our sites […]
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Composing Continuously #INN3
The Composing Continuously panel presentation was a change to the innovation track. The speakers included Charles Fulton, Paul Gilzow, and Royall Spence and the discussion was moderated by Robin Smail. They focused on an overview about Composer, a dependency manager for PHP, with a particular emphasis on using it with WordPress and Drupal (although it […]
Kat Liendgens from Hannon Hill (@katliendgens) led a standing room only discussion of the importance of content personalization techniques to address some of the unique challenges facing higher education. She shared a staggering statistic that 38% of colleges failed to meet their enrollment goals by May 1 last year and offered several options for tailoring […]
The final presentation of the Marketing and Communications track focused on one of the newer social media channels: Snapchat. Presenters Tony Dobies and Candace Nelson from West Virginia University consider it to be growing to the point that they expect it to push ahead of the likes of the big three (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram). […]
What a Tumblr Learned Meerkating His Periscope?: The Future of Social Media & Higher Ed presentation pitched by Ron Bronson was a completely different animal by the time we met in MCS 11. Ron admitted that when he proposed his idea to #heweb15, he thought Periscope and Meerkat were the greatest apps ever, and now […]
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Accessibility 101
Stephen Fornal from Tarrant County College, discussed the important of accessibility in university (well really, ALL) websites. The goal of his UAD9 presentation was to convince us to level the field and be inclusive; website accessibility should not only be about the law. Stephen pointed out that from a marketing perspective, it is estimated that […]
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Go Bold or Go Home
So UAD1 was supposed to be “Your Website is a Window Not a Billboard” but it was renamed in final edits to be “Go Bold or Go Home #nofilter” The team from Beloit College (including Melissa Dix (@akamelissa), Jason Hughes (@jasonhugheshere) and Bill Mortimer) focused their presentation on a rebranding effort created to boost admission […]
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How to Boil the Ocean
MPD2 kicked off its second presentation with the crazy title of “How to Boil the Ocean” from the Washington University in St. Louis web team. Chris Amelung and Ted Elsas shared how they were overwhelmed with web duties on a campus creating breaking news almost daily. As Chris pointed out, “the university can help put […]
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Is Tumblr Right for Your School?
Wendy Darling from Emory University wants everyone to decide “Is Tumblr Right for Your School? and if yes, to get started. As curator of a blog on Art Deco architecture, she’s become a power user over the past four years and has several tricks to help schools revamp their content or get started. “Tumblr is […]
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Beyond The Screen
Working in highered means that we have many different audiences to support and dozens of stories to tell. Sitting at your desk stagnates your ability to effectively talk to these groups. Amanda Smith from Illinois State University wants highered professionals to work “Beyond The Screen” to connect better with end users. “I’m not really in […]
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Jude’s Law
Jude’s Law says that in order to sustain day to day creativity you have to be happy — and happy comes from having fun. Kegan Sims from Oregon State University just wants to have fun. His talk focused on the reality that highered folks need to be creative on a regular basis and that […]
Let’s face it: We’re not 16 anymore, and Mark Heiman, Senior Web Application Developer at Carleton College (better known as @wyrdebeard) doesn’t want to be that age, but he knows that we need to think that way to do our jobs better. Carleton College reworked their homepage after a series of focus groups that […]
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Hacking Away at Cancer
On Monday, Oct. 7, over 75 web professionals came together for HigherEdWeb’s first Hackathon. Their goal was to create a new website for the Ride for Roswell and to be able to connect the site with their fundraising systems. The redesigned website will make The Ride site mobile-friendly and simpler for users to navigate. “An improved […]
Jennifer Younker, Executive Director of Marketing and Communications and Romana Amato, Web Strategist from Saint Xavier University presented MCS10 Marketing and web strategy: repurposing traditional promotions into innovative formats. St. Xavier University is a smaller school in the Chicago suburbs where the team is working to use new marketing methods to boost awareness. Although data suggests that […]
Nikki Massaro Kauffman, Interface Designer, Penn State World Campus, and Heather Dawson, Instructional Designer, Penn State World Campus presented MCS#8 Applying Progressive Enhancements to Multimedia Content to describe how they approach the myriad requests for video production. Their presentation was focused on online course content, but their approach works for any project where text, images and video pieces may intersect. So, […]
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Placemarks to the People
Gabriel Nagmay (@nagmay) of Portland Community College presented TPR6 where he discussed how maps are an incredible tool that combines location based data with details. After launching with a map of Mirkwood (yes, a Hobbit reference)he showed the 2010 US Census data map of Portland. Every dot on the map represented a person and it […]
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Measuring Web Performance
Dave Olsen from West Virginia University presented AIM 4-Measuring Web Performance with several tips to help optimize web loading. He started out with some startling statistics about how the average weight of a homepage today is 1.5MB. And that 77% of that weight is due to images and javascript. Making a website responsive doesn’t solve that […]
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Six Questions with Chris Nixon
Chris tells us about launching the membership model for HighEdWeb, adoption of the UoA Web Style Guide and the truth behind @maybechrisnixon.
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Web Content Strategy (MCS 8)
Web Content Strategy: Effective Pairing Multimedia, Social Media and Text Romana Amato, Web Strategist for Saint Xavier University Romana summed up her content strategy goal as working to create a distinct user experience. While simply said, there are many steps to achieving that outcome. First, the action of finding useful and usable content to lure […]
Give ’em some social media love. The right people using the right tools for the right reasons (UAD 10) Alana Riley, Associate Director of Web Design & Social Media, Providence College Alana jumped right into her talk with a series of resources. These tools offer images and support materials from this talk: Pinterest: https://pinterest.com/alanariley/ Speakerdeck: […]
Cloud Computing: Planning for Success Jason Fish, Manager of Application Programming, Purdue University This session appeared to be for adults only with a focus on how we can satisfy our users (give them more for them to choose); perform better (meet technology needs); last longer (meet user demands) and pick people up (use other platforms […]