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2009
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2009: A Year in Review
I’ve read many posts lately providing predictions for the coming year. Instead of offering my own predictions, I would like to review this past year. This has been a great year. I’ve met so many great people, learned a lot, and had fun writing my blog. I would like to share some of my favorite [...]
Weekly Video: Design by Committee
One of our web designers sent this link to me (I wonder if he’s trying to tell me something?). Actually, this video is very funny and puts into action the negative outcomes of design by committee. All joking aside, have a committee provide the direction of any design is a critical fail point. What are [...]
Twitter… The Best Traffic Source
I fully believe this statement to be true, with one caveat, which I will offer at the end of the post. The other day I was looking at the web analytics for my blog and noticed something interesting. I receive traffic to my blog from various sources, but I really just wanted to compare Twitter [...]
Weekly Video: “The Serendipity Engine” from Chris Brogan
This week’s video is a little on the long side (10 min), but well worth the view. If any of you have read or listened to Chris Brogan, you’ll understand why it’s worth the view. Chris calls Twitter and other tools like it (eg. LinkedIn) a ‘serendipity engine’. Which makes total sense if you refer to [...]
How Do You Measure Success?
Being successful online is all about measuring success. There are countless blog posts about measuring ROI using web analytics, establishing KPIs, using engagement to measure success with social media, etc. While all of these are absolutely important, there is one indicator that I think trumps them all – especially in larger organizations. That indicator is [...]
Social Media: An Inside-Out Approach
I’ve been thinking a bit more lately about social media and how organizations can effectively roll-out a social media strategy. The most important factor that will lead to an organization to be successful with social media is internal adoption. That is leveraging the power of social media within the organization first. Organizations that engage customers [...]
Nice People Still Exist
This doesn’t really fit in any of my categories, but I felt a need to share this. I was Christmas shopping this evening at Toys R Us. We had our kids with us and actually have gotten fairly good at hiding presents from them. I use my coat to cover the presents in the cart. [...]
You Need to Unplug
It’s kind of ironic that I’m writing a blog post about unplugging from technology, but this has been on my mind lately, so I thought I would share it. This has been a year of transformation and growth for our web department and for myself. We are tapping into new technologies and methods that we [...]
Weekly Video: Social Media ROI: Socialnomics
I gave up putting weekly videos as posts and resorted to having the weekly videos I found interesting posted in my sidebar. I will continue to do this, but I think there is value in having the videos embedded in a post to comment on. So on to the video and comment. We all hear [...]
Measure Twice, Cut Once
This old adage is so true when working with wood or other materials that require measuring and cutting. The premise is that it is far less costly to spend an extra few minutes double-checking your measurements then to make the wrong cut and waste your material. This also so very true with web design. It [...]
Listen To Me Already!
Last week I was approached by a vendor of a virtual tour solution. I decided to entertain their call because I believe virtual tours are an important part of any web site. Within minutes I wanted to stick pencils in my ears. I quickly felt removed from the conversation. The vendor was all about what [...]
Twitter Contest Observations
I mentioned that I would share the outcomes and some observations from our Twitter contest we ran at the college I work at, so here is my report. Contest Background We ran the contest in conjunction with the launch of our new campaign microsite. The contest had three objectives: Increase followers of the main college [...]
The Importance of Metadata for PDF Files
PDF files have been around for a long time and Google has been indexing PDF files for almost as long. Unfortunately, some basic best practices still go over looked to ensure proper indexing of PDF files. Just do a Google Search for PDF files, and you will see a lot of search results with irrelevant [...]
It’s OK To Poke
Growing up our parents use to tell us its not nice to poke our brother or sister, but we never really listened. Now that lack of listening can pay off. Lately at work there has been a lot of experimentation with software, processes, methodologies, etc. When talking to my colleagues, I’ve referred to this experimentation [...]
Twitter Search = Fail
I don’t usually have negative things to say about Twitter. Yes I have drunk the Twitter kool-aid, but this time I can’t ignore this. We recently ran a Twitter contest where entrants had to send tweets using a specific hash tag. The intent was to search all the hash tags and pick winners randomly. Well, [...]
Social Surfing
The way we consume information online is changing rapidly. If there were web sites that we wanted to share with our friends, we would e-mail the links to them. Any discussions happened after the fact through e-mail threads and were out of context. Jeremiah Owyang talks about the future of the social web being five [...]
Be Honest About Your Web Goals
I came across a campaign website for Lakehead University and at the very top of the website is the call-to-action, ‘Enter to win an Apple MacBook.’ At first glance all it appears that I need to do is supply an e-mail address. Upon submitting, I needed to provide more personal information like birth date, address, [...]
What Should Our Web Team Do?
In my role as Web Services Manager at a higher education institution, I lead a web team of three (including myself). For a large institution, that is a small team. No matter the size of your web team, you’ve probably asked yourself, ‘What should our web team do?’ I’ve been wondering that myself. I’ve been [...]
Usability Testing With Usabilla
I’ve noticed a shift in the web design world. Maybe the shift isn’t recent, maybe I’m just become aware of it. The increasing importance of involving the user in the design process. User centered design is becoming especially important in higher education. As colleges and universities begin to face tougher times due to reduced budgets, [...]
Vodpod: A Social Way to Share Videos
YouTube, blip.tv, Viddler, Vimeo, and much more… Web video has become very mainstream, but also very fragmented. There are numerous video delivery services and each person has their favorite flavor. That makes it very difficult for people that want to collect these videos and/or share them. That’s where Vodpod comes in. Vodpod is a video [...]