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It’s the season for those looking for professional development opportunities and there are plenty of conferences around to meet most needs. Yours truly will be speaking at the upcoming CASE Summer Institute in Communications and Marketing being held this year at the lovely University of Vermont in Burlington.

For about 5 days during the first week of August, marketing and communications professionals new to their jobs or new to higher ed will meet to enjoy perhaps one of the most fun conferences I’ve ever attended. Because it’s held over several days, participants get to truly immerse themselves in the experience, get to know the faculty and, most importantly, make other friends within their profession. This is critical for communicators.

Last year I was the rookie on the faculty. This year, I’m a returning team member with a brand spanking new Web workshop to offer attendees. My workshop sessions will include:

• From Conception to Production: The Process of Building a Successful, User-Centered, Web Site

Sites big and small benefit from a sound plan and process. Learn how to organize your team and deliver a site that is within budget, meets goals and places the needs of your visitors first. Included in this session will be insights and resources you can use to make decisions about hiring consultants, selecting a content management system and more.

• Managing the Hybrid Web Team

It’s a new and unexplored world now that communication and technical professionals work together on the same team. How does a communications professional manage technical staff? How can you find a language that both of you can understand? Let’s share some tips, tricks and techniques that will help you hire and manage the hybrid Web team.

• I’ve Collected the Data; Now What Do I Do With It?

You have tons of Web analytics collected over many months or years. Learn how to use this information to “listen to your audience” and create user-centered Web sites.

Other presentations include Marketing Your Institution Online and the perennial favorite, What a Tangled Web We Weave: Campus Politics and the Web.

I was looking back at my presentations folder yesterday and realized the first time I delivered the Campus Politics and the Web presentation was in 2001. Wow. That seems forever ago. The good news is that what I discussed in the 2001 presentation as problems I faced, in 2008 I can stand before people and talk about them in the past tense. It’s nice to make some progress, isn’t it?

I will also be chairing the Online Strategies conference for CASE in Seattle in October. More about that one later.

Whatever you do in your professional life, make sure that continuing education and development are a part of it. For those of us who work in the world of Web, learning is perhaps the most important thing we do.

ReadWriteWeb had a very interesting post today about how 7 out of the top 10 fastest rising search terms from last year were “navigational search” terms: searches for a website that the user wants to visit where adding .com to the search term would have take the user directly to the site. In other words, instead of typing “www.facebook.com” into the browser’s address bar, the user searched for the term facebook in order to get to facebook.com.

We, as developers, have long been taught that providing your users with an easy-to-remember, intuitive URL is the best way to ensure that your users can find your site. But in light of this new information, I wonder if we, as a campus, should begin discussions on how we can make sure all our various sites are optimized for search engines.

Often in higher ed we use words that people outside academia (see, I just used one) don’t really understand. It’s sort of like a secret club and only those in it can participate in the conversation.

Recently, we started a list on the white board in our break room. This list was called: Words that are overused in higher education. We normally use our white board as a space to entertain, blow off some steam and otherwise have a laugh or two. However, it was really interesting and educational to see the list grow. So much so that I thought it should be shared on this blog.

As you read this list, think about how you communicate with your audiences. Are you telling your stories in ways those outside “academia” can understand? Are we relying on the same old catch-all words that amount to a lot of fluff and very little substance? Are we unintentionally creating the illusion of a special club by speaking in lofty terms that really don’t translate into the important messages we need to send.

There were a few other entries obviously added for laughs like football, bowl games, athletics, “your Mom”, etc. However, I’m sure you get the meaning. Take a look at the list and feel free to add a few of your own. After all, it’s all about the conversation, right?

• excellence
• paradigm
• engaged
• leadership
• diversity
• core values
• synergy
• utilize
• experiential
• impact
• enhance
• innovative
• success
• academia
• scholarly
• matriculate
• mission
• support
• dialogue (as a verb)
• multifaceted
• achievement

Thanks goes to my brother for sending me this.

