Higher Ed Web Pro Files

Web Communications Specialist at Texas A&M University System, Stephanie Leary fell into the Web in high school. At Texas A&M University, she works for the University System administration — not directly with any single university — composed of 10 universities and a few branch campuses with just over 100,000 students total and 7 state agencies. Reporting to the Director of Communications, Stephanie is responsible for the 30,000-page website that has just been redesigned. The website is made of straight-up HTML with includes, managed in Dreamweaver – while the press releases are being migrated from static files to a WordPress blog.

1) What’s your background? What did you do before becoming a higher ed web pro?

I began building websites in high school as a hobby. In college, I worked in the student computer labs on campus doing face-to-face tech support, and soon I was the go-to person for HTML questions.

I have a B.A. in English. The combination of writing skills and technical expertise has served me very well. The first couple of jobs I took out of college were catch-all positions dealing with tech writing, graphic design, and “web stuff” as an afterthought. I got tired of trying to be everything to everyone and decided to focus on web design, where I’d still get to use all three skills.

2) What’s your biggest achievement as a higher ed web pro?

It’s still getting off the ground, but I’ve helped start a sort of professional organization for the webmasters on our campuses. About half a dozen of us got together and said “we should have this,” so we put the word out and it came together. So far we’ve had a couple of meetings and held some training sessions, and we’re planning another series of training sessions for the spring. There aren’t many training opportunities in this part of the state, and the training that’s available through the universities is really geared toward beginners rather than professionals, so I’m really proud that we’ve been able to help our webmasters by finding peers who are knowledgeable enough to teach others. We’re also giving ourselves a collective voice to the administration, which can only be helpful for a group as thoroughly decentralized as we are.

3) What’s the most difficult part of your job?

Educating my content providers, who are generally administrative professionals without web experience, that “web design” is not creating a page layout in Word and exporting the HTML. They don’t care much about accessibility, usability, or even good design; they just know that they need to get their information “out there.”

4) In your opinion, what’s the biggest challenge we face as web pros in our industry?

A fundamental lack of understanding about what we do. Our field is too new! We have no standard job titles, descriptions, or salaries, and there’s no career ladder — once you’re “the webmaster,” how do you move up? (Most of the time, I find, you don’t. You just move over, and become someone else’s webmaster.) People with the same responsibilities can end up in IT or marketing with wildly different salaries.

For people who do end up in marketing or communications, the challenge often becomes educating your own colleagues — perhaps even your boss — about what your job entails. They often don’t understand why a database project takes so much longer than any other (static) site, why we can’t use that nifty Flash interface they saw on a business site somewhere, or why we can’t say for sure exactly how many people (never mind students, parents, or legislators) have visited the site. I’ve gotten requests to fix everything from lost email attachments to printer cables from people who don’t understand how “web stuff” differs from other “computer stuff.”

We have a lot of educating to do.

5) Any good advice to share with your fellow higher ed web pros?

Find some way of managing content. Even if you can’t make the leap to a full content management system, use include files, site-wide stylesheets, and HTML templates to centralize your design and basic page structure. Use blogs for parts of the site with constantly-updated content, like press releases. Use RSS (or any kind of XML, really) to publish information in one place and use it in several others.

Also, make friends with your counterparts at other institutions. We all face the same problems sooner or later.

6) What about a couple of good links?

Just one: the University of Minnesota Duluth’s web dev listserv, which collects all the new articles worth reading into a weekly(ish) message. I read a lot of things to keep up with the state of the art, but if I had to pare it all down to one listserv or RSS feed, this is the one I’d keep. All the resources from previous issues get filed away in the enormous web reference directory.

Ramapo College’s director of online communications and web administrator, Stephen Schur is the newly elected president of the NJ HigherEd Webmasters Association. At Ramapo College, he is part of the Office of Marketing and Communications and reports to the Assistant Vice President for Communications and Public Affairs. Stephen and his team are in charge of the 25,000 pages of the college website maintained via a combo of CMS, HTML and CSS.

1) What’s your background? What did you do before becoming a higher education Web pro?

I attended Queens College in New York, majored in American History with a minor in Mass Communications, then went on to Hofstra University in Long Island for a Masters in Secondary Education. I’ve had several careers that range from reporting for the Associated Press Radio division, then heading daytime news operations, to working as a general manager for an advertising and marketing company, to starting my own successful advertising agency, to working as a senior administrator and marketing coordinator in the resort real estate industry where I created the first resort real estate website in 1995, and then to working in higher education in my current position.

