Rochester HighEdWebDev 05

I know, I know only a few months have passed since the last edition of HighEdWebDev, but I’m sure a few of you can’t wait to find out when the next edition of this great higher ed web conference is scheduled.

Well, the wait is over:

HighEdWebDev 06 will take place in Rochester, NY on October 22-25, 2006 around a theme dear to my heart: “Collective Intelligence.”

On the conference website, the organizers explain their choice by the fact that, “as Web developers in the world of higher education, it often falls to us to collect and share the intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom our institutions create every day. Our work supports the important work of our students, faculty, researchers, and alumni and often serves to underscore the point that, with the help of the Web, none of us is as smart as all of us.”

Thinking about presenting this year?

You have until May 15 to submit your proposals. You’ll find all the information you need on the conference “call for proposals” web page.

Oh, and by the way, the conference is moving downtown this year: HighEdWebDev will be held at the Hyatt Regency Rochester.

Paul Kruczynski, Senior Web Implementation Specialist and Brett Essler, Web Publications Editor from Buffalo State College presented a very interesting case study at HighEdWebDev 05 on how they implemented and integrated podcasting in their university website.

They also had the terrific idea to make a podcast out of their presentation available from the impressive podcasting section of their website along with the slides of the session in both PDF and Powerpoint formats.

If podcasting has been on your mind – or your to-do list – for a while, you should definitely take the time to listen to this podcast or check out this presentation’s slides.

In their case study, Kruczynski and Essler not only explained how they proceeded to introduce, implement and develop a flourishing podcasting practice at Buffalo State, but they also provided some very interesting statistic data about their podcasting traffic – especially showing the difference the launch on iTunes made in terms of traffic.

Adam Finlayson from Northwestern University presented yesterday an interesting session at HighEdWebDev05 titled “Improving Accessibility with a Content Management System (CMS).”
After attending this session, Brian Phelps, who agreed to be our very-own correspondent at the conference, filed the following report.

“There are two barriers to improving Web accessibility: learning the techniques and implementing them. HTML-savvy designers and developers easily overcome these hurdles, but what about WYSIWYG-using department assistants making updates? Teaching Dreamweaver basics is challenging enough without the what, when, and why of accessibility recommendations. Learn about techniques Northwestern University uses to improve accessibility and how a content management system (CMS) makes life easy for site editors.”

Adam summarized the three types of challenges most common in web users:

• Physical, e.g., a motor skill limitation
• Technical, e.g., a slow modem
• User-defined, e.g, JavaScript disabled

Adam described basic components of a page and how, through a content management system, you can improve accessibility for impaired users to your content. He broke the document control into three components:

• Template control
• Input control
• Output control

Template Control
Adam described how first specifying the correct Doctype is essential to the disabled user and their web browsing technology, whether it be a screen reader or another technology. He recommended certain base line strategies, including using “skip links” that permit impaired readers to skip navigation to get to the main content. This means imbedding Access Keys in the content. He said that the main content should be placed at the top of the file, and navigation and header matter should come last in the code. The layout should be controlled using CSS.

Input Control
Input control means we should specify a language in the page and require users to implement certain attributes, like the ALT tag for images, the CAPTION tag for tables, and LABELs for forms.

Output Control
Output control means employing techniques or technology to validate user’s code to tidy up X/HTML, to strip unwanted FONT or other tags, and to otherwise optimize it for standard appearance on your web site.

He suggested that meaningful page TITLEs that closely match the first H1 are important. He also described a technique of “reverse bread crumbs” in the TITLE, so that users are always able to discern their location, and bookmark it accurately. He described how to use the LINK tag for navigational aides, such as “Next,” “Prev,” and “Start.” While not visible to most browsers or the users, they can be accessed by disabled users with using assistive technologies.

That being said, CMS won’t solve everything. It doesn’t prohibit users from adding “Click here” to every link, or from using undefined acronyms or abbreviations.

Daniel M. Frommelt from The University of Wisconsin – Platteville shared his experience in converting his university website to web standards and gave a few very good tips on how to proceed in a session held yesterday at HighEdWebDev05 and titled “Conversion to Web Standards: Tips, Tricks, and Methods.”
After attending this session, Brian Phelps, who agreed to be our very-own correspondent at the conference, filed the following report.