Design Coding

I'm a big fan of Google Analytics and am always on the lookout for information that helps me use this tool to better serve the needs of our online audience. I found a great blog post from the .eduGuru who recently attended a Google conference and it has some great tips for using Google Analytics.

This week finds the staff in Web Communications very busy on the heels of winning the Big 12 North Championship game against KU and being ranked #1 in the national football polls. With the upcoming Big 12 Championship game against Oklahoma on Saturday night, we are industriously churning out online material to meet the demands of Mizzou Tiger fans all over the world.

So, how does one take advantage of these historic opportunities to deliver messages to the hoards of online visitors? As with everything we do in Web Com, it starts with a plan.

There was to be an immediate update of the MU/KU pre-game story when battle was completed last Saturday night. First thing Monday, a victory story made its appearance in the rotation on the Mizzou homepage. By Tuesday, we added a story from Mizzou Magazine to the rotation and deleted non-football related stories for this week. On Wednesday, we'll launch a retrospective of this dream season, building up to the next big battle to be won on the weekend. On Thursday, our editor, who will be traveling with the Mizzou Alumni Association to San Antonio, will make his first post to our Big 12 Championship blog. Friday, he will begin blogging from the road as he follows the team and the fans to the big game.

There are many other activities taking place on campus and to promote quality, consistency and ease for PR folks, we've established a page for people to download football related photos and logos as they send emails, newsletters, etc.

Our analytics tell us that football is, indeed, tremendously popular with online visitors to the Mizzou site. Within 24 hours of posting the story about the win over KU, that feature had received over 4,100 unique visitors. Those are some very healthy numbers, folks!

Online blogs offer another glimpse of the success story. When searching blogs, it was interesting to see how those in the prospective student demographic reacted. There were many mentions of being interested in attending Mizzou, being glad they were accepted to Mizzou and so forth. Successful athletics do help when recruiting students.

It's a lot of extra work, no doubt about it. But, if a PR shop has to put in extra hours on crisis management, this is the best kind to have.

In the past few years, through trial and error, I've determined there are some rules that are critical for our department. It's been challenging to lead a department that is growing and in a field that is constantly changing. There have been many mistakes and a lot of frustration, but, as a result, there were certain fundamental things that rose to the surface. While some of the details change, the basic list seems to work for us. They've certainly helped us to become a much more professional and productive Web team.

1. Do not build what you cannot sustain.
Anyone who knows me has heard me utter this phrase time and time again. It's important that you don't incorporate things in your site that you don't have the ability to support. This is especially important when using free scripts and such you may find on the Web. Changes occur, things break and you've created something you don't have the ability to diagnose or fix. If you don't know how to build it, how it works and, most importantly, how to fix it properly, DON'T DO IT.

2. Technology should be used to solve problems.
Too often people get excited about the newest technology that's creating a buzz among practitioners. The next thing you know, people have purchased software because everyone else seemed to be doing it and then have to make up projects to justify the purchase. It's my philosophy that this is completely backward. You should first identify your problem and then determine whether software is a solution. When you're too quick to jump on the latest technology bandwagon, you sometimes find that you've actually invested more time and money in a product that it's worth to your institution.

3. Planning is the most important part of the process.
When a project goes badly, the first thing I do is look at what type of planning was done in advance. The lack of a solid plan with goals, priorities and stated expectations is usually the cause of frustration and disappointment for both the developer and the client. While certainly not the most exciting part of the process, any project worth doing deserves ample time for research, planning and preparation.

4. Engage in continuous evaluation.
It's important to make good, solid decisions. It's just as important to look back later and make sure those same decisions are as good today as they were yesterday. Times change, people change, technologies change. There's no crime in deciding that something you did during an earlier time needs to be adjusted to meet today's demands. It's just good business practice. By evaluating what you do, you often find you can discontinue doing something that was a priority a year ago and make room for something that has become a priority today. After all, your plate's only so big, right?

