Technology

My latest UB column is now available in the February issue as well as online: “Websites Gone Mobile: More institutions exploring—and succeeding with—mobile web”

In this column written last December (so many new mobile websites have been launched since then – I’ll post even more examples in the coming days), I provide a few examples of mobile websites developed by higher ed institutions – including West Virginia University’s mobile website developed in 19 days by Dave Olsen – along with some traffic data.

Websites Gone Mobile

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Web professionals have always frown upon the use of PDF as the online version of a print newsletter or magazine.

For some publication officers and college magazine editors, PDF is an easy way to provide the online version of their hard print work.

Just take the final file from the designer (PDF has been used for proofs for many years), have it uploaded to the web server and… voila!

According to The State of Print and Electronic Publications in Higher Ed, a survey completed by 198 professionals last year, PDF is the format of choice for the electronic version of the main magazine in 38% of the cases as shown below.

• PDF file of the print magazine: 38%
• Website powered by content management system: 21%
• Email newsletter: 18%
• Flash-based flipping-through digital magazine: 12%
• Website powered by a blogging platform: 6%
• Other: 4%

Even if the practice is quick and cost-effective, it has been proven by many usability studies that PDF isn’t a user-friendly format for people browsing on computers. These files were also problematic for search optimization as their content was not indexed by search engines in the past – but this isn’t the case anymore.

Yet, in web circles, PDF still has a bad vibe. No respectable web professional wants to see PDF used on web servers for anything except maybe for official forms that needs to be printed.

While I still think web versions of print magazines or other publications are a better way to cater to readers using a computer or even a smartphone (or a pocket sized web mobile device like the iPod Touch), I can’t help think it won’t be the case for ebook readers or tablets – especially when these new “reading” devices are going to get a big push from students looking for a better text book solution.

So, what should a college magazine or publication officer do?

Adopt a multichannel approach: develop a real online version and keep the PDF version for print publications – even if they end up not printing them anymore in the future.

What do YOU think?

My latest UB column is now available in the November/December issue as well as online: “How to YouTube with Success: Six tips for optimizing online videos”

Here are the 6 tips:
1. Get listed on YouTube EDU.
2. Make videos that are easy to share.
3. Choose keyword-rich titles, descriptions, and tags for the videos.
4. Produce context-rich videos.
5. Don’t ignore your most fervent video fans—and critics.
6. Add closed-captioning.

University Business: How to YouTube with Success

I wrote this column a couple of months ago, after writing this post on how closed captioning can make a big difference but long before YouTube made an important announcement about new features using speech recognition on November 19: auto-timing and auto-captions.

Auto-timing will automatically synchronize your text-transcript with your videos.

Auto-caps will do ALL the work and is already used by several institutions such as UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke, UCTV, Columbia, etc.

You can find out more about these features by watching this video from YouTube:

BTW, if you are a University Business reader who has just discovered collegewebeditor.com, welcome! Don’t forget to subscribe to this blog via RSS or email.

Since I started this blog in February 2005 with its version 1.2, WordPress has become one of (probably the) best online publishing tool out there. Can you believe version 2.9 will be released in a couple of months?

Naturally, as higher ed print magazines have started to go digital or even paperless, more and more college editors choose WordPress to power the online version of their publications.

Swarthmore College Bulletin is a good example of this trend.

Swarthmore College Bulletin (October 2009)

That’s why I asked Nathan Stazewski, Web Multimedia Specialist at Swarthmore College’s Communications/News & Information Office, to answer a few questions about the online magazine and its WordPress implementation.

1) What design theme did you use?

We used the BranfordMagazine theme as a jumping off point and highly modified both the look and functionality. Since WordPress is really a blogging platform, the most difficult part was getting it to pull together content from a single issue. This was accomplished by setting each post’s “publish date” to be from the month of the appropriate issue (July 2009 magazine articles are all published with dates falling sometime in July 2009 even if we’re preparing them in June). Long story short, our theme’s custom coding is very specific to the way our magazine works.

2) How long did the implementation take?

Our implementation took around 4 months. Our Web Designer, Steve, worked on the look of the site and I worked on the backend.

