Transcript Web Community Meeting

Web Community Meeting
What I did on my Rochester
vacation
HigherEd WebDev 05
• Overview: 300+ attendees, tracks, classes
• Tracks: Corporate Partners; Content:
Strategies & Design; Content: Tools &
Planning; Management: E-commerce &
applications; Technical
• Presentations can be found here:
http://www.highedweb.org/2005/presentati
ons/
Buzzwords
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The long tail -- amazon;
Millenials;
the parent-child co-purchase;
closing the comment loop;
Web 2.0 -- AJAX
Web 2.0
• Services, not packaged software, with
cost-effective scalability – involve users in
software improvement
• Web as platform
• Harnessing collective intelligence
• Leveraging the long tail through customer
self-service
• Examples: Google’s gmail; Flickr;
Wikipedia; SEO; syndication
Why it sucks to be you
• Keynote:
• Steve Krug, the author of “Don’t Make Me
Think! A Common Sense Approach to
Web Usability,"gave keynote entitled
“Why it S*cks to Be You.”
Why it sucks to be you
1. Corporate expectations in a non-profit
budget
2. Stakeholder who can be petty and
whiney in ways that wouldn’t dare in the
corporate world
3. Find and implement a CMS in your spare
time, and herd kittens into using it
Life still sucks …
4. Sub-site/Fiefdom hell: “We want our
dept/school/project to have its own
character
5. Multiple audiences:
faculty/staff/students/alumni/media/comm
unity/etc
6. Home page death match: everyone
wants a piece of the home page pie
Even more
7. Deans less likely to force everyone to toe
to the site-consistency line than CEOs
8. Tons of dynamic content of variable
quality and enormous importance (but
only to its creators)
9. Cool-factor: The arms race to stay
competitive with your peers and deploy
the latest gadgetry or fad (blogs, etc.)
On usability
• Don't be intimidated.
• Recruit three or four users.
• No elaborate recruiting (not all that important).
Don’t worry about getting representatives from
real-world user audience.
• No stats, no exit questions, no faux validity
• Get as many team members and stakeholders to
watch as possible
• Iterative, over several months
Sample of Tracks
• Accessibility through CMS -- Northwestern:
• Visual Design -- Vanderbilt: Design theory.
Malcolm Greer hired to do identity work for them,
got a doc with buzz words and a style guide.
Only 10% adoption.
• Princeton Redesign -- Roxen CMS; stakeholder
support took longest 5-6 months.
• Smart Portal Web Design -- RISD: build using
what you know; Flash and .NET
Sample of Tracks continued
• Emerging Web Technologies -- Univ. of Buffalo:
overview of impact of blogs/wikis/podcasts/RSS
on campus. Student generated blogs on
admissions.
• Rolling your own CMS -- Penn State: use what
you know and can support;
http://weblion.psu.edu/
• Sustaining Web CMS -- Dartmouth: Jay Collier;
policy of outside content; Major discussions on
impact of Web 2.0.
Trends
• CMS, CMS, CMS
• Syndication
• Millenials
Resources
• Presentations:
http://www.highedweb.org/2005/presentations/
• Tim O’Reilly: What is Web 2.0
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/
2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
• Born to be Wired blog of UBuffalo's Mark
Greenfield:
http://www.bloglines.com/blog/millennials
• Pew/Internet American Life Project:
http://www.pewinternet.org/index.asp
Next Webcoms
• SEO; CMS use; Web Security; VIPs?
• Suggestions?