You’re sold on the “Benefits of Web Standards”: reducing file size, minimizing bandwidth, generating printer-friendly pages, optimizing search engine placement, and achieving greater accessibility. Now learn how to take a common site and walk through the conversion. This presentation walks through the methods of rebuilding a site with XHTML and CSS. We will focus on the transition of a Web site that was built with a table structure and converted to a new structure using XHTML and CSS and focus on the benefits of Web standards: reduction of markup, separate CSS files to control design, printer-friendly CSS pages, and increased accessibility. We will also discuss how to optimize a site for search engines using semantic markup, plus some general tips and tricks for making the CSS layout behave in a more predictable manner among numerous browsers. Sample files will be made available for the participants to review.

Daniel described some of the standards affecting accessibility and the benefits of implementing accessible web pages. He demonstrated how, without altering the layout of a sample universities home page, he reduced the total HTTP requests from 51 to 25, and total size of the page from 113.3kb to 58kb.

Much of this was accomplished by putting images into the CSS, which is then cached by all browsers. HTML, which is fetched repeatedly with each HTTP get, was reduced to 8.9kb from 45kb, and HTML images were reduced to 25.2kb from 65kb.

He showed how he used advanced features of CSS to enhance accessibility, including image replacement and list items, to accomplish this feat. For example, he marked an H1 tag with a margin left of -999em, and added a background GIF in its place. He showed how to use list items for any time two or more like items are listed and how they could be successfully manipulated the home page to appear correctly in a browser and degrade successfully on devices liked PDAs, cell phones, and other readers.

Yesterday at HighEdWebDev 05 in Rochester, Richard Ells from The University of Washington offered interesting insights about web accessibility for higher ed websites and shared his experience on integrating the famous Section 508 requirements and the W3 standards into website management workflow in a session titled “Building Accessibility Into The Workflow”.
After attending this session, Brian Phelps, who agreed to be our very-own correspondent at the conference, filed the following report.

By comparing the Section 508 and W3C-WAI accessible design requirements with Web site management workflow patterns, we will identify where in the Web management process the decision and action points are for accessibility. The objective is to make in-depth accessible design an inherent and efficient part of the creation and maintenance of a Web site, whether it is maintained by hand, with a Web programming language and database such as PHP and MySQL, or with a content management system. Including non-HTML content such as PDF and scripting in the process will also be discussed.

Richard illustrated some of the challenges inherent in designing accessible web pages. He cited 16 discrete criteria outlined in Section 508 1194.22 standards that define accessibility.

He then described several attempts to create systems that would produce web content meeting these standards, like a Decision Tree, Basic Publication Workflow, and Opportunistic Reuse Workflow.

He sorted the requirements into groups that could be satisfied by specific roles in the production process:

• Alternative and associative text
• Technologies
• Graphics and color
• Usable design
• Alternative pages with equivalent information and functionality

Richard briefed the crowd on the success he had in breaking the content production workflow into a Decision Tree by Roles and Swimlanes, which assigned certain individuals responsibility for specific kinds of content and accessibility responsibilities.

Again referring to the 16 discrete criteria outlined in standard 1194.22, he outlined how by thinking through the CMS process, the participants could focus on Elements and Attributes, Technologies, Table Structure, Templates and Stylesheets, and Other.

He concluded by advocating that it is important to build in accessibility by thinking about content as components, e.g., graphics, tables, scripts, CSS, or color, and how each component needs to be made accessible by some means.

As announced in July, Steve Krug, the author of “Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability,” gave the keynote presentation of HighWebDev05 in Rochester yesterday: “Why it S*cks to Be You.”

Brian Phelps, Web manager at the University of the Pacific but also the expert behind PhelpsTeKnowledge has accepted to share his well-taken notes with all of us who couldn’t make it to the conference this year (or the attendees who didn’t feel like taking notes ;-)

What’s usability?

“If something is hard, I just don’t use it as much!”

• If you have room for only one usability rule: Don’t make me think.
• Everything should be self-evident as possible.
• Clarity trumps everything
• Navigation needs to tell you where you are.
• Avoid lots of faces and fonts, and be consistent with what you use.
• There is a huge disparity between when we think people are doing on our web site and what really do.
• We like to think their use of our site is orderly, but people are all over the map
• Omit needless words

Krugs 3rd law of usability from his book
Delete half the words, and then delete ½ of what’s left.

Instructions must die

If it’s obvious, then it doesn’t need to be said.

For example,

“Complete the fields in the form below and click submit.”

