Another MU WebCom project is done! The redesigned Human Resource Services (HRS) site is live. This was a long, complex project that touched almost everyone on our staff. Every aspect of the site was rebuilt, from the information architecture to the final design. The following is a quick recap of our goals.
As I mentioned in my first post here, I come from a print background. Magazines, specifically. Now that I’m working on the Web, I’m learning more about what does and doesn’t work online.
Good grammar and punctuation? Catchy headlines? Simple sentences that are clear and to the point? Those things are important no matter where your work is published. My trouble lies more behind the scenes.
Writers often record their interviews so they can allow the conversation to flow without being bogged down by excessive note taking. It’s also great for going back to check quotes. I’ve been recording for a while, but it wasn’t until this week that I realized I have a habit of saying “mm-hmmm” and “uh-huh” as my subject speaks. I’ve always done this as a form of active listening and to let my interviewee know that I was following what they were saying. That, in itself, isn’t a bad thing. But it does become a problem in the internet realm.
Right now I’m working on a story that is going to have an audio slide show. Unlike many people I’ve interviewed in the past, this particular subject spoke in complete, coherent sentences that didn’t require a lot of additional context. Those are just the kinds of audio snippets that are perfect for an audio slide show. That is, if you haven’t mucked them up with a bunch of “mm-hmmms” and “uh-huhs”…
Usability is something that is becoming increasingly more important in the construction of our Web sites. However, not many people who design and build Web sites truly understand what usability is.
There are two important components in building a good Web site that should never be overlooked: usability and usefulness.
I’d like to share a site that is a great resource for learning about usability and what you can do to create a more user focused site. The company is called User Interface Engineering. They also run some great conferences if you’re in the market for a good experience in the future.
The other component I mentioned, usefulness, comes down to whether or not you’ve been strategic in the development of your content. If you review your own site or benchmark with others you can easily find tons of content that is taking up valuable time and real estate on a Web site, but, it isn’t really useful to many people. Information is what the Web is all about. I challenge you to take a few moments to review your site and see if there’s something posted there that is taking up time and space that you can get rid of. It’s a wonderful feeling to be able to trim the useless material from your site and begin to regain focus on the things that are really important.
Go ahead. Give it a shot. Let me know how it feels.
In a video interview I came across on 37signals, Ira Glass, host of This American Life, explains his storytelling process and two points in particular stood out to me:
“The amount of time finding the decent story is more than the amount of time it takes to produce the story.”
“Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.”
These two ring true with everything we do in our office. It’s not obvious to the visitors of our sites just how much time is spent on doing the initial research, finding the story, building the information architecture, deciding on the back-end technologies or creating the design mock-ups. The actual build-out of a site, the stuff that people end up experiencing, goes much, much quicker.
That’s only half the battle. Even if you do all the initial work, you still have to edit out the “crap.” You have to be ruthless and only show what needs to be shown in order to get your information across with as little static as possible.
Anyone can tell a story, or build a Web site. The difference between a good one and a great one is not about what has been put in, but what has been taken out.
The entire interview: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4
See also: Stories smooth as Glass (Mizzou Wire)
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.
I saw this article in Digital Web Magazine and thought it was worth a read. We don't give enough thought to the copyright liabilities we face when posting Web content, or the risks we take when creating it. It's always a good idea to learn as much as you can about the legal issues surrounding intellectual property before posting.
Web Design and the DMCA: Giving and Getting Take Down Notices
Recently, I was updating the 18 Reasons feature on our Admissions site. This is always such a fun part of my job and affirms how great it is to be working in higher education. I’m finding out about new and exciting things students are doing all the time to further their education and expand their minds.
For example, I loved talking to one of our undergraduate students who studies dust shells around stars. How cool is that? Not only to be studying something so interesting but to be doing it as an undergraduate.
Some of the most popular features on our Admissions site are our profiles. While prospective students are of course interested in entrance requirements, tuition and housing, learning about current students and faculty gives them so much more insight into the University and the opportunities here, and helps them get to know us a little bit better.
You’re a writer for a Web site. Here’s what you’re up against (or at least what Web writing “experts” tell you you’re up against): You have to grab readers in three seconds or less, or they’re gone. They want info fast and frill-free. They don’t read anything but headlines and links. They don’t read anything over 500 or 600 words. Maybe they don’t read anything at all.
The challenges seem daunting. But even with all that’s working against a Web writer, there’s something working for you, too: storytelling.
This is the idea we apply to our homepage features, which are stories that promote some aspect of the University, be it research, sports, students, etc. The goal is to produce tight, entertaining stories that tell people something they probably didn't know. A bit of narrative goes a long way, even if it's just there to add flash to a lead.
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?"
From time to time I find that I need to take a few steps back and look at the big picture. It's very easy to focus on a few large projects and lose sight of some very important and strategic details. I noticed that while we were very busy taking care of www.missouri.edu, the Chancellor's site, Admissions, Development, Undergraduate Research, etc., that our own Web Communications site hadn't even appeared on the project radar. How could we take care of everyone else and allow our own Web site to lag behind? Yikes!
This is, unfortunately, a very common problem for Web staff who serve many people and departments. It's also why project management is a very important element in what we do. While it's good for us to focus on our current projects, we also need to have a strategic plan for the continuing maintenance and evolution of our other sites. The management part becomes even more important when we have content that needs to be reviewed and freshened on a regular basis. I find we do a pretty good job of taking care of those things that need attention daily or even weekly. However, we aren't so great about remembering all of the details that need minding monthly or less frequently.
Content management will become a more and more important resource for this and many other reasons. Instead of tying a string around my finger or cluttering my Outlook calendar or task list with lists that are too long, I will be able to set reminders that will prompt me to tend to my content responsibilities.
As for the Web Communications site getting a redesign and migrating into the CMS? Well, maybe next year...
