Topic Ideas for WebComm School

A lot of the posts in this blog are to share the presentations and discussions we have that are a part of WebComm School. We usually try to take our cues about what we ought to teach from what our Web programmer ask about during the course of regular work. Sometimes, we have a hard time deciding what to present on.

So, this entry is to list some of the topics we'd like to present on. What are your thoughts? Let us know what other things we ought to be discussing.

• Accessibility, the W3C Standards and Otherwise Making Sure Everyone Can Use Your Site
• Social Media: What's Out There, and How Should We Use It in Higher Ed?
• Blogging: Tips On Making Them Useful, and Thinking About Who Should Be Doing It
• Outside Looking In: Thinking About Your User
• User Testing: Card Sorts, Analytics, Surveys and Focus Groups
• Integrated Communications: Erasing the Line Between Web and Traditional Communications
• Open Source: What's Out There, How We Can Use It, and How We Can Give Back
• Mash-Up: How We Can Use XML, RSS Feeds and the Like to Make Great Pages
• Style Guide: A Definitive Collection of Editorial Standards for the Web at ISU
• Touching the javascript:void(‘’): How To Get Over It
• It's A Google World: GMail, GoogleTalk, Google Maps, Blogger, Analytics, Custom Search Engine and More!
• Audio, Video and Images: What Formats to Use, and How to Make the Most of Them
  
• Forms: How to Build Them, How to Use Them
• HTTP 101
• Animation Nation: The Do's and Don't's of Flash and Other Animation Tools

That's the list so far. What do you think?

Stylin'

We had our first meeting today with staff from University Relations and others in public information roles on campus to start talking about style issues. We are realizing that it is important to settle on style guides and rules for the entire communications spectrum, since much of our work on the Web and work in print bleeds across lines.

We started today with some discussion about general style guides. We're going to make AP Style our general rulebook, while the Chicago Manual of Style the authority when it comes to magazine-style writing (such as in ISU Magazine).

We reviewed the core vocabulary for the Web, too:

• "Web site" and "Web," not "website" or "web"
• "e-mail" and "online," not "email" or "on-line"
• "home page," not "homepage"

Some of these are obvious, but we've all seen the variations in use. We just wanted to get on the same page.

Similarly, we talked about common terms we use frequently at ISU:

• always "health care" and never"health-care" or "healthcare"
• always "health professions" and never "health-professions"
  

We also shared some insight into the Web. We talked about links and e-mail addresses and URLs. We don't want to print the full text of a URL (link relevant text instead) and we prefer "E-mail Graham" to simply be a mailto link. We also clarified that Web address is not the preferred terminology — we want it to be URL.

With the easy stuff out of the way, we started to delve into the matters specific to higher education and ISU. What will the styles be for first and subsequent references to facilities on campus? Is it Pond Student Union Building? PSUB? Student Union? What about the Bennion Student Union Building in Idaho Falls? BSUB? We're ironing these out and expect to include them in a new, ISU-specific online style guide.

We also started the discussion about academic degrees. This seems to be the first area we've found where print and Web preferences differ. Print wants to include periods in the abbreviations (i.e., Ph.D.), while we want to omit them (ala PhD).

The discussion is ongoing, and we'll be posting more as we meet. Of course, we also intend to post a link to the style guide as it starts to take shape.

CSS 101

My presentation this go round was on the basics of CSS. I didn't go much into the specific properties of CSS (you can look those up anywhere), but there are certain things that I think are important that they won't teach you in normal tutorials. For example, you should never name a CSS class based on what the end output is going to look like. If you're going to create a news column on the right-hand side of your page, call the CSS selector "news" and not "rightcolumn!" It will only cause you headaches when your boss tells you next week that he likes the news box on the left-hand side.

Without further ado, here is the presentation:

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WebComm School: Making Web Sites Out of Nothing At All

We started WebComm School as a way to help us teach (and refresh) how to undertake web projects. This is especially important with our temporary and student workers. Many of them have little to no formal training in web development, and we wanted our office to be a good training ground.