3) What plugin do you use? Why?
The main plugins we use are:

• Akismet – This automatically deals with most spam comments.
• Lightbox – When you’re in an article and click on a photo, this is what makes them pop open with a nice effect.
• More-fields – This allows us to include extra information that WordPress doesn’t automatically ask for (such as Related Links, Illustrators, etc.)

I also built a custom plugin just for our particular needs so that it could check a magazine issue for possible problems before we make it live on the Internet.

4) What advice would you give colleagues creating an online version of a magazine using WordPress

If someone was looking to use WordPress as the backend for their magazine, I would definitely suggest they use the BranfordMagazine theme as a starting point. Also, this project wouldn’t have been possible without a PHP programmer and a great web designer. I think the fact that we had a programmer (myself) and a designer (Steve) really let us both work to our strengths which pushed out a much better product than if either one of us had to do the whole project ourselves.

Do YOU use WordPress for the online version of your magazine or newsletter?
Post your web address in the comments. I’m currently looking for other great examples and possibly more folks to interview.

Have you seen NC State’s Twitter page yet?

Launched last month, it aggregates all the official twitter accounts on a single easy-to-use web page.

NC State on Twitter – NC State University

It looks sharp and really user-friendly.

Wish you could have a similar page for your institution?

Well, stop dreaming and send a thank-you email to the nice folks at NC State as they have decided to open-source the code powering their neat Twitter page.

But, before downloading the code, take a minute to read the short interview I conducted with Jason Austin, Senior Solutions Implementation Engineer NCSU – OIT – Outreach Technology (that’s a nice long title), about NC State Twitter page.

1) How long did it take to create this page?

From concept to design to implementation, we had 4 staff members in two departments working on it for about a week on and off. It wasn’t terribly labor intensive, just took some initiative and coordination to get it done. It started as one of those “Hey, we should make a page where all the campus twitter accounts are listed so people can find organizations they might want to follow.” Next thing we knew, we were working on a design and had the basic site up quickly. After the site went live, we began getting requests from other universities for the code, so we decided to package it up and distribute it.

2) What kind of traffic do you get on this page? Have you seen an increase in followers for the NC state Twitter accounts?

The page itself doesn’t get an overwhelming amount of traffic yet.
It’s had more than 5,000 visits so far, which is pretty good considering we’ve only advertised on Twitter and Facebook. The site isn’t linked prominently from the main university site yet, but we’re planning to promote it much more on the university home page and throughout the Web presence very soon.

The RSS feed of all the tweets probably gets the most activity because it allows people to stay up with real-time happenings on campus from all the twitter feeds and don’t have to actually follow all the accounts. That feed is part of our growing mobile site as well.

The real result is looking at the number of followers from the accounts listed on the page. The page has provided a great resource to put users in touch with on-campus groups and increase their relevant followers (not just spam). Our campus news account (@NCStateNews) now has more than 1,500 followers. It was closer to 1,000 before the site launched just over a month ago.

We should also note that putting this aggregate together has encouraged other organizations to start using twitter. We now have over 60 organizations using Twitter for all kinds of communications.
The site takes all of those feeds, puts them in a simple context, and gives a great sense of what’s happening at NC State right now.

3) What are the technical requirements to run your code for this page?

The code is based on PHP 5 and uses the Twitter API wrapper provided by the Zend Framework. No internal database is used at all. The accounts and tweets all come directly from the twitter API.

After Bates College last month, Duke University unveiled its new homepage on October 1st.

The last design was done in 2006 and had definitely a Google-ish kind of look.

Duke Homepage (2006)

With the new design Duke’s homepage look and feel is less unique, but it is definitely more user- and content-friendly. Stories – told through text, photos and videos – are a big part of this new homepage (like for Bates).

Home | Duke University (2009)

What is also great about this new homepage is that it is running on the open source CMS, Drupal and was mostly developed internally. Ben Riseling from the Office of News and Communication, Samantha Earp from the Office of IT and Blyth Morrell of Duke Web Services oversaw the technical development and deployment of the new site.

You can read more about the redesign in the press release about the redesign launch or the blog set up to keep the community informed about this project.

