Web designer at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Drew Stephens was one of my guest bloggers at EduWeb in Baltimore last month. Since his blog, “College Web Guy,” showed up on my technorati radar a couple of months ago, I enjoyed his great posts. I even gave Drew a few tips to help him reach blogging bliss ;-)
1) Why did you decide to blog in the first place? Can you tell us a bit more about your experience with blogging?
All too often I’ll compose lengthy emails to co-workers, not only recapping work that has been completed, but also to discuss future web projects and ideas. It seems a waste to let that dialog rot away on an email server. There are plenty of good reasons for publishing that stuff on a blog. Only one year have I been involved with web development for a college/university, and making the transition from corporate or even agency work to a university environment could be likened to going from professional baseball to professional cricket. Web design is still web design, but there are different kinds of rules, and different players.
I needed all the help I could get at first, and being actively involved in a community of people who are facing the same challenges and involved in similar projects is important to me.
Also, coming from a design background, I’m always thinking about the portfolio. A blog is the best kind of portfolio that a web developer/designer could ever have. We’ve all carried around the fancy leather bound portfolio, and even the giant pdf-document-as-portfolio that never fails in being too large to email, and I refuse to play that game anymore. A blog is a current, easy to update, record of not only your work but your thoughts on your work. It’s a no brainer.
2) How is your blogging received by your administration and the rest of your campus community?
Well, it isn’t received. I’ve thought about it, but I haven’t gotten around to putting a personal website url on my email signature. I’ve got second thoughts about my blog serving as an official podium for my job at this college. I don’t care if people know about it, but I’m not going to promote it. They really aren’t the audience, anyway. The audience is …other poor college web guys on campuses all over the world, working away in the confines of their small, windowless offices. I care how those people receive my site. I want to talk with those guys (and gals).
3) You reposted on your blog a few video projects you worked on for your institution. How hard is it to get into online video for a web professional? Any tips?
Well, let me start by saying that I’m not a video guy. I’m a web guy. Increasingly though, people want video on their internets. So I can’t ignore it. In spite of being deeply involved in our campus website redesign project, I’m finding time here and there to peek out of photoshop land to work on video projects.
Simply filming campus events and archiving the tape on the shelf, perhaps even showing it on the university television station, isn’t going to cut it. Prospective students want to SEE campus life. They aren’t necessarily going to read about it or take as much stock in your staged photos. Thank Youtube and MySpace and Facebook for that. To understand and prepare for that reality is important for university PR and Communications people, and yes, web people.
Compared to other universities, mine is behind when it comes to online video, and I hope to push the envelope. A big obstacle can be getting buy-in from stakeholders on equipment purchases and dedicated man hours, (as is the case with nearly all forms of new media) but that doesn’t mean you can’t cobble something together on your own to show the possibilities and establish a need.
Two notable examples of “cobbling” are a spring graduation video and a campus urban renewal video produced within the past few months:
More on these projects here and here.
Just from the handful of video projects I’ve been able to edit and post online, the web traffic statistics are hard to ignore. Page views on our video features dwarf the other content. If we’re smart we’ll keep a pulse on that demand and dedicate an increasing level of marketing and web development resources to filming and publishing video.
From my limited experience, I’ll break this down into three entirely separate yet required categories: Shooting, Editing, and Publishing.
Shooting
If you want to shoot your own footage, try and find those people scattered around campus who dabble in video, whether it be instructional media services, people working with streaming video for online courses, campus TV, etc.. It’s important to have relationships with those people so they can help out the dumb web guy who can’t operate his camera or figure out what’s wrong with his new wireless mic.
Editing
If you are totally clueless about editing your video, well, get a mac. Get a big hard drive. And use iMovie. Anyone can use iMovie. Anyone. Soon you may graduate to Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere, but I’m still using iMovie. It’s a powerful, yet simple piece of software.
Publishing
Speaking to the process of posting video online, I cut my web video teeth at a PBS affiliate and maintained a website for a local production that wanted to put all episode video online. I’ve been in the trenches of exporting video from tape to a hodge podge of online video file types, and it was exhausting. Because of competing formats, you can spend enormous amounts of time making available multiple versions of the same video for people with different players. Quicktime, Windows Media, even the dreaded RealPlayer. Because of my PBS connection I was able to speak with one of the guys behind the amazing Frontline website, which puts all episodes online. Essentially, they had a full-time employee who did nothing but encode video for the Frontline website. There had to be a better way, and there was.
The silver bullet is flash video. The compression is great, and everybody has the Flash player. Following a tutorial on converting my exported iMovie files to FLV (flash video) files was very easy. All that’s left is to setup a “player” that can play those files online. I use JW FLV Player for now, though there are plans for something more versatile and standalone that we can brand to our university.