We figure this will help us not only improve the quality of work our office produces, but also provide a pool of web designers and programmers who can be hired full-time by those departments who need them (even us, hopefully).

We do this weekly, and we take two hours. One hour is devoted to a technical presentation (by Laird) and one is devoted to concepts and principles of design (by me).

So, this week, my presentation was on coming up with content when a department doesn't provide you with anything. We've all been in the situation where a department needs a web site, but they haven't given us anything. So, hopefully this presentation will help us get basic sites up when content is sparse.

Here's the presentation:

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Ideas, Goals and Projects from HighEdWebDev

So, after attending the HighEdWebDev conference, I wrote a list of the prime concepts and ideas I want WebComm to tackle. Here's the list, and the target dates for starting or completing the projects (or, the case of principles, tackling a project associated with the principles). I've listed the source of the ideas in the parentheses following each item. Here goes:

1. Blog about what you are doing (Penn State) – Oct. 23
2. Experiment with your own accounts on the social networking and Web 2.0 sites (Texas A&M) – Oct. 24, then once a week
3. Use analytics to support your actions and requests [we'll use this to change some of the way we have organized our home page] (Xavier U.) – Oct. 26
4. Create a style guide (Santa Clara U.) – Nov. 9
5. Form a web developers group (U. Nebraska-Lincoln) – Nov. 15
6. Create an e-newsletter for the campus community to show what you are doing in web work, including a list of your recent accomplishments and your upcoming projects, as well as tips and pointers (Xavier U.) – Nov. 30
7. Make your marketing efforts integrated and authentic [we'll probably work with Admissions or the Graduate School to do a "storybook" about ISU professors] (TargetX) – Dec. 7
8. Have a "lite" version of your home page, in case of emergency, to relieve server demand (Virginia Tech) – Dec. 14
9. Do a pet project for Admissions (Xavier U.) – Dec. 21
10. Have monthly web dev meetings and do exercises (Santa Clara U.) – Jan. 11
11. Develop a presentation to give to administrators (Xavier U.) – Jan. 18
12. Develop emergency plan (Virginia Tech) – Jan. 25
13. Cohesive database for print and web projects (Missouri State) – Summer 2008

Welcome to ISU WebComm!

I just returned from the Higher Education Web Professionals annual conference in Rochester, N.Y., and I've resolved (among many other things) to start blogging about what the work we are doing in the Office of Web Communications at Idaho State University.

It might help to give my brief background, and a little about the department:
In November 2006, I was asked to start a new department. I had previously served as the interim director of the ISU Foundation and the director of the ISU Alumni Association/Office of Alumni Relations. Prior to my time at ISU, I was the political reporter for the Idaho State Journal.

I had plenty of experience as a writer and some as a manager, but my only web experience had been in developing a web site for the Alumni office. At that time, I had experience as a print designer and graphic artist and thought it would be a simple transition into web design. Boy, was I wrong!

I learned some very basic HTML and developed the Alumni site through Dreamweaver. It wasn't the best web site ever created, but it was better than what we had before and it introduced me to web design.

So, when I was told that the university wanted to start a web office, I was pretty intimidated. But, I was able to hire the very competent Laird Duncan as the tech genius for the office and that has helped immensely.

My bachelor's degree is in political science and my master's is in public administration, and Laird has a bachelor's in computer science. Together, we're able to tackle both the communication and technical sides of the office's role.

After I started the office, I went to the American Marketing Association's higher ed conference and got a great start. The HighEdWebDev conference really has me and Laird raring to go.

By January 2007, Laird and I worked up a plan to offer maintenance agreements to various departments on campus. That allowed us to generate some revenue, and we hired a couple of part-time students (and recent grads) to help us out. Right now, Joe Marley and Derek Aitken are those part-timers, and they have been a great addition.

Our office is responsible for the top-level pages of the the web site, and really, the entire web presence of the university (outside of personal pages for students and faculty). It is amazing how overwhelming such a massive area can be, and it often feels like you are very slowly chipping away at a mountain.

We've got some big plans on the way, and I'll be posting those soon.