2) What’s your biggest achievement as a higher education Web pro?

I could certainly point to a successful award winning Web site, our successful roll-out of CMS, or the creating of a state-wide higher education webmaster group, but my real pride comes from the success of our student workers who are members of our Web Team. The environment is that of a professional Web design studio tied to a strong learning experience from understanding site architecture, to usability testing, to working with campus constituents in the design of their sites. Our graduates are all working as successful webmasters in higher education, private schools, advertising agencies, businesses, and the communications industry. They have formed a strong network among themselves and the students are members of our Web Team. When we roll out a test site, the team seeks input from our extended family, and receives both constructive criticism and strong support for their efforts.

3) What’s the most difficult part of your job?

Trying to keep ahead of the curve both from the point of view of Web technology and convention, and to meet the growing demands of our campus constituents who continue to embrace the Web, and who really do understand the significance of this medium in our society.

4) In your opinion, what’s the biggest challenge we face as Web pros in our industry?

Consistency in policy, procedure, and protocols for higher education websites. When the members of the NJ HigherEd Webmasters Association gather for a meeting, we find ourselves sharing both technical and operational information. Topics like the choice of CMS program and just how to successfully implement and support it, how to define and then implement accessibility standards when there is no clear administrative direction, what is needed in the way of personnel and funding to maintain and expand a Web operation and, the critical need for higher education Web professionals to attend Web conferences and seminars as part of their professional development.

5) Any good advice to share with your fellow higher education Web pros?

Communicate, communicate, communicate with those working on your site, the faculty, professional staff, administrators, alumni and others. A higher education website is not owned by the webmaster, it is the property of the campus community. They must see a bit of themselves in the pages of the site. This requires the Web professional to spend a lot of time attending meetings, making presentations, conducting usability testing and focus groups, and seeking campus constituent “buy-in.”

6) What about a couple of good links?

• Jakob Nielsen’s Usability Website
• WebAIM for Accessibility resources
• Yale University’s online Web Style Guide, 2nd Edition
• Vincent Flander’s Web Pages That Suck blog

World Wide Web Coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, Daniel M. Frommelt is a recognized expert and a strong advocate of Web standards and accessibility. Since 2003 he has presented and written about these topics on many occasions including his recent presentation “Conversion to Web Standards” at HighEdWebDev 05 in Rochester, NY. At the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, Daniel reports to the Chief Information Officer in the Information Services Department and is responsible for the 41,000 pages composing the Web presence of the university. As astonishing as it may look, all these pages are generated manually using a text editor.

1) What’s your background? What did you do before becoming a higher ed web pro?

I have a BA in History, from Loras College in Dubuque, IA. My occupational experience is in management and publishing. Immediately prior to working as the webmaster for the university, I ran a children’s educational book publishing company in Rapid City, SD. My experience of getting the publishing company’s website online and the opportunity to move closer to home were major contributing factors in taking the position as the webmaster at University of Wisconsin-Platteville.

2) What’s your biggest achievement as a higher ed web pro?

My biggest achievements all have to do with Web Standards. I was asked to present on Web Standards at the WebdevShare conference at Indiana University in 2003. This was the very first national web development conference I attended. I met the keynote speaker, Jeffrey Zeldman, and had a wonderful time discussing the topic with him. My presentation on Web Standards was about re-building the Slashdot website to be compliant with Web Standards.

The presentation ended up winning “Best in Track Presentation” and also the “Prestigue Award for Best Conference Presentation.” After that I was asked by Jeffrey Zeldman to publish my Slashdot example on A List Apart. The article turned into two articles, and both were Slashdotted.

Since that time, I have been invited to present 29 times on Web Standards and web accessibility and have won numerous awards. I have been a keynote speaker for Penn State, have even been video recorded by Web Accessibility for All, have spent a day with Eric Meyer discussing accessibility and CSS at Iowa State, and have written a total of four articles for A List Apart.

My achievement is simply trying to bring web standards to the larger web community. The biggest compliment was when Slashdot finally converted their website to utilize Web Standards!

3) What’s the most difficult part of your job?

The thing that is the most difficult is to try to figure out what request is being made when an email arrives at the Web Development Office. It is even more complex since some requests come from an anonymous comment form. Frequently, an email will simply say, “This link is bad.” Another favorite is, “There is a typo on this page.” Of course there is never a mention to the URL which has the typo or for that matter, which paragraph, sentence or word.

