August 2007 Archives

"Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime."

This is the philosophy in Web Communications.

We try to regularly step back and take a good hard look at what we do and how we do it. For the first several years of our existence, we spent most of our time building Web sites for other departments and then handing the client the keys. This was a complete failure for many reasons. First of all, we broke our own cardinal rule which is "do not build what you cannot sustain." Second of all, we were destined to disappointment because the site soon bore no resemblance to what we'd created because the owner didn't have the skills needed to manage the site. We had the best of intentions, but, the result wasn't what we'd hoped to see.

Education and training, although not initially part of our mission, has now become a core part of what we do in Web Communications. This blog, in fact, was developed as a means to communicate with our campus Web developers. We now teach through a variety of methods. Each one of our staff are gifted in different ways and each one came to the department with a love of learning. This has now evolved into a love of teaching. There continue to be monthly Web Developer meetings and part of the agenda is usually devoted to a training activity. However, we've now expanded this by hosting some smaller workshops that allow people to explore more specific areas of interest such as information architecture and CSS.

We'll be doing more of this in the coming year and would love to know what topics interest our campus colleagues. If you have an idea, please let us know. We're interested in knowing how we can help.

After over ten years of dedicated service to Mizzou, we bid farewell to the old events calendar last week and welcomed aboard a shiny new calendar with lots of bells and whistles.

The new calendar offers several new improvements over the old calendar:

• Event submitters can now add, modify, cancel, reschedule and delete their own events.
• Visitors to the calendar can elect to receive an e-mail or text-message reminder before an event.
• The "Add to My Calendar" features makes it easy for calendar visitors to add the event to their personal calendars in either iCal or vCal format.
• Visitors can e-mail events to up to five friends.
• A nifty syndication feature makes it possible for calendar managers to place event feeds on their department Web sites so that they only need to enter an event once.

There are also several other features that we haven't rolled out just yet but hope to as soon as we've had an opportunity to review them more carefully and develop campuswide implementation plans for each.

Configuring the new calendar was fairly straight forward and really only took a matter of a few weeks. The whole process included everything from adding the Mizzou brand and customizing the look and feel of the calendar to establishing a plan for distributing access to our campus departments and developing a user guide and training outline for staff.

The roll-out process also involved developing the event categories for the calendar. Our goal was to develop a list of categories that was comprehensive without being extremely long and made sense to our users. This involved taking a good cross sample of campus events and then sorting them into event types (lectures, meetings, sports, arts and culture, ceremonies, etc.). Once the basic categories were established, our team got together for a game of "devil's advocate" or "where-would-I-find-this." This helped identify a few missing categories (such as "sales").

So far the new calendar has been well-received on campus, and we'll continue to make small changes as we get more feedback this semester. Thanks to all the dedicated Mizozu staff who have really pitched in by posting their events to the calendar before students return on Monday!