January 2007 Archives

Recently we decided to give the free version of the Google Analytics tool a shot and are now using it to monitor traffic and activity on the main MU Web site and the Undergraduate Admissions site. I'll have to say, I'm extremely impressed and for someone whose job it is to monitor audience activity and make decisions based on user need, my job just got a whole lot easier.

This tool allows me to see much more clearly where our visitors are coming from, what they're looking at and all sorts of additional information I've never had available before in an easy to read format. It's especially nice when I can take the guesswork out of decisions. For instance, I always thought that if current students, faculty and staff had a very specific area of the site designed for their own purposes, it would become one of the most heavily used areas because they would find it easier to go about their daily work, using it as a resource. Recent statistics show that the #1 hit page on the MU site is, of course, the homepage at www.missouri.edu. The #2 spot is held consistently by the current students gateway page at http://www.missouri.edu/students/. The faculty and staff gateway is also popular, showing up consistently in the top 10. This means that I can, with complete confidence, use these areas as a means of disseminating important information useful to these audiences with the knowledge that they are indeed looking at the page. No more assumptions, it's solid fact.

Another great piece of intelligence is that our visitors are searching for us using these top two terms:
1. University of Missouri
2. Mizzou

I'll provide more of this information occasionally for your reading pleasure. If you're a geek about statistics like I am, you'll find some of this very interesting. For those of us responsible for marketing Mizzou, the information is like pure gold, or should I say "black and gold?"

If you blinked, then you most likely missed it, and that was completely by design. Wednesday morning our office, in conjunction with the IATS CMS staff, re-launched the MU homepage except this time it was in CascadeServer, our Content Management System. There are a few things I learned that I'd like to pass on to all of the new kiddos joining the CMS crew.

If you were to randomly grab a book out of the web technology section of any book store odds are you'd get a book on cascading style sheets (CSS). They're everywhere. With a flood of CSS books on the market, it's not a problem finding out how to write CSS, make it valid, standards compliant and accessible.

Being a creative person from the print world who made the transition to the web, I've had a hard time finding any sort of resource on the creative process of Web design -- which I find sort of strange. Any book on print design focuses on the creative process and spends very little time talking about applications or operating systems. Yet when it comes to Web design, it's all code and browser compatibility.

I suppose there is a reason for this. Print design has its roots in the fine arts and tends to be very visual while Web design emerged from programming and tends to be highly technical. It’s basically the old "right brain" vs. "left brain" fight. So, how do we meet in the middle?

I thought I had found my answer in The Zen of CSS Design, but it fell short of my expectations. While it was good for creative inspiration, it ended up being a gallery of advanced CSS techniques without much explanation behind either the creative or technical process.

Now, with the release of the follow-up to The Zen of CSS Design, I’ve got my answer: Transcending CSS, The Fine Art of Web Design by Andy Clarke. This beautifully designed book is about design and not markup, and assumes that you already know about XHTML, CSS and Web standards. It goes over designing from the content out, finding inspiration, establishing a workflow, creating wireframes and prototypes, and working with grids and the box model -- allowing both sides of your brain to work together in harmony. It's about time!