I often joke with my students that a part of their job is to assist as a mind reader to figure out what some of the requests mean.

“My mind reading ability is not what it used to be.”

4) In your opinion, what’s the biggest challenge we face as web pros in our industry?

The World Wide Web Consortium has a term called the “web year”, which is defined as follows:
“time measured in ‘web years’ = 2.6 months”

That means that in the same time that takes the medical or automotive industry to develop new technology in twelve months, the “web community” generates the same amount of technology in 2.6 months. This means that the web moves at least FOUR TIMES FASTER than any other technology on the planet.

The biggest challenge is keeping up to the technology boom. The higher education web developers are expected to be a master of all of the new technologies, even if it came out just a week ago. That means that we must be granted research time so we can try to keep up with the technology or at least study enough of the new technology so a decision can be made if it is worth an investment of more time.

The problem is the higher education environment typically does not have a budget to allow for extra research time, and rarely has enough money to maintain the current expected level of development. This is the biggest challenge that I see facing the web community.

5) Any good advice to share with your fellow higher ed web pros?

Hire some good students. They are looking to prove themselves, and looking for experience. The web development students have an incredible benefit of actual job experience in a very political and demanding environment. That kind of training isn’t available anywhere else.

The students are also the ones who come up with the most creative ideas and solutions for some of the most difficult problems I have ever encountered. They are still learning, yes, but they have much to teach the professionals too. Give them a few difficult projects and let them help you with the discovery of the web.

6) What about a couple of good links?

• From a web developer’s perspective, a collection of links is always helpful. The Campus Web Council of Wisconsin maintains a list of reference links.
• Everyone needs to laugh, so Home Star Runner eases the mood.
• It’s nice to get some fun alternative news, and Amanda Congdon’s daily video blog is it (Disclaimer: Amanda is not always politically correct).

Director of Web Services for UB (State University of New York), Mark Greenfield has had the chance to witness the birth and the development of the Web in higher education. He reports to the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and manage a Web team with its own blog. Mark is responsible for approximately 50 sites (about 10,000 web pages) directly related to student recruitment and retention, academic policy and procedures, and student academic services. These sites are maintained through a home grown CMS built using PHP and Oracle, WordPress as well as Contribute.

1) What’s your background? What did you do before becoming a higher ed web pro?

I’ve been working at UB for 20 years. In the late ‘80’s and early 90’s, I was a member of a team that designed our technology classrooms. I was also involved with helping our faculty make the transition from using traditional audio-visual technology to computer and information technology.

I was an avid gopher user, sharing information with colleagues across the country on the development of our technology classrooms. I remember clearly the first day I discovered Mosaic in 1993, and I was immediately hooked on the power and potential of the web. In 1995, I read an article in The Economist magazine titled “The Death of Distance”. The article explained how distance was no longer a factor in the cost of communicating electronically and the impact this would have on not only business, but on society. I knew it was time to alter my career path. In 1996, I was hired in the position of Web Development Manager for UB’s department of Computing and Information Technology, the university’s central computing organization. In 2001, I assumed my current role in the Provost’s office.

2) What’s your biggest achievement as a higher ed web pro?

Our “Integration of Online Academic Tools” initiative. This is a multi-phase, multi year project that integrates numerous academic tools including the online class schedule and undergraduate catalog, and provides syndicated content to numerous related sites. This project has been a huge success, resulting in improved service to students, significant cost savings, improved efficiencies, and better management of content. It is now easier for students to understand what courses they can and should be taking, and when those courses are available. The syndication of content has greatly improved the accuracy of key academic information and made it much easier to maintain. This project has also resulted in significant cost savings for the university. Because class schedules are no longer printed, there is an annual savings of over $50,000 on print and distribution costs. Production of the web version of the catalog is now automated. The entire catalog is created in a couple of weeks. Previously it took several months to create the site manually. In addition, there are over 20,000 links that are automatically created as part of the publishing process that would have been cost prohibitive if done manually.

3) What’s the most difficult part of your job?

Getting people to understand the value of User-Centered Design (UCD) and Web Standards. My methodology follows UCD principles but there is often a question of why continuous, iterative user research is a good use of my time. I am also an advocate of web standards, but it can be difficult to explain the importance of valid code and proper semantic markup when anyone with a copy of FrontPage and 30 minutes of training can create a web site. (This may be a bit of an exaggeration, but hopefully you get my point.) Another challenge is the assumption that “usable” and/or “assessable” means boring and ugly. When done correctly, aesthetically pleasing, feature rich sites can be usable and accessible.

