other side notes

Paul Boag talks about the top ten challenges he sees in getting a working and worthwhile college/university website and web presence. This is a great presentation and is DEFINITELY worth listening to all the way through, but I’ve pulled out a few great points here below to consider:

1. Make better use of CMS and content providers: be sure that writing, updating and removing out of date web copy is included in people’s job descriptions. Having a dedicated web team doesn’t negate the need for getting information from the experts themselves. 

2. Social media is hard. Take a moment to think about what is it you are trying to do with social media? Facebook and Twitter are merely tools for engagement; engagement should be the main goal, not use of the tool for the sake of using the tool. For example, using Twitter as simply a broadcast tool defeats the actual purpose of that platform. Invest in social media strategy for the long term. Has to do more with customer service than marketing. 

3. Think about becoming more user-focused. Create user-personas, understand what terminology and content makes sense for each persona, what are their goals and structure your site around those use cases. And make sure content providers understand the user personas so they are writing for that audience! User-test your site on a regular basis. 

4. Stop trying to appeal to everyone. Instead, design your website to offend nobody, but appeal to somebody. Know what your institution is about, and cater to that audience. 

5. Your site is bloated and out of date. Whose job is it to deal with that out of date content? And there is too much content! Users get lost in it all. Massively simplify your college’s website. 

6. Undergraduates especially are very savvy about being marketed to. They want transparency, relationship building, honesty and openness. This is what builds engagement online. 

7. Because you  have so many content providers, content becomes repetitive, inconsistent, and not aligned with overall strategy. To avoid this, put together content templates for content providers. Helps them to focus on user needs, learning purpose, what can the user do in this section of the website, and what action do they want visitors to take. 

8. Why do you have a website? How do you measure success? Set business objectives and measurable success criteria. Be proactive. Consider your overall strategy. 

9. You sell courses. And your course finders stink. Invest in your course finder. Help people make the right course decisions, pick the right classes. It can be very overwhelming. Make it simple, provide guidance. 

10. Politics are killing your site. You need someone senior with authority over the whole site who can get over power struggles. You need the power to say NO. 

Ten harsh truths about institutional websites from Paul Boag on Vimeo.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 at 1:15 pm and is filed under othersidenotes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.