7 guest bloggers, 14 posts in just 5 days and a very happy, excited Karine… live from her office.
It felt like my good old days of journalism…
While some of you might have thought that their RSS readers were going crazy with so much action, I’m sure everybody will find something interesting in the excellent coverage the 7 guest bloggers provided this week.
If you want to read everything later, here’s the page you might want to bookmark:
Now, I just want to thank again the 7 amazing people who agreed to send their reports in record time (actually, like pros), so we could provide you with the best thing after attending the conference:
- Nina Sossen (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
- Drew Olanoff (Educational Directories Unlimited)
- Natalie DiPasquale (Ripple Effects Interactive)
- Kesha Boyce Williams from (Cleveland Institute of Art)
- Aba Blankeston (Cornell University)
- Shane Colvin (University of Oslo)
- Rachel Reuben (State University of New York at New Paltz)
They did a splendid job, so don’t forget to say “thank you” by posting a comment after reading their reports. They are the living proof of what the so-called “Consumer Generated Content” (reader generated content in this case) can do and why your institution should look into it.
When people are passionate about something and belong to a community, they can really do great stuff.
Let’s wrap everything up with 2 last points about the conference:
First, Rachel did send me the following report about the last session she attended: “Editing Print Document for the Web,” by Merry Bruns, Science Sites Communications. I’ve been wondering if I should post it as the session was really not worth the blogging attention. If I had been the one sitting in this room, I would have probably not bothered writing anything. But, Rachel did – so here it is:
Unfortunately the title was misleading from what was actually presented, and her session was plagued by technical difficulties, which seemed to lead us even further off the topic as promoted in the conference literature. But, I stuck it out for the sake of the collegewebeditor.com readers who are waiting with bated breath for my summary of this session (!), and sincerely hoped she would get back on topic at some point.
She covered three pretty well-known tips and shared countless examples (primarily corporate, and useless things such as Webcams at certain universities):
1. Create reader-focused content. What do they want to do (not what you want them to do)?
2. Make text scannable. Use headlines, sub-heads, short paragraphs, bullets, lots of white space, etc. Be concise – write less text.
3. Design user-friendly navigation
She then talked about setting goals for your site, which doesn’t have anything distinctly to do with reformatting documents for the Web, but is common for creating all Web sites in general:
• What’s most important to the reader?
• What’s the purpose of this site?
She did not talk about taking an existing print document (such as an alumni magazine, viewbook, or a course book) and how to best put it up on the Web, other than just using those basic tips I mentioned above.
Last, Natalie DiPasquale was eager to send me a link to the presentation her company did at EduWeb. None of the 7 were able to attend this session. So, I told Natalie that I would check it and see if there is anything worth sharing with all of you (I’m always cautious with vendors presentations – don’t want to make this blog a sounding box for sales pitch, that’s what online advertising is for ;-). Well, there is (data, trends, tips and advice on how to deal with the Millenials). So, you should probably take the time (literally – the file is 20MB) to download this presentation.
Karine,
This is an amazing service you’ve provided for the community. I will benefit tremendously from each of these posts, as I was unable to attend the entire conference. Many thanks to you and all the guest bloggers. Hope to hear from them all again very soon (perhaps on blogs of their own)!
Dan
[…] it seemed like an awful lot of those higher ed web types. Now, if you haven’t met many of them, you’re lucky. There certainly are some that are doing new things, but for the most part I sort of imagine most of them being people that either aren’t capable, or have just never worked in the “real world.â€
I didn’t listen to anyone else speak, but I was reading about some of the topics over here. Lots of boring stuff, more boring stuff and then this sticks out:
“This is the first year Furman is spending more on web than printâ€
First, let’s take a look at Furman. Mmhmm, not a great site. Perhaps their admissions site is better. Doh, not so much. So, hmm. They are spending more on web than print and their web stuff looks and functions poorly… not good. […]
[…] I just wanted to provide a quick summary of the eduWeb Conference last week in Baltimore where I presented on “Using RSS for Marketing”. The presentation went well and there was a nice crowd of conference-goers interested in using RSS for marketing especially in higher education. From what I saw, the conference was set up well including the division of topics into three tracks – marketing, development, and marketing/development. A full list of the sessions can be found here. Unfortunately, my schedule didn’t permit me to see as many of the other presenters as I would have liked, but there was some live blogging during the conference and an aggregation of the posts can be found at collegewebeditor.com. […]