4) In your opinion, what’s the biggest challenge we face as web pros in our industry?

I attended HighEdWeb this year and Steve Krug highlighted many of our biggest challenges including:

• Corporate expectations on a not-for-profit budget
• Huge information spaces with multiple audiences
• Sub-site/Fiefdom hell

5) Any good advice to share with your fellow higher ed web pros?

Understand the culture of higher education. Universities are devolved organizations, with individual schools and departments operating with a great deal of autonomy. Don’t waste energy fighting this culture, but learn how to work within it. And don’t get consumed with campus politics. One of my favorite quotes is from Henry Kissinger – “University politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small”.

I also recommend everyone read “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman. I agree with his predictions and expect to see dramatic changes in how we live and how we work. He specifically mentions web programmers as a profession that potentially could be “flattened” and how we need to be really adaptable.

In closing, I think this is a great time for higher education web professionals. In general, I sense the same excitement I did back in 1993 when I first got started working on the web. The web is going through some fundamental, exciting changes loosely grouped under the umbrella of Web 2.0. I also feel that university administrators now understand the strategic importance of the web. It offers opportunities for enhanced services, improved efficiencies, and ultimately a solid return on investment. And with the arrival of the Millennial Generation and their inherent love of technology, the web will only continue to grow in importance.

6) What about a couple of good links?

• Naked Conversations – A blog for a not-yet-published book on “How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers” by Shel Israel & Robert Scoble
• Writely – An online collaboration tool similar to a wiki.
• BusinessWeek – This magazine has become essential reading with numerous stories and resources about emerging technologies and how businesses are learning to adapt. The latest issue features a cover story on the “MySpace Generation: They live online. They buy online. They play online. Their power is growing”
• The Cluetrain Manifesto – Maybe more relevant now than it was five years ago
• The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog – “Education-technology news from around the world, brought to you by the Chronicle of Higher Education.”
• The Read/Write Web – “A blog about Web 2.0 and Social Media”
• Syndication for Higher Ed – “Exploring emerging practice in RSS, podcasting, and blogging on Higher Ed websites.”

Web Manager at Pierce College, a community college district based in Pierce County, Washington state, Elaine Nelson is a writer who literally fell into the Web in 1998. At Pierce, she reports to College Relations and is in charge of a 6,900-page website serving 25,000 users. The College web presence relies on several maintenance methods: a PHP-based homegrown system, a templating system, FrontPage or Nvu, WordPress, and Drupal. While she’s been blogging for more than 4 years at her personal blog, ePersonae, Elaine has also started a work blog at her college.

1) What’s your background? What did you do before becoming a higher ed web pro?

I have a BA in English (UPS, 1996) with an emphasis in creative writing; my mother despaired of my ever finding a real job.

I didn’t have much exposure to the Internet except for email while I was in school, and I was resolutely not a computer person. My work-study job, which turned into my first fulltime job, was at the Children’s Museum of Tacoma. I started tinkering to make brochures, keep track of attendance, that sort of things, until I became something of a low-end nerd, with a bit of graphic design.

I got started with the Web when I was working at United Way of Pierce County, where I was an administrative assistant. My cubicle neighbor Tom was working on their site as part of his job, and I thought it was interesting, so I bugged him for information. He sent me to the old Webmonkey, and I took it from there. This was early 1998, I think.

At the same time, my future husband had just bought our first PC. We got the Internet at home for the first time, which was a real boost in terms of trying things on my own.

I had a Tripod site for a while, and then got my personal domain name in 1999.

In 2000 I started at Pierce, which is my first and only all-web job. I can’t imagine doing anything other than the Web… which constantly amazes me, since the job didn’t really exist when I was in school.

2) What’s your biggest achievement as a higher ed web pro?

We did an assessment project on our site in 2003-2004, and I’m still incredibly proud of what that achieved.

We took a serious look at how the Website worked for our students, including a survey, card sorts, usability testing, log analysis.
Faculty members were great about letting us into their classrooms for the card sorts, in particular. That part of the project was amazing: one of the librarians ran the sessions, and the results were surprising, in terms of student conceptions of the site and our terminology.