5. Set priorities and make sure your work supports those priorities.
The setting of priorities is an important part of the planning process. However, the priorities affect many other things in your work day and can, in fact, make it easier for you to make decisions. A retreat with the people you work closely with helps determine what those priorities need to be. In many cases, they are actually derived for the priorities of your institution. When planning your tasks or addressing requests for your services, it helps to ask yourself how the work you've been asked to do supports one of those priorities. I try to set 3 top priorities each year and develop a project list based on our support of those items. It's been a great way for me to resist the temptation to develop "project creep."

6. Take breaks.
We are a society of sedentary people. For those of us who work in front of a computer monitor all day, it's very important for both our physical and mental well being to get away from the computer and take a break at least a couple of times each day. I've found that we're all happier, healthier and more productive by taking a little bit of time to invest in ourselves. It's also a great opportunity for the team to bond with each other.

7. Make time for learning new things in your work week.
One of the questions asked of people who want to work in Web Communications is "Do you like to learn?" In our field, things change daily. It's an exciting field to work in if you like learning new things and mastering new challenges. Not so great if this isn't something you're willing to do. Make a little time in each work week to learn something new. It can be as simple as spending time reading a blog you find has value or planning something into a project that allows you to learn a new skill. (Just make sure it solves a problem first. See item # 2.) This keeps you on top of your game.

8. Learn to say no when necessary.
This is one of the hardest to accomplish in our top 10 list. People who work on the Web are largely focused on customer service. That's why we engage in usability testing and user-centered design, right? However, this is a good time to put those priorities into action. You don't help anyone by agreeing to do everything and accomplishing nothing. Plus, you just make yourself feel overwhelmed and unhappy. It's okay to say no in the right way. Organize your work and demonstrate that you are completing priority projects. If pressed, ask if the priorities have changed since they were originally set and ask which one may be moved off the list to accommodate the new request. It makes it easier if you ask the person requesting the service to become a part of the process of deciding what stays and what goes.

9. Know your limits and respect them.
If you do, others will, too. If you are not a programmer, don't pretend to be one. Taking on tasks you're not trained to perform will ultimately do nothing but make you look bad. And stupid. Web developers, from day one, have been expected to be jacks of all trades. This also guarantees you'll be master of none. If you want to add to your skill set, ask for additional training so that you can do a better job and support those areas of priority that have been defined for you. Include others in the development of your site. Maybe you're great at coding and design, not so great at writing content. It's hard to pretend to be a good writer if you're not. Just remember, it takes a village to build a Web site.

10. Spend time with your peers and learn from each other.
This is important and is the most inexpensive path to continuing professional development on campus. This is a great reason to use when asking for time away from the office to attend Web Developer's meetings!

"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.

We've worked on scores of Web sites through the years. At some point in the process each time, I always ask myself why clients tend to make unreasonable requests. When at the point of complete frustration, I usually pull out a cute piece a friend shared with me years ago in the early days of the Web. It's message is as true today as it was then. Enjoy!

Dear Mr. Architect:

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted.

When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don't have nearly enough insulation in them).

As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)

Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that the kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.

To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year. Make sure that you weigh all of these options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.

Please don't bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet. However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.

Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.

While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers. Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has. I advise you to run up and look at my neighbor's house he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many features that we would also like in our new home, particularly the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.

Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.

You must be thrilled to be working on as an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can't happen very often. Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans.

PS: My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I've given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can't handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.

PPS: Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case.

This past week, I had the great opportunity of attending the Web Design World 07 conference in San Francisco. I saw a lot, ate a lot and learned a lot. I also forgot my jacket and understood what Mark Twain meant when he said, “The coldest winter I ever saw was the summer I spent in San Francisco.” Once I made a visit to Old Navy and got some warm cloths, I was ready for the conference.

Here are a few interesting things I took away: