smeranda shares Attending the Designing a New User-Centric College Public Website - Lessons Learned. #heweb08

59 responses to this plurk.

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  October 06, 2008 at 10:49 smeranda says leadership realized website fragmented, so thed decided to fix it. St. Louis Community College. www.stlcc.edu/
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  October 06, 2008 at 10:49 smeranda says Going through some history of the college now, large community college
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  October 06, 2008 at 10:50 smeranda says 3 sites, public, internal for faculty sharing and a sharepoint site.
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  October 06, 2008 at 10:51 smeranda says 16,000 pages with no navigation standard - yikes!
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  October 06, 2008 at 10:51 smeranda says site wasn't built for the external user, another problem to fix.
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  October 06, 2008 at 10:53 smeranda says Good to see the college realizes the user-centric problems created by inconsistency, non-ADA compliance.
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  October 06, 2008 at 10:54 smeranda says no that problem defined, discovery stage is next
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  October 06, 2008 at 10:54 alvin says seth is using plurk as a notebook
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  October 06, 2008 at 10:55 almostcool says live-blogging baby!
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  October 06, 2008 at 10:55 smeranda says lot's of great user stats from research. Hope the slides will be online soon.
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  October 06, 2008 at 10:56 smeranda says 30% of students couldn't find what they were looking for on the site.
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  October 06, 2008 at 10:57 smeranda says 92 different technologies used on their 16,000 pages.
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  October 06, 2008 at 10:57 smeranda says 10 minutes into presentation, and speaker concerned he is behind... must have a lot of content to go through
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  October 06, 2008 at 10:59 Mort_Blort says Increased enrollment is goal ... will be interesting to see how they attribute that.
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:00 smeranda says Sounds like the Serena Collage CMS isn't popular with users.
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:00 saltybeagle and how do you attribute increased enrollment to the website..?
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:01 Mort_Blort says yeah, exactly.
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:01 Mort_Blort says I just say "the website is responsible for all increased enrollment."
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:01 smeranda says Not sure that you can, but you can report on other metrics... speed of which content was found, decreased friction...
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:02 almostcool says hrmm... we had increased enrollment right about the time we launched the full redesign in '06....
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:02 smeranda says "create an agile development for future-proofing" that is always helpful
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:03 Mort_Blort says Yes; then assumptions can be made on which you can base theories and test them. Surveys of entering students.
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:04 smeranda says Tower 29 worked on development, note for myself.
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:05 smeranda says load-balancing graphic on the screen... This was more than a visual redesign
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:07 smeranda says taxonomy creates navigation - Many areas recreating the wheel and they are trying to change to a more collaborative effort. Sounds familiar?
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:09 Mort_Blort says They seem to have a much more systematic approach to content, though, which I suppose is more possible at a CC level.
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:12 smeranda says Quicklinks convention by the user is that you will jump to another website according to speaker.
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:12 smeranda says Would like to see some research on this point.
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:13 smeranda says Using Active Data Exchange calendaring
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:13 smeranda says Blackboard LMS and other various home-grown applications
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:13 smeranda says and Windows Live student email
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:14 smeranda says Website went live on on March 9, stlcc.edu
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:14 saltybeagle they're caught in the Windows Live edu trap also, eh?
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:14 Mort_Blort says QL convention can't jump, IIRC, and be accessible
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:14 smeranda says Ad hoc web committee created to develop phase 1
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:15 Mort_Blort says Did they get their $10M?
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:15 almostcool says looks fairly comprehensive, although i admit that i didn't click really deep. did they say what % of the 16k pages they converted?
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:15 smeranda says "jump" as in leave, not the JS functionality.
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:16 smeranda says I'll ask on the 16k pages.
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:16 smeranda says New positions were created to help, restructure the IT department to be more web-focused.
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:16 smeranda says Content belongs to community relationship/structure support belongs to IT. Great model.
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:17 Mort_Blort says Want to pick their brains on that after.
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:17 Mort_Blort says Politics of it
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:17 smeranda says Phase 2 is the future: more dynamic content.
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:18 smeranda says New focus on enrollment management, new position/department created
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:18 smeranda says CRM to come... intrigued to see what they are looking at.
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:19 Mort_Blort says Smaller = more agile, or so it seems
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:19 smeranda says active involvement by faculty during process, a plus.
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:20 smeranda says successful integration of home-grown applications. Define "successful".
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:22 smeranda says Speaker: "Never outsource content development, this is what you do as an institution." Right on.
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:22 Mort_Blort says "Need to be at seventh-grade reading level."
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:22 Mort_Blort says I think he's talking about the community college audience.
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:24 Mort_Blort says But that's a perspective we could probably use; simplicity and friendliness.
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:24 smeranda says Little things can break the user experience. It's a fragile world.
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:25 smeranda says Vendor stopped working on product one week before going live.
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:25 Mort_Blort says group moan.
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:27 smeranda says they had more hardward than necessary... We'll take your extra servers!
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  October 06, 2008 at 11:29 almostcool says again, if they take questions, ask about the % of pages they flipped. i'm just curious given our own experience
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  October 06, 2008 at 23:18 gsackett is flipped very little content. almost all rewritten - went from 16,000 pages to 1,600 pages