Introductions must die

No one reads long blocks of introductory text

For example,

“The Graduate School is located in the Office of Research and Graduate Studies (RGS), 214 Knoles Hall on the beautiful Stockton campus, close to the landmark Burns Tower on Pacific Avenue .
The RGS office is responsible for the administration of graduate degree programs leading to master’s (M.M., M.Ed., M.A., MBA and M.S.), educational specialist in school psychology (Ed.S.), and doctoral (D.P.T., Ed.D. and Ph.D.) degrees in over 15 departments in 5 schools and colleges.
The RGS office is the place where the admissions, student records, degree audits, and final checkout for all graduate degrees on the Stockton campus occur, regardless of academic discipline.”

If it’s absolutely necessary, cut introductory text down to one sentence and place immediately in front of related links to related content. Then maybe your audience will read it.

Happy Talk must die

• Throat clearing text
• Mission statements
• A sure fire indicator of Happy Talk: the voice in the back of your head saying, “blah blah blah”

Make text easily scannable

• Break text up into bullets, headings, highlights, etc
• People don’t read blocks of text
• See Software Usability Research Lab

Top 9 reasons why it s*cks to be you

1. Corporate expectations in a non-profit budget
2. Stakeholder who can be petty and whiney in ways that wouldn’t dare in the ral world
3. Find and implement a CMS in your spare time, and herd kittens into using it
4. Sub-site/Fiefdom hell: “We want our dept/school/project to have its own character”
5. Multiple audiences: faculty/staff/students/alumni/media/community/etc
6. Home page death match: everyone wants a piece of the home page pie
7. Deans less likely to force everyone to toe to the site-consistency line than CEOs
8. Tons of dynamic content of variable quality and enormous importance (but only to its creators)
9. Cool-factor: The arms race to stay competitive with your peers and deploy the latest gadgetry or fad (blogs, etc.)

Get navigation down cold

• Still a major problem
• In a large information space, it’s crucial that people always know where they are
• Impeccable navigation
• Easy to spot
• Make navigation approachable (use short lists < 7 items)
• Break up longer lists with white space or headings
• Clear up ambiguous menu items
• Consistent across sub-sites

• Unsubtle you-are-here indicators
• Big page titles that match link text
• Breadcrumbs OK, but not a necessity unless site more than 3 levels deep

Tell me who you are

• Tell me in 20 words or less why this is a great place to go to school on the home page
• Unique selling proposition
• Where are you?
• Tagline and welcome blurb

What’s the Solution?
Simple, iterative user testing

The problem with usability testing

• People do every little testing because they think it’s a big deal
• 8 users
• Two-way mirrors
• Video
• Big honking report
• $5-10,000
• If they do it all, they save it for the end
• Because they only afford it once

Instead, do lost-our-lease usability testing

• No labs or mirrors
• Laptop, $10 to buy some students whatever they are drinking, and one morning a month in the student café.
• Recruit three or four users.
• No elaborate recruiting (not all that important). Don’t worry about getting representatives from real-world user audience. Just get a body.
• No stats, no exit questions, no faux validity
• Get as many team members and stakeholders to watch as possible
• Iterative, over several months

Camtasia ($300) or Morae (TechSmith $1200) records what’s going on the screen, good for usability testing. Uses USB microphone, creates AVI audio and video.

I’ve already written a few posts about this web higher ed conference to be held in a month in Rochester, NY.

Since I interviewed the Conference’s Program Chair Doug Tschopp, the final program has revealed a few familiar faces for the regulars of this blog.

Four out of the 11 Higher Ed Web Pros interviewed up until now by yours truly will be presenting at Rochester next month:

• Piet Niederhausen (Georgetown University) on November 7 from 11AM to 12PM
  In a presentation titled “Content in Motion = Content in Action,”Piet and his colleague Robert Michael Murray will explain why and how content liberated from static Web pages can improve and develop a richer user experience. This original approach to content management for large collaborative websites was first introduced in “Content in Motion: What iTunes can teach us about managing web content,” an article written by Piet earlier this year.
• Jerry Dannemiller (OSU) on November 7 from 4:45PM to 5:15PM
  In “Post Comments Here: Blogging through a Redesign,” a 30-minute showcase session, Jerry will talk about his experience of blogging a website redesign.
• Jay Collier (Dartmouth) on November 8 from 2:45PM to 3:45PM
  In his presentation “Sustaining Content Management”, Jay will share some of his insights and tips to prepare you for the big CMS leap of faith we all face at some point in our careers as higher ed web pros.
• Mike Richwalsky (Allegheny College) on November 8 from 3:45PM to 4:45PM
  In his session “Gnosh: Building a Social Software Search Engine,” Mike will present one of his many projects related to new web technologies: a social software search engine built with Vassar College and the Center for Educational Technology at Middlebury College.

If you already miss the summer conferences, help is on its way with HighEdWebDev 05 on November 6-9 in Rochester, NY. As I’ve already mentioned it in a previous post, Steve Krug, the author of “Don’t Make Me Think” will be the keynote speaker this year.

Whether or not you plan to come to HighEdWebDev05 this Fall, I’m sure you’ll be interested to read the Conference’s Program Chair Doug Tschopp’s perspective on our industry and the 2005 edition of this event:

1) This year would mark the 10th year for WebDev and the 5th year for HighEdWeb. What is the history behind this and why did you choose to combine these two conferences last year for the first HighEdWebDev?

WebDev or WebDevShare started at Indiana University in 1996. The conference drew attendees from across the US and eventually from around the globe. From the inception, this conference had the reputation of being the conference where the people in higher education that make web happen could share solutions to common issues. In 2003 Indiana University decided that it would no longer host the conference. I came to the conference that year (as the program chair) with the expectation that it would be the final conference.

However the attendees of the conference had very strong feelings about the necessity of the conference continuing. The key point being that there was no other conference where this high quality content was available to those of us in higher ed that actually have to make the web work… and it was also a lot of fun and a great place to network. I was barraged by people to figure out how to keep WebDev going. By the end of the conference, the conference program committee had agreed that we would look at proposals from different colleges and universities to move the program to a new location.

We looked at various proposals, and the committee decided that the consortium of schools in the Rochester, NY area would be a great group to partner with. They had a few years experience of running a small regional conference. They had the resource commitment from their schools. But the clinching element was that they had started to explore the possibilities of forming a national professional organization for web developers in higher education.

2) In your opinion, how has our field evolved for the past years?

This is an easy question. In 1998, the conference seemed to center around what code to use where and how to get different platforms to play together. In 1999, there were some of the first content/design/management presentations. By 2001, WebDev had started to be known as the “content conference”. So today we have a great mix of different backgrounds at the conference… tech geeks (propeller heads), marketers, writers, designers, etc… and they are all looking at the same issues, just through a different focus.

3) Today, what are the biggest challenges for higher ed professionals?

This is tough, because I can think of enough things to turn this into a dissertation. But let’s look at two simple things.

Personally: Each one of us has to figure out where to focus on personal skill building. Doing “web work” has become too complex for any of us to be great at all the skills that are necessary. So we need to learn to be great at some things and work with other experts to build sites that best meet the needs of our audiences.

As a group: I think it is important that we better define our skill sets and our jobs. This begs the issue of a professional organization that can collect data and provide some guidance to this varied group of people that are “web developers”.

4) This year’s theme is “Building Connections”. Can you tell us a bit more about the program? If somebody can only attend a few presentations or workshops, what should they be and why?

We are working on getting this info posted on the conference website even as I am answering your questions. It is a great mix of topics to appeal to this widely varied group of attendees that I have already referred to. There are four main tracks, each with seven 1-hour presentations and one 2-hour presentation. There will also be ten half-hour showcase presentations and we anticipate at least 16 poser presentations.

Of course I want everyone to come to my workshop and presentation… and give me high ratings! Actually, there is no way to recommend anything in particular since we all have different questions and issues that we are seeking information for. I can tell you that we had a record number of proposals submitted and the quality was very high. You would think this would make putting together a program very easy, but it was difficult knowing that many good proposals would have to be told “no thank you”.

So come pack in as much info as you can… make sure to have fun, because that is one of the features of this conference… and meet a lot of colleagues that you can use as resources as you try to muddle through this thing we call web development.

NOTE FROM KARINE: Early bird registration is open until September 30 at $379. After this date, the conference will cost you $499.

I’m just back from Salisbury where we had a great conference. In my previous post, I talked about what was probably the best presentation I attended there: “Got Five? Effective User Testing with $5 and Five People” by Liz Norell, the director of Web Communication at TWU.

As she indicated in her presentation, her method has been largely inspired by Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make me Think.”

Well, if you want to listen to Mr. Krug, this is your lucky day. I’ve just found out that he would be the keynote speaker this year of HighWebDev05.

The program of this conference for higher ed web developpers hasn’t been released yet, but I will let you know as soon as I hear anything about this event planned November 6-9, 2005 in Rochester, NY.