IWMW and sharing what we're up to

I was away for a few days last week at the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2011 conference (IWMW) , where lots of like-minded web folk from universities around the country get together to share experiences and ideas.



As ever, there were some interesting presentations and workshops (videos are online) but the stand-out benefit of attending was once again the conversations with colleagues at other universities that happen between sessions and in the bar in the evening. Of course, being an annual conference means there can be a lot to catch up on, so it was great to see a couple of outcomes this year which should help keep us in touch more regularly.

Regional meetups

There was a resurgence of interest this year in resurrecting some of the local web meetups that have happened in the past but, with the exception of the Scottish web folk, seem to have largely fizzled out. Between a few of us University folk in Yorkshire, we're hopeful that we might manage a local get together before too long.

A higher-ed blog aggregator

Since getting together in person is always going to be a once-in-a-while activity, the surprise unveiling of an institutional web teams blog aggregator was great to see. It should help all of us discover what one another are up to on an ongoing basis.

I've probably got RSS feeds for most HE web teams pouring into Google Reader already, but this makes them much more visible, saves me having to discover new blogs myself (I can use a single feed from here to pick up everything) and adds a handy search feature.

Hopefully the increased visibility will inspire both us and others to post more frequently!

Blogger Template Designer

Google recently announced the addition of some brand new template design functionality to Blogger (the tool that powers this blog). The new template designer is accessed via Blogger in Draft, which lets you see how any changes will affect your blog before you make them live.

I gave it a go this afternoon and was really impressed with the results. There are 15 templates available (with more planned for the future), which all look good straight out of the box. You can put your own stamp on them by making changes to the layout, fonts, colours, background image, etc, all of which are easily changed. The background images available are very impressive in themselves, with a choice of hundreds of high-quality photos, textures and patterns to play with. Each template comes with suggested colour palettes too, which makes it easy for non-designers to produce something that looks great.

What you're seeing now (view the blog here if you're using an RSS reader) is the result of just a few minutes of experimentation.

The video below gives a quick tour of what you can do with the new template designer: