College Web Guy

We use google to power our university search.  We assumed that our important PDF documents were being searched or indexed.  Until yesterday, when my illustrious colleague alerted the web team that most of our PDF Course Catalogs weren’t, in fact, being being noticed.  More like ignored. In fact, google was only aware of ONE of our catalogs.

continuing from his email:

All the other (catalogs), while linked to from the Academics pages and therefore scannable by Google, don’t seem to be indexed by Google like the illustrious 2003-2004 catalog.

I found this on Google webmaster forums from 2006:

“I suspect that Google simply won’t index documents of that size.  Traditionally, their recommended limit on HTML documents has been 100K, although they’ve certainly relaxed that in recent years to more than twice that size.  But I don’t think you can expect multi-megabyte files to be indexed.”

So I checked our file sizes:

2002-2003 catalog: 7.907 MB
2003-2004 catalog: 2.387 MB
2004-2005 catalog: 4.361 MB
2005-2006 catalog: 12.535 MB
2006-2007 catalog: 4.634 MB

Looks like if a PDF file is larger than ~3 MB, it won’t be indexed by Google for searches.

So thats something of a revelation.  If you’ve got important content and you need google to know about it, reconsider depending on large PDF files.  It’s worth someone’s time to convert/provide that content in web-text form.

In fact, according to this source:

Large web pages are far less likely to be relevant to your query than smaller pages. For the sake of efficiency, Google searches only the first 101 kilobytes (approximately 17,000 words) of a web page and the first 120 kilobytes of a pdf file. Assuming 15 words per line and 50 lines per page, Google searches the first 22 pages of a web page and the first 26 pages of a pdf file. If a page is larger, Google will list the page as being 101 kilobytes or 120 kilobytes for a pdf file. This means that Google’s results won’t reference any part of a web page beyond its first 101 kilobytes or any part of a pdf file beyond the first 120 kilobytes.

So now I don’t know what to believe.  Anybody have additional insight on this?

I’d file this somewhere under “Best Slide Presentation about University Web Development, Ever.”

Found via Future Endeavour:

| View | Upload your own

You can also download the slides.

The creator of the presentation is Louis Rosenfeld, an independent information architecture consultant, and founder and publisher of Rosenfeld Media, a publishing house focused on user experience books. You can find 5 more of his presentations here.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my two years as a university web developer is this:

Websites built to mirror the org chart, will result in confusing user experience for the average site visitor.  In particular, the prospective student.

Every administrative unit feels they need their own website.  Every college.  Every Department.  And my simple advice is to quietly and consistently smother that demand.  Smother it, and or prioritize it far beneath that of providing relevant content for your key audiences.  The user doesn’t care who’s providing that information, they just want it.  And they don’t want to dig through your borg silo-structured website to piece it all together.

I’m a fan of Khoi Vinh, Design Director of the New York Times.  And a nugget of wisdom from his recent Q&A is worth a CTRL-C.  It’s worth pasting into a word doc in big type and sticking it to your wall for permanent reference:

Every time we add a new feature to the site, redesign an existing section or create new digital products of any kind, we start with the premise that our primary “clients” are the people who will actually be using it…

…It’s kind of an obvious assumption, but it really is the hardest part of the process for any design team, regardless of the industry: setting aside your own familiarity with the content, your own expertise and envisioning a solution through the eyes of those whose relationship with your product is much more casual.

You’re looking at graph of our web traffic compared with that of other universities in this region.   I’m not a huge fan of Alexa, but today I just found out you can generate these comparison charts.  Short of getting access to the server logs or analytics of rival institutions, this is pretty telling.

Several thoughts about this graph:

• Isn’t it interesting how these university websites have a similar pulse?
• I’d like to know more about the Alexa’s formula for “reach”.
• Let’s pretend I had a google analytics data for the other three sites.  How close would Alexa’s data match up?