The relationships that came out of that project have been helpful in an ongoing way. We had a lot of buy-in for the redesign that followed because of the level of participation.

Plus, I submitted a proposal to speak about the project at HighEdWebDev in 2004. I was able to attend that conference because I was presenting. This gave me a huge boost professionally and personally. The funniest thing is I first met the Web Manager from The Evergreen State College, who lives across town from me, in Rochester.

3) What’s the most difficult part of your job?

Being only one person. Technically, one and a half, since I have a part-time assistant, who is amazing. Everybody wants something, and sometimes they understand what it is, and sometimes not. People sometimes come saying “I need X” where X is a podcast or a link on the home page or whatever, and it’s a real challenge to get to the underlying needs and goals.

That, and folks who want sites but never get you the information… I’ve started joking about “not being psychic”, which occasionally has good results.

4) In your opinion, what’s the biggest challenge we face as web pros in our industry?

Keeping up with everything. I know there are lots of schools out there with just one or two people, and we are expected to fill all of the roles of teams much larger. I’ve given up on ever having that much to say about Flash or multimedia, and instead I’ve developed expertise in PHP, standards-based design, information architecture, usability, that sort of thing, although even in the subfields that I follow, I can only claim deep knowledge in a few of them.

At the same time, you have to have a broad enough view, so that when somebody sees something in the newspaper, you can at least have an intelligent conversation about it. And, to keep an eye out for the new things that are worth expanding into. After several years of ignoring JavaScript pretty much entirely, I’m getting interested again because of all this AJAX stuff.

One other thing that occurs to me is that community colleges in particular serve such a humongous audience, theoretically, that it can be a real challenge to serve all of those groups effectively. As web professionals we have to keep all those audiences balanced in our heads while we work with internal clients, who may be focused on only one audience.

5) Any good advice to share with your fellow higher ed web pros?

Keep an ear open for what’s going on out there. UWebD is an amazing email list – although, people, rim your posts! — plus local non-college technical lists can be useful. In this area, the Digital Eve list is fantastic. Read the blogs; even just skimming helps keep up on trends and glean new ideas, techniques, etc.

If you have an idea, submit to present at a conference, to write an article, etc..

And, as my webby friends will expect, I’ll put in a plug for standards and CSS. Stylesheets rock my world.

I also have this theory about evolving with stealth projects, but I haven’t yet articulated it well enough to share.

6) What about a couple of good links?

• Interllectual: Andrea Schwandt-Arbogast, who I think has been interviewed here. I love the way she combines personal and professional writing, and the site is gorgeous.
• Burningbird – Shelley Powers – is somewhat similar in blending personal and professional. Plus fantastic rants on women and technology, and pretty photos.
• Caveat Lector — for me, Dorothea has been something of an entree into the librarian blogger world, which is tangential to our world.
• Rashmi Sinha is relatively new to me, but she has some good stuff on information architecture.
• Lifehacker is a group blog. The whole “lifehacking” phenomenon has been helpful both personally and professionally. My tool combo, by the way, is Tasks Pro, Backpack, TracksLife, and post-it notes.

I’m often told that I ask lots of (too many?) questions, but don’t volunteer answers easily.

So, I thought I would be the one giving answers for a change to celebrate this blog’s 100th (yep, 100 posts since February 12, 2005) post on this blog. If you’re a regular, you probably know that I have a series called “Higher Ed Web Pro Files” featuring interesting web professionals working in universities and colleges all over the country – well, actually the world. As of today, 12 very talented web pros have accepted to answer my questions, the same questions I’ve decided to ask myself for this special blog post.

1) What’s your background? What did you do before becoming a higher ed web pro?

I have a Master’s in Communications with a minor in Public Relations from La Sorbonne in Paris – not the one in Texas. I started my career as a journalist and worked for several radio stations, newspapers and magazines. After 6 years of journalism, in 1999, I realized I really needed a change of medium and got a Webmaster Certificate at Rutgers University, NJ in 2000.

Thanks to my background in journalism and my newly acquired technical skills, I was able to get my share of the dotcom boom at About.com in NYC. And, yes, I got the total dotcom experience with free soda, candy bars, breakfasts and even lunches – sometimes – as well as the worthless stock-options. I actually learned a great deal and met amazing people while working as a Web editor back then.

In 2002, I started to work as my college’s Web editor. This is a part-time position (and, some of you thought it’s tough to be a Web team of one person…), which has allowed me to keep consulting for small businesses as well as a couple of other higher ed institutions.

