In higher education, you often have to perform miracles on your websites with limited time and resources. When this happens, your tools can become your best buddies.
If tools should never come first, they can definitely help make you things happen.
That’s why I asked the 12 higher ed web professionals speaking at the 2018 Higher Ed WEBSITES Conference to tell us about the favorite web tool(s) they can’t live without.
Google Lighthouse for Dan Herrero, Web Development Specialist at Lehigh University
It’s a great tool for instantly auditing your web pages in terms of performance, accessibility, SEO and more. It’s available as part of Chrome’s DevTools (and also as a Chrome extension), and since I’m already using DevTools quite a bit when I’m working on a project, it’s very handy to be able to run all of these audits in the same place and get actionable advice on how to make improvements.
I like to use this as I’m working on a web project to identify potential issues along the way, rather than trying to scan for and fix them all at the end of a project.
Google Lighthouse for Jessie Groll, Web Developer at Indiana University of Pennsylvania
It is Google, so there are specific recommendations and links to more information so you can quickly take action. There is a lot of detail provided, but the overall scores for each section make it easy to see if you are making progress. Since it is not just a list of errors, you see where you’ve passed audits as well, which is encouraging!
Siteimprove Accessibility Checker for Dave Poortvliet, Web Manager at Grand Valley State University
One of the best tools I’ve found to check web accessibility is SiteImprove’s Accessibility Checker chrome extension.
What I love about it is how clearly and thoroughly it explains an issue and how to fix the issue.
Slack, Teamwork and Siteimprove for Emily Mayock, AVP at Case Western Reserve University
The first two allow us to communicate and stay on track—and reduce the number of meetings required, which is always important. The third helps us find and fix errors on websites—whether links, spelling or accessibility—and it helps with the triaging of web tasks.
Are we seeing that a link to our apply page is broken and has been clicked on 200 times in the past two days? That needs to be fixed ASAP!
Is there a spelling error on a page that gets a couple of visits per day? In an ideal world, we’d fix that too—but we just can’t.
Siteimprove helps us see what’s wrong, and then prioritize what we need to fix.
Google Optimize for Robert Blizzard, Coordinator of Web Design and Analysis at University of Saskatchewan
If you haven’t explored this recently, it is miles ahead of the former Google Experiments tool.
It makes it easier and faster than ever to setup an A/B or multivariate test in a matter of minutes.
Scrumdo for Cade Whitbourn, Web Manager at Charles Sturt University
We use this tool to plan our project sprints, store project artifacts and deliverables, and monitor task allocation and deadlines. It’s very well suited to agile project management, but is also flexible enough that it can be customized on a project basis to support waterfall workflow, general task management or even a personal todo list.
Basecamp for Kris Hardy, Director of Web and Digital Marketing at Messiah College
It’s an online project management and collaboration tool that organizes our to-do lists, discussions, calendars, chats and files within a project.
It also has a “client side†that allows us to pull campus clients into the tool for larger, more complicated projects. Best part – it’s extremely affordable and intuitive.
Airtable for Nicole Montgomery, Director of Digital Communications at York College of Pennsylvania
It allows us to organize the countless website projects/updates, story ideas and content calendars.
This tool has allowed us to streamline the workloads within our team as well as following up with key project deadlines.
New Relic for Cody Benson, Sr. Director of Digital Strategy at Georgia State University
While expensive ($500 per month or more) the first time we resolved a problem in minutes instead of hours after an update had been made, it was worth every penny.
BrightEdge for Stephanie Geyer, Vice President, Digital Marketing and Creative Services at Ruffalo Noel Levitz
Google Data Studio for Elaine Shannon, Web Developer and User Interface Specialist – St. Mary’s University
Google Analytics is a little overwhelming for most of our team, so I’m experimenting with creating printable reports that give them just the right information in just the right format to be useful. While dashboards have been available for a long time, we’ve found Data Studio works better as many of our team members feel more comfortable with a printed report in their hands. It also makes it easy to archive past reports for quick comparison.
Juicer for Rebecca Larson, Director of Web Communications at Wheaton College
I like Juicer because it’s easy to connect to your social accounts, and it provides a great deal of flexibility in terms of the way the stories are displayed. You can customize the design, as well (post order, feed style, show only posts with images, etc.). It also provides a moderation function to allow you to choose exactly which stories go out into your online feeds. This is helpful to avoid redundant stories, or those that don’t translate well for various reasons into your design.
A conference focusing on higher ed WEBSITES?
The 2018 Higher Ed WEBSITES Conference (now available on-demand!) is a must for higher ed web professionals and teams looking for inspiration, ideas and best practices to kick off their summer projects.
Read below what a few of your higher ed colleagues who attended the past editions of the Higher Ed WEBSITES Conference say about the experience.