Ben Riseling was kind enough to answer the few questions I had about the redesign.

1) How long did the whole process took and how did you approach this redesign?
The whole process, from strategy/planning to design to build and launch took 9 months. Duke’s new VP for Public Affairs, Michael Schoenfeld, and also new Director for Brand Strategy, Denise Haviland, set the initial goal that the new site should visually align itself with the branding standards set by our undergraduate admissions viewbooks. Mike also made very clear that we needed to deliver dynamic content, utilizing our many news and event feeds effectively while also showcasing our growing number of videos.

We knew we wanted to utilize internal resources more than in the past and, from the start, involved our central IT office in all levels of planning. Aside from that we followed the traditional route of gathering strategic needs of the university, creating functional requirements and then making design and technical decisions to meet our needs. Despite this being one of the most complex sites we’ve built everything went so smoothly.

2) Duke has already done a lot of work with WordPress, why did you choose Drupal over WP for this implementation?

The main reason we chose Drupal is that it met the functional requirements for the proposed site perfectly. Drupal is also used widely across Duke and supported by our central IT office. Creating editorially rich sub pages was a key deliverable for the new site and Drupal gives you the flexibility to build pages as distinct sites. We knew we wanted to port over our existing Arts and Research sites as new secondary pages for Duke.edu and wanted to leave the door open to expand other sub pages in the future.

Wordpress has proven to be a very flexible platform for many types of sites but we had experienced some challenges in how that tool handles everything as a distinct piece of content with a unique url.
Customizing with new plugins then created challenges of backwards compatibility when addressing critical security patches. We still use Wordpress and Wordpress MU for many sites at Duke but, again, Drupal met both the functional and technical needs for this new site and has proven to be very easy to use.

3) Some of the main navigation tabs directs to differently branded websites, don’t you think it might be confusing for a first-time visitor?

Can you or should you develop a unified visual brand across every unit of a higher ed institution? We pursued the alternative track of duplicating content and links to services on Duke-branded sub pages and this was a resource drain while also not meeting the need of the first-time visitors who really just wanted to find a doctor or clinic or purchase basketball tickets.

The majority of first-time web traffic comes directly from search engines and visitors are entering sites from the basement window vs. the front door, right? Our user testing with incoming freshman has certainly confirmed this trend at Duke. One approach we’ve developed is our expandable brand bar which can be easily added to a site and unobtrusively lend that extension of Duke’s brand. It is safe to say that this is an ongoing conversation at Duke.

Brand Bar | Duke University Spotlights |

Brand Bar – screenshot

Last week, I attended the rehearsal of Dave Olsen’s webinars on how to create a mobile website for your university in 24 hours or less.

And, I’m happy to report that he has really done a lot of work to make the implementation of MIT Mobile Web very easy through the integration of some Google services. In just a few edits, you can get a mobile website for your institution complete with a campus directory, news, campus map and a calendar of events.

It is really amazing and definitely worth the registration fee with the time you will save – by attending the webinar – implementing the open source package.

Since I’ve received a few requests to postpone the registration deadline of Dave’s webinar series, Going Mobile, I’ve decided to give you a few more days to register if you are interested.

Registration will close this Friday (October 16, 2009) at 9PM ET: www.higheredexperts.com/goingmobile.

This 2-webinar series is composed of a live event and a pre-recorded session that can be watch on-demand.

Register for Going Mobile Webinars

Going Mobile: How to build a mobile website for your institution in 24 hours
October 21st 2009 – 1PM-2PM ET (rain date: October 28, 2009)

Can you find your way in a page of HTML code, use Google services and follow basic steps?
Then, you can develop a mobile website for your institution compatible with smart and regular mobile phones in no time and on a dime.

David Olsen, Professional Technologist at West Virginia University, will explain why and how to build your institutional mobile website in 24 hours (or less) and… for free. He will demonstrate all the steps involved in using MIT Mobile, an open-source mobile web platform, and will share the shortcuts and code he developed to implement the calendar, map and news features for WVU Mobile Web.

