What to put on a university homepage

We're currently looking at making some changes to the University homepage, so today's post from xkcd is rather timely:

Hopefully we'll remember to include the things that people go looking for!

Update

A couple of higher education blogs have gone into more detail on the subject:

• No Laughing Matter (Inside Higher ED)
• This is my truth, tell me yours (Shall Make You Odd)

IT Services goes live

The Computing Service changed its name to IT Services today, and along with the name change they have a brand new website.

The move into the Web CMS prompted a fundamental review of the site's information architecture and content. The site has been completely restructured based on user feedback and usage statistics, and much of it has been rewritten for clarity.

This was followed by a comprehensive programme of pre-launch user testing. This picked up difficulties and ambiguities which made it harder for users to find what they wanted. While some key issues were identified and resolved, it was very good news to discover that most of our testers found information easily and quickly. As one of the University's most high-profile sites - both internal and external - it was really important to get this right.

Do you have a view on the new site? Please fill in the 1-minute user survey and let us know.

Derwent College goes live

The new site for Derwent College went live today.

Derwent is strongly focused on student involvement, integration and sociability: the numerous photos on the site, and the 'I love you Derwent' student profiles, illustrate those themes well. There's also a page showing the commemorative garden that's being built for Ron Weir, who sadly died last year after 29 years as Provost.

The College shield has been redrawn for clarity but retains its simplicity and impact.

Derwent is the seventh college to go into the Web CMS.

Can you attend a conference without physically being there? Thoughts on IWMW 2010 as a remote attendee

Dan recently blogged about his experience at IWMW this year, so I thought I'd share my experience of the event as someone who wasn't physically there, but was instead following the action remotely.

Being a conference for web folk, it should come as no surprise that it makes extensive use of technology as a way of amplifying the conference experience. The have been live video streams of the talks as far back as 2007, and "backchannel" discussion on Twitter before most people even knew what Twitter was.

On the first day of the event I fired up the live video stream with the aim of watching the opening session. But then the phone rang, and I missed most of that. And then I got called into a meeting. And then something on the website broke that needed fixing urgently. This was a common theme over the three days of the event - I was able to catch the odd bit of a session here and there, but didn't manage to watch anything all the way through.

In spite of the interruptions, I was dipping into the Twitter stream of posts tagged with #iwmw10 as often as I could, which was giving me a good idea of  the key messages from each of the sessions, and how the physical audience were responding to them. As well as being streamed, videos of the talks have been made available to watch on-demand - now all I need is to find some time to actually watch them.

It's obviously not as good as being there in person - a lot of the benefit of being at a conference comes from the discussions that happen outside of the talks (and usually after a few drinks), and there's that pesky thing called the day job that keeps getting in the way. But in times when not everyone can afford to spend three days out of the office, it's not a bad substitute.

Institutional Web Management Workshop 2010

I spent three days out of the office last week at the Institutional Web Management Workshop in Sheffield. The conference theme was 'The Web in turbulent times' and though it sounded a bit gloomy (and indeed started that way when we were asked to look around and ponder who would be out of a job in 12 months - see from the 13th minute of the video), there were lots of positive ideas and opportunities being discussed.

There are videos and presentation slides online so I'll not go over the sessions, but I recommend taking a look. In particular, Paul Boag made great points about viewing a tightening of belts as an opportunity to assert web team authority over sprawling sites - something that seemed to strike a chord with lots of delegates. Paul's slides are available, but if you've got the time then the video of his talk is well worth watching.

In the final session Brian Kelly implored university web teams to blog more (and he's written a blog post on the same matter). I certainly enjoy and value reading what other universities are up to and hopefully this blog is of interest to colleagues both at York and elsewhere. However, I've been guilty for a long time of being 'too busy' to contribute. One of my IWMW resolutions this year is therefore to do my bit and contribute regularly to the 7500 posts that Brian reckons the HE community could produce each year. Hopefully I'll find something interesting to say...

James College goes live

James College went live with their new website today, using the College colours of black and white and the College visual ID.

Quick CSS tip - alphabetise your properties

Since I first read about this technique about a year ago I've been using it without even thinking about, but I'm reminded how much of a time saver it is every time I work with CSS that isn't alphabetised.

Compare and contrast:

Unordered properties

.myclass {
    position:absolute;
    top:0;
    left:0;
    width:42%;
    margin:0 0 0 8px;
    padding:8px 10px 10px 10px;
    border:1px solid #e6e6e6;
    background:#f5f5f5;
    visibility:hidden;
    font-size:85%;
}

Properties in alphabetical order

.myclass {
    background:#f5f5f5;
    border:1px solid #e6e6e6;
    font-size:85%;   
    left:0;
    margin:0 0 0 8px;
    padding:8px 10px 10px 10px;
    position:absolute;
    top:0;
    visibility:hidden;
    width:42%;   
}


Image by Jan Tik