2) What’s your biggest achievement as a higher ed web pro?

I’ve survived a content management system (CMS) implementation and migration.

When I came on board, my college had just signed a 2-year contract with an external vendor. The whole website was outsourced. In early 2004 the decision not to renew this contract was made. In the spring, the college’s chief technology officer decided that the best solution was to go with the very powerful yet flexible free open-source CMS, typo3.

During the following summer with a team composed of a business analyst/designer and a programmer – both independent contractors -, we completed this 3-month project on schedule, on budget and ahead of time – well, just by one week, but still.

The project scope included the CMS migration of about 300 web pages (about 150 were just moved to the new server) as well as the design and the programming of 7 modules to replicate on typo3 the existing functionality. Let me tell you that I didn’t sleep too much that summer…

3) What’s the most difficult part of your job?

Sometimes, things don’t go as fast as I would like. I’ve been blogging about some very interesting initiatives in universities and colleges for the past 9 months. I wish we could implement all of them at my college, but it can take time to get people on board. Since I started to work in higher ed, I’ve learned a great deal of patience.

4) In your opinion, what’s the biggest challenge we face as web pros in our industry?

I think it all comes down to the fact that we have to be crossover pros. I always feel very lucky to have a background in communication/marketing along with good technical skills. With all the new Web 2.0 user-friendly applications such as blogs and wikis, the Web is slowly opening up to regular users such as PR or admission folks. So, our role might soon involve more training on the non-technical part of the Web.

5) Any good advice to share with your fellow higher ed web pros?

Don’t forget the end user: that’s sometimes very easy to do while dealing with demanding stakeholders. Get a good RSS reader and put it to work: information truly is power. So, get it and share it. By becoming a good information source for your stakeholders, you’ll make friends – especially precious at budget time.

6) What about a couple of good links?

Since I started my online exploration of the higher ed world last February, I’ve come across a lot of very good blogs. The following are the ones who made it to the top of my 125 RSS feeds for the information or the insights they provide. These bloggers post on a regular basis which is very important for the RSS-addict I’ve become:

• Dan Karleen’s Syndication for Higher Ed – for news and great tips from the higher ed RSS guru
• Georgina Hibberd’s Templatedata – for a look at what’s going on down under
• Andrea Schwandt-Arbogast’s Interllectual – for a unique mix of professional ideas and personal views
• Dean Dad’s Confessions of a Community College Dean – to get into a Dean’s head

This blog’s readers don’t usually comment a lot about my posts — but I know YOU’re reading, well at least viewing them, and I have my web stats to prove it ;-) I’ve just answered a bunch of questions, so why don’t YOU take the time to post a comment for a change? Hey, it’s my 100th post after all!

Web Content Coordinator at Capital University in Columbus, OH, Bob Robertson-Boyd used to work as a web professional in another capital, on the Hill in Washington, D.C.
At his university, he reports to the Director of Public Relations and his VP is in charge of Marketing. The website serves a student population of about 3,000 and is maintained with a mix of Dreamweaver and Contribute. However, Bob is currently rolling out, iteratively, a new website that uses the Estrada content management system. Besides, his job at Capital University, Bob is also involved in some personal research about the very interesting concept of social networking content management.
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Web Manager at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA, Brian Phelps worked as a technical writer before switching to the Web. He works for the Director of Marketing and University Relations who reports to the Office of the President. The 12,000-page website serves a student population of a bit more than 6,000. Brian maintains 700 HTML pages and relies on content authors to update the rest of the University’s web presence. He is in the middle of a big CMS and redesign project due to go live on April 17, 2006.
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Web Designer at The College of Charleston, Elaine Montambeau started her career as a print graphic designer before moving to the online world.
Reporting to the Dean of the College of Charleston Libraries, Elaine belongs to the Department of Academic Computing. Along with the College’s Webmaster, she takes care of about 20% of the 1000 web pages that composed the web presence of her institution. The site is maintained using HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, Perl, CSS, XML, and JavaScript.
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Director of Web Communication at Texas Woman’s University, Liz Norell gave one of the most interesting presentations I attended at the Web Communications and Strategies Conference in Salisbury this year: “Got Five? Effective User Testing with $5 and Five People.” Reporting to the Associate Vice President for Marketing & Communication, Liz in charge of the 30,000-page external website, a site composed exclusively of HTML pages.
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