Registered institutions include:

• Indiana State University
• The University of Iowa
• Missouri University of Science and Technology
• Upper Iowa University
• Susquehanna University
• Point Park University
• UTM
• Rowan University
• University of Delaware
• Southeast Missouri State University
• Angelo State University
• Washington State University
• UC Berkeley
• Lehigh University
• Emory University
• University of Tampa

For more info and to register, you can visit www.higheredexperts.com/goingmobile

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Dave Olsen’s achievement in developing a mobile website for West Virginia University in just 19 days using MIT Mobile Web open-source platform.

Dave spent some time customizing the existing code (that’s the beauty of open-source projects) to integrate Google services and reduce the implementation process to just a few hours.

I followed his progress very closely and asked him if he would be willing to share lessons learned and his shortcuts with the higher ed community. Dave agreed.

As a result, he will present a 2-webinar series next month on how to build a mobile website for your institution in 24 hours or less, “Going Mobile.”

This series is composed of:

1. a pre-recorded session – that can be watched on demand – showing the step-by-step development of an institutional mobile website in real time
2. a live presentation – scheduled on October 21st, 2009 – explaining the main development principles and addressing questions from the audience.

Going Mobile: How to build a mobile website for your institution in 24 hours
October 21st 2009 – 1PM-2PM ET (rain date: October 28, 2009)

Can you find your way in a page of HTML code, use Google services and follow basic steps?
Then, you can develop a mobile website for your institution compatible with smart and regular mobile phones in no time and on a dime.

David Olsen, Professional Technologist at West Virginia University, will explain why and how to build your institutional mobile website in 24 hours (or less) and… for free. He will demonstrate all the steps involved in using MIT Mobile, an open-source mobile web platform, and will share the shortcuts and code he developed to implement the calendar, map and news features for WVU Mobile Web.

Places are limited for this series and registration will close as soon as it is sold out. So, don’t delay and register as soon as possible to reserve your seat at www.higheredexperts.com/goingmobile

If you have any questions, just email me at karine@higheredexperts.com

Upcoming Webinar: Going Mobile

Two days ago, I had the chance to attend the rehearsal of the webinar Glenda Sims will present on September 16: ADA-Compliant Web Videos 101: How to produce and publish online videos accessible to people with disabilities

Glenda is a true accessibility champion. Her presentation does a great job at providing the reasons why accessible online videos are important and how easy it can be to provide closed captioning.

Lately, I’ve been browsing some of the YouTube channels listed on the YouTube EDU portal, and out of the 40 I’ve reviewed up until now, only 2 or 3 offer videos with closed captioning.

It looks like closed captioning isn’t very high on the priority list of higher ed institutions with a presence on YouTube.

And, then I found this video from Gallaudet University, Graduation Day 2009.

Please just take 2 minutes to watch it to find out how closed captioning can make a big difference in online videos:

So?
Did you understand a thing of what was said?
Probably not unless you’re fluent in sign language.

Now, watch it again but don’t forget to turn on closed captioning (CC) as shown on the screenshot below – on the bottom left right side of the YouTube browser.

Makes a huge difference, doesn’t it?

Well, the difference will be the same when people who are deaf, not very fluent in English or in a very noisy (or too quiet to turn the audio on) environment watch your own videos — with closed captioning that is.

Do YOU provide closed captioning? Why? Why not?

Yep, you’ve read correctly. It’s not a typo.

Web Services professional technologist Dave Olsen managed to develop the mobile version of his institution’s website in 19 days thanks to a lot of hard work and Mobile MIT, the platform developed for its own use and made available earlier this year for free by MIT.

Launched today along with an iPhone application developed separately by a WVU student, the mobile version allows users to search the WVU directory, stream WVU radio station U92, browse a campus events calendar, get University news and sports updates and link to WVU’s You Tube channel.

You can check it out at http://m.wvu.edu or have a look below at the screen captions prepared by Dave.

Pretty cool for 19 days of work, don’t you think?

Dave just proved that it doesn’t take a lot of time and money to develop a useful mobile presence for an institution thanks to the good folks behind MIT Mobile. And, if you want to learn how he did, watch out for an upcoming webinar he will present soon for Higher Ed Experts.

Got a mobile website for your institution? Share its link in the comments below!