Lots of ideas here. It’s as if the folks at espn are intent on bringing great magazine writing to the web, and preserving the flavor of how we’d expect to see it in print. It flies in the face of what we’ve all heard, …that limitations of the web prevent great design. Well folks, great design is about taking those limitations and embracing them. Like Zeldman once wrote: “Limitations are the soil from which creativity grows.”

Wanna see all these in higher res? I took some screenshots and made a pdf.

These special “E-Ticket” articles come out once every two weeks or so on espn.com.

30 more after the jump… Continue reading »

So I’m sitting at a table this morning with 4 other web people from colleges scattered around Texas and Louisiana, eating bland hotel breakfast food and chatting about the common issues web developers at universities face. And I realized that my new blog here is really just an extension of that conversation. Make that an easier, cheaper way to have that conversation without those tasteless donuts, the travel reimbursements, airport security, and predictable CASE presentations that often don’t yield anything new.

Then there’s Bob Johnson.

While the suits and university administrator types are stubbornly clinging to old-world communications habits and often resisting recommendations from their own web staff, …all of a suddent here’s a paid consultant, obviously a professional, …they’ll listen to Bob..

Suddenly these are new ideas.  And the conversation goes:

Suit: “Are we doing this? Can we get a plan to do this thing Bob is talking about?  What’s the holdup?”

Staffer: “Uhh, yeah.  It’s identical to the proposal you turned down 11 months ago.”

And that’s great.  Bob is great.  If Bob can open their eyes to the realities of the internet, and of the disappearing “controlled message” then thanks bob. Whatever it takes.

Allow me to illustrate.

It’s as if university-web-nerds are embarking on a voyage by ocean vessel to the distant shores of a forbidden land, whereupon they’ll trek overland by foot and penetrate the as-to-yet-impenetrable depths of jungle-academia, and they’ve carried with them and conscripted the services of one man: Bob Johnson, an emissary gifted of dialect, who has spent time among the inhabitants of this isolated jungle-people and can engage them in their native tongue.

Bob speaks to those people. This is no insult. Thanks Bob.

My university is in Little Rock, Arkansas, so it was pretty much a given that my boss would sign up everybody in the office for a CASE Conference, which will be held next week a few short miles from campus.

The schedule looks interesting. And I’ll probably meet fellow college-web-people from my region. In fact I’m supposed to moderate a roundtable discussion on Tuesday, early in the morning. And by early, I mean ridiculously early. 7:30 - 9:00 am. So I might be the only one at the table, moderating the voices in my head.

Some of the sessions look pretty interesting. I plan to attend the ones focused on new media and design, leaving about the boring stuff, ..you know: fundraising, management hoopla, etc.. Continue reading »

If you work with PR people who aren’t concerned as much about web, instead burying their heads in local newspapers and regional television, you should show them a recent survey:

More Americans turning to Web for News

Nearly half of the 1,979 people who responded to the survey said their primary source of news and information is the Internet, up from 40 percent just a year ago. Less than one third use television to get their news, while 11 percent turn to radio and 10 percent to newspapers.

More than half of those who grew up with the Internet, those 18 to 29, get most of their news and information online, compared to 35 percent of people 65 and older. Older adults are the only group that favors a primary news source other than the Internet, with 38 percent selecting television.

Does anyone have any personal experience getting your institution’s news items picked up by Google or Yahoo News? If so, I’m curious. Leave a comment.

Google News and Yahoo News are probably the top destinations for online news. And while it’s important to remember that these services pull mainly from newspapers and television outlets, they also gather news from other sources they consider worthy. Sources that could potentially be, well, your university. Your press releases, your news items. Straight to the online arena, bypassing the traditional gatekeepers.

Now, I don’t know what this means for the future of journalism. …who does, really? But it DOES mean that your news items and press releases could potentially reach a much larger audience, if you play your cards correctly and clue in on some general requirements.

Here’s where you can suggest your site for Google News.
But, there’s no guarantee they’ll pick it up. As a whole it seems that athletic news articles are more likely to be indexed. That’s the case with my university anyway.

