Every organization makes mistakes running their website; the nature of those mistakes varies, however, depending on the size and type of organization. Institutional websites are often large unwieldy creatures plagued by bureaucracy. In this talk Paul will share some of the harsh truths surrounding these websites and suggests ways to tame the beast!
…college news is a messy business. Students are learning, and their mistakes all too often show up in print. An online presence will broadcast those mistakes to the world, so the theory goes. Also, a college that supports student press freedoms when distributed to 2,000 people on campus might not be so keen to distribute “bad news” about the campus when the whole world is watching.
…Trumping all those considerations, staying offline is a disservice to student journalists who cannot use the online tools now widespread in the industry. A student who can’t put material online can’t really understand the impact of social networks like Twitter or Facebook to spread news. They can’t really understand what it is to create a personal brand. And they can’t really understand the challenges of multimedia production.
A college that will not allow their student journalists to practice online journalism in a “real world” setting is abandoning its commitment to education in order to save face. And that is a tragedy not only for the college, but for the students who look to higher education to prepare them for the future.
Bob Bergland notes a survey he conducted: “We were amazed to find that 36% of the 392 papers analyzed (random sample from the ~1,600 on the directory) did not have a web presence (defined as no site, a site with no content listed as being under construction or a site which had not been updated in over six months).”
There are two primary obstacles for getting a college newspaper online: One is relatively easy to overcome (technology), the other much harder but more crucial overall (institutional).
The MediaShift blog is always a great read. I’d highly recommend subscribing to the feed.
In the same way that communications plans, meetings, and approval chains can sometimes be the enemy of effective web work, there is also the quagmire of demanding every great feature on the first iteration.
Most often the culprit is yourself. You want the best. You want it all. You want to buy a house and keep pushing back the move-in date, until every last piece of furniture is neatly in place.
What does your website sound like? Turn off your style sheet and look at what you’ve got. Suddenly the person listening to a website with a screen reader is no longer different from you—your needs are the same. Achieving the highest level of accessibility makes a lot of sense and should be part of your design efforts for reasons you no longer need others to justify for you.
…accessibility is often assigned a low priority for the following reasons:
We would like to create accessible content, but we only have a small team.
Nobody ever really complains about inaccessibility, anyway.
Accessible sites are less aesthetically pleasing and they limit our design options.
We really don’t know what it takes to make our website/web application accessible.
Our target user group doesn’t include users with disabilities.
Of all the arguments, number four is really the only valid reason why a website or web application should have accessibility issues. You can resolve this issue—provide your web designers and developers with some minimal and gradual accessibility training, and keep the discussion alive. As for the rest…they merely require a small, but powerful shift in mindset
In the next few years I predict a glut of University Advancement jobs going to new-media types who are masters of their tools and not much else. With the prevalence of content management, web-templates, and social media tools, the recurring weakness of most any web project is content creation.
Writers. Communicators. Storytellers.
Without these people, the designers, the developers, the usability experts, and the webmaster server types are useless. In the absence of substance, our tools mean nothing. It’s packaging without product; A concert without music.
So don’t hire a web designer. Don’t hire a “Social Media Expert”. First and foremost, hire a communicator who also happens to specialize in one of those areas. Your decision will pay dividends.
(saw that great little cartoon in IABC’s latest CW magazine) It struck a nerve.
until we commit to treating content as a critical asset worthy of strategic planning and meaningful investment, we’ll continue to churn out worthless content in reaction to unmeasured requests. We’ll keep trying to fit words, audio, graphics, and video into page templates that weren’t truly designed with our business’s real-world content requirements in mind. Our customers still won’t find what they’re looking for. And we’ll keep failing to publish useful, usable content that people actually care about. Stop pretending content is somebody else’s problem. Take up the torch for content strategy. Learn it. Practice it. Promote it. It’s time to make content matter.
