Interview: Elaine Nelson, Pierce College’s Web Manager

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.