College Web Guy

I’ve started collecting the highlights of things I read, and/or dig up.  The good stuff.   And like a dirty old miner emerging from a dusty cave, I intend to pack those gold nuggets on a mule and bring them to town for everybody to see.  Possibly also to trade for hard goods like Snuff, liquor, and additional mules.

So here they are:  Gold Nuggets for June 2008: 

Ubrander: Webcentricity And The Future Of Print Designers

To summarize, print and Web should not be seen as competing with each other. The essence of both is design. In the future, we will only hire designers who can work on both platforms. And it will be more common to see Web developers moving out of IT and into the marketing department, not as Web designers, but as those who oversee functionality.

Reading, Writing and Big Ideas: Authenticity U:

…No one cares what you think of your institution. They want to hear it from the customers themselves.

…It’s communicating the simplicity of the authentic experience of your institution that will make your admissions marketing materials and especially the college web site speak to its audience.

.eduGuru: You want my Blogging Manifesto well here it is:

Using SEO on a webpage isn’t about keyword stuffing, it’s about creating a interesting and unique piece of content that people will find useful and share with each other.

Jason Santa Maria: A New Day

We’ve made so many advancements in how we publish content that we haven’t looked back to what it is we’re actually creating.

Newsweek: Microsoft After Gates. (And Bill After Microsoft.)

Gates understands that his identity as a philanthropist will be drastically different than his role as the king of software. “We don’t have a CES on malaria, so you don’t get 50,000 people converging on a city and saying, ‘Oh, Bill’s keynote on malaria is coming’..

TreeHugger: Quote of the Day: Felix Salmon on Commuting

Over the very long term, I suspect we’ll look back on the era of the 85-mile commute as a historical curiosity. That kind of distance is so enormous compared to any kind of human scaling that it just doesn’t make sense as a way to live.

Notes from KarlynMorissette: An Event Apart: Understanding Web Design

“Teaching Excel is not the same as teaching business.” Learning software is not the same as learning web design. Generally educational programs teach you software and not strategy.”

“Web Design Competitions award certain kinds of work and perpetuate certain kinds of work. This work is not necessarily about users.”

Robert Hoekman: Throwing User-Centered Design out the window

User research, as it’s typically done, results in a set of persona descriptions, which are, well, less than useful as project deliverables. Managers care about results. Numbers. They want to see progress, not fictitious character descriptions. They hired you to design, not write movie scripts. …I just believe it’s far better to focus on activities rather than people.

It seems like everybody has heard of Wilkes University and their bizarre method of marketing to individual students on billboards and tv commercials.  I didn’t know that all those tv spots were on Youtube.

Really great stuff.  What makes them all-the-more powerful, I think, is the way they stand out from other commercials because of not having an audio voiceover.  Oh and, great copywriting.  Of course.

The ads are the brainchild of Philadelphia marketing firm 160over90, which had a mandate from Wilkes to convey the message that the school gets to know its students personally and pays close attention to their needs. 

One of eight:

Here is the audio/podcast from, by far, the most entertaining /interesting panel I attended at SXSW Interactive.  The topic: Browser Wars. The speakers and/or members of the panel:

Brendan Eich invented JavaScript and is CTO of Mozilla; Chris Wilson worked on every version of IE that you’ve used; Charles McCathieNevile is the public face of standards at Opera. And Arun Ranganathan moderated the discussion and tried (unsuccessfully) to keep them all civil.  The panelists take frequent snipes at Apple/Safari, who chose not to send a representative for the conversation.

Once again, it’s about the ingredients that constitute a Web application, and who’s putting them in their browsers for us developers to build stuff on. Proprietary technology again competes against open standards. This panel will ask the hot questions to the browser titans - Firefox, Microsoft, Apple, and Opera. What’s with HTML5? And Silverlight and other proprietary stuff? And who’s building what feature into JavaScript? And what about the mobile web?

So many conversations lately, both in blogs and in person, …about METHODS of PR and communication.  TOOLS and MEDIUMS of delivery.  ONLINE vs PRINT.  Social Media vs traditional media.

We web-tech nerds like to talk shop.  We like like to discuss methods, tools and mediums.  But all this discussion is meaningless without content creators and storytellers.

Lately I’ve been a huge fan of The Big Picture, a new feature of the Boston Globe, instigated by Alan Taylor.  (Make sure to click on the features.  Each one has 10-20 additional images.)

On his personal website, Alan writes about his motives behind the project:

When I see quality photography consigned to the archives, or when I see bandwidth readily given up to video streams of dubious quality, or when I see photo galleries that act as ad farms, punishing viewers into a click-click-click experience just to drive page views - those times are the times I’m glad I was able to get this project off the ground (many thanks to my friends within boston.com)

And the thing that makes me happiest about it - I’m telling stories once again, on a regular basis, with great support and great platform. I hope you enjoy The Big Picture - go check it out.

In another post he gets to the central motivation for his recent projects:

In my 40 years, I’ve had over 30 different jobs. The ones that I enjoyed the most, that were the most fulfilling, all involved storytelling. I discovered long ago a real love for storytelling, and have practiced it in many different ways (oral, digital, print, video, graphic, more) - all very satisfying. This is my central passion and I need to keep nurturing it, and I will.

My day job is still with boston.com (The Boston Globe), and I love that I can be involved with storytelling at some level there. In the past, it was a bit difficult because of my specific role there, but recently things have been changing, and there will be more opportunity for me to nurture that passion at work as well.

I envy Alan and his career.  He’s put together an interesting set of projects.   This year my aim is to focus more on storytelling.  Sure, the tools of delivery and the methods of communicating stories are very important.  That’ll always be a big part of what I do.  But in the end, all this banter about tools is essentially identical to artists arguing about pencils.  My job affords me the option of helping writers find, document, and present stories, and I’m going to try and take a bigger step into that arena.  Be it with video, photography, audio, or yeah, even text.

Ahh the tangled web we weave. So I’m scrolling though kottke.org and become interested in his post about JK Rowling’s Harvard commencement address. I follow that link to Harvard Magazine’s website which includes the video, and notice the Summer Enrollment promotion they’ve placed in their ad space:

Upon further investigation, Harvard has one of the best Summer Course sites I’ve ever seen. Check it out.

From personal experience, we’re in the middle of promoting the summer program at our university, and I’m woefully aware of all the things we WANTED to do but didn’t have the time or manpower to overcome. Particularly I’m impressed and jealous of the “find a course” page. Simplicity at it’s best. Multiple pathways for prospective students to find the course they’re looking for:

Ultimately a web team can present and promote a concept, but the trouble can begin when a student wants to go beyond that and take action. In this case, find a course. At many universities they’ve got to overcome and navigate the often confusing and extremely unusable internal campus app, and thats just to FIND a course.

In this case, Harvard is doing an awesome job. Everything appears to be crystal clear and readily available. Those developers are major-league, (as is their budget, surely) and I’m down here in pee-wee-baseball-league, admiring them from a considerable distance.

Karlyn Morissette has a VERY informative post about placing advertisements on Facebook.   Complete with charts, clickthrough rates, everything.  Valuable information.

The most telling part of the whole experience for me, was one of Karlyn’s follow-up comments:

..this is pretty much one of the cheapest things you can do. I don’t expect to pay more than $200 for this campaign, and I think that’s a high water mark. The beauty of this sort of thing is that although you don’t get a lot of leads, the ones you do get are very well qualified. When we did this for our last challenge, the people who got to our site through these ads gave at a much higher rate than our regular users.

Found like so many other great links, via Kyle James at .eduGuru’s Links of the Week.

Several weeks back, I was asked to compose a short bio.

In case you weren’t aware, this happens all the time with famous people. Usually these requests are handled in-house. I’ll typically get one of my publicists to compose something. I simply don’t have the time, what with all the philanthropic endeavors and high-profile IT /Desktop support activities I’m involved with in the Communications office of a small Arkansas university.

This time however, I set aside some time to reflect on life and compose the bio myself.

Several months ago I was approached to design a Capitol Campaign website for my University. This was a problem.

Usually I can at least attempt to imagine myself as the intended audience of a site; put myself in their shoes, and design a site based on what (I think) they expect.  But people inclined to give away large sums of money?  I haven’t the slightest understanding of this audience, and probably never will.

So I spent several hours looking around.  Who seems to be doing this well?  Linked screenshots are below.  And for higher resolution, here’s the original pdf I put together containing all the examples.

The criteria in my short search weren’t that lofty, just find University Campaign websites done moderately well.  …not just in terms of design, but compelling copy, user-experience, etc.  Anybody know of additional examples worthy of emulation?

“There’s nothing wrong with Flash, provided you don’t use it to construct web sites where people want to find information, navigate easily or do anything beyond passively consume exactly what you choose to give them in exactly the way you’ve decided.”

Annoying Software : A Rogue’s Gallery put together a list of annoying internet-related software.

High on their list:
Adobe Reader
RealPlayer,
and Flash.

Related:

Flash’s Weaknesses: Then and Now
Does Flash Irk Me?
6 Places that Flash Does Not Belong

So Monday my wife gave birth to our second child.  See our lives unravel on the flickr account.

In my downtime I’ve been updating my web design portfolio in hopes of finding more freelance work.  ….an expanding family it turns out, is an amazing motivator.

www.drewtube.com/portfolio 

Using wordpress to power a design portfolio seems to work well.   Most graphic artists I’ve been around go to exhaustive lengths to build/produce their portfolio every 3 or 4 years.  Floor to ceiling, they completely revisit it.  With wordpress, I can treat mine as a blog, and simply add to it whenever I’ve got something new.

So in between pacifying a screaming newborn, consoling a jealous two-year-old, and reading Indiana Jones movie reviews, I’ve been updating that portfolio and cruising craigslist for freelance/contract web development work.  Of course, one of the nice things about working at a University is the generous amount of vacation time I’ve been able to accrue.  That really helps out with a new kid.  With this amount of sleep, there’s really no way I’d be able to work anyway.

Newborns work the night shift.