Technical Requirements

Google News is particular about your article urls:

Your article URLs should meet these guidelines: Be unique. Each of your pages that display an article’s full text needs to have a unique URL that doesn’t change. We can’t include sites in Google News that display multiple articles at the same URL. For example, if your main news article is always located at http://www.google.com/news/story1.html, we won’t be able to include this URL every time the content changes. Display a three-digit number. The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. For example, our news crawler can’t crawl an article with this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article23.html. It can, however, crawl an article with this URL: http://www.google.com/news/article234.html

If the only number in the article consists of an isolated four-digit number that resembles a year, such as http://www.google.com/news/article2006.html, we won’t be able to crawl it.

What about RSS?

Strangely enough, Google says “Feeds? We don’t need your stinking feeds“:

At this time, we don’t accept RSS or Atom feeds for inclusion in Google News. Google News currently finds articles by crawling online news sites.

If your news content appears on a website, please let us know and we’ll review it.

Additional Resources

Google News has a new “Help for Publishers” resource that addresses other common questions.

Getting into Google and Yahoo News

How to get indexed by news search engines

Yahoo news
Yahoo may find your news site if you have a proper RSS feed.

Sing up for an My Yahoo! account and subscribe to your own RSS feed. Alternatively you may use the submit RSS feed form found at their Publisher’s Guide to RSS.

By doing this you will let Yahoo! know that the RSS feed exists. However, whether the company will include your news articles in their news search engine results is entirely up to them.

The strangly named SEO Blog Marketmou has a few more suggestions:

Never use a default theme for your blogging platform. Google hates ‘em.
Referencing Multiple Authors: You stand a much higher chance of getting indexed if you have more than one person posting.

As if I’ve got nothing better to do, I’ve been following the William & Mary web redesign effort via the blog and the dedicated project website.

Very jealously, mind you.  The efforts they seem to be expending to involve their constituents and keep them aware of the redesign process are going to pay dividends.

…from the initial concepts offered up my mStoner, through the amazing news and events design preview and down to today’s post previewing the new copy for William & Mary’s admissions page.

I’m no writer, but I know great copy when I see it:

Undergraduate Admission
Don’t let our looks fool you. We have big brains under all our beauty.

William & Mary consistently attracts the most exceptionally talented high school seniors from Virginia and across the world. Last year, nearly 11,000 applicants fought for 1,350 spots in William & Mary’s class of 2011. Take a look at the numbers for this year’s freshmen:

* 87% graduated in top 10% of their class
* the middle 50th percentile on SAT was 1310-1470
* the class includes 77 high school valedictorians and 33 salutatorians

But what really sets W&M students apart is a passion for learning. There are no one-dimensional eggheads around here. (Though there are enough smart alecs for us to anticipate some crack about eggs being three dimensional.) Chemistry majors write poetry for the literary magazine, business majors volunteer in soup kitchens, and football players star in Shakespeare. It’s all part of the proud intellectual culture at W&M, extending from the classroom to the dorm room and everywhere in between.

Yes, we work hard. But that’s because we’re working on things that we love. Our professors—hands down the most committed and engaged in the country—inspire us to go one step further, to challenge conventional wisdom and uncover new truths.

I had a pleasant surprise at South By Southwest Interactive in Austin, when I attended a morning session called: “Everyone’s a Design Critic”. I made a special effort to overcome the time-change and see the panel because one of the presenters was Jason Santa Maria, a designer I’ve kept up with for several years that maintains a blog about his experiences with web design.

The great unexpected part, was that the case study of his presentation centered around the way he approached the upcoming redesign of MICA, the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Audio of the presentation hasn’t been released yet.
View the presentation Slides. (8MB pdf)

Some highlights:

3 design ideas were presented to the client, each with unique design goals, and two mockups for each idea, meaning a main page and a secondary page.

Design 1 (main)

Design 1 (secondary)

Design 2 (main)

Design 2 (Secondary)

Design 3 (main)

Design 3 Secondary

I also enjoyed the sketches. Any designer worth his stuff will be carrying a sketchbook for ideas and notes:

And for what it’s worth, the old/current site: