This week 450+ higher ed web workers converged in Milwaukee, WI (opens new window) for the HighEdWeb 2009 (opens new window) conference. I was lucky enough to not only be part of this group but also give a presentation. The conference was filled with great people, sessions and excursions. The tone of the conference was very easy going and friendly. I went in expecting to meet a lot of the people I talk to every day from other universities what ended up happening was I got to meet and learn ten times more than expected.

Below is what I took away from the each presentation I attended and my own presentation (notes coming soon). It's quite long and my original notes were longer. If you click through each presentation should be available to download and some sessions were recorded. You can also checkout the Flickr stream of photos (opens new window) which are still rolling in. Enjoy.

ADA and Section 508: Best Practices for Web Accessibility for People with Disabilities (opens new window)

• 508 is easy to read but not super useful
• University of Illinois built upon 508 but are in real life environments for people and developers
• Developers are going to make the difference, not the standard
• FAE - Functional Accessibility Evaluator (opens new window)
• Firefox Web Accessibility Toolbar (opens new window) has the ability to send authenticated pages to FAE
• Without the ground workers embracing it it will not happen

The Infrastructure That Protects Vassar from Out-of-Date Content (opens new window)

• Not relying on emailing content updates
• Custom design for every site (130+ centrally maintained)
• Ticket system - Web Help Desk
• Goal: distribute the course list and requirements to all the sites from the course catalog
• Using the official information from the central catalog to be used all throughout the web
• Exporting from catalog to PDF or indesign to use that content past web
• Most everything is coming from external sources
• http://webdesign.vassar.edu (opens new window)

Creating an Online Brand: From Buy-in to Execution (opens new window)

• Integrated Marketing and Communications - It's is everyone's job to be a marketer
• Web Presence - Audience centric, eliminate fragmentation of messaging
• Think about the web site differently, not from technology standpoint but from the integrated marketing model
• Web groups are new, asking for resources need to be done strategically
• Data needs to back up every decision and not because person wanted it that way
• Use wireframes to outline how things will be placed on the site

General Session with Jared Spool (opens new window)

• Vision: "Can everyone on the team describe the experience of using your design five years from now"
• Feedback: "In the last six weeks have you spend more than two hours watching someone use either your design or a competitor's"
• Culture: "In the last six weeks, have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure?"
• 5 second test is a really easy way to tell if a page is doing its primary job or not (Very useful, I know (opens new window))
• Paper prototyping is another good way to do cheap usability testing
• There is a difference of being creative and clever

Web Project Management (opens new window)

• "Ongoing with many false starts and chronic scope creep. Governed by committee(s), success is not often tangible"
• Chaos is everywhere, developers that come in after noon, designers that dont answer email, using "pedagogy" with parents, committees, changes upon changes
• Pick a strategy, understand it, Version control, Issue tracking
• Have a process and follow it, launch a product
• Staff time is not free
• There needs to be a communication strategy between team members even when they are not working in the same place

Using XML to Create an Online Course Catalog (opens new window)

• The power of the XML XSL and XSLT can create CSV, HTML, PDF.. etc.
• Printed bulletins cost a lot and are out of date by the time they go to print
• Search ability is also possible when exporting as XML
• XML file for each program then a file for all the other info
• Building on the XML it can be transformed into a mobile site, phone app, anywhere

Goal-Driven Web Strategy: Implementing Technology with an Eye on ROI (opens new window)

• Universities should be run like a business
• "Communications make marketing tactics tangible"
• Set Strategy - What are your higher level goals? What does success look like?
• Plan Tactics - What types of communications will we use to achieve our goals and how will we measure results?
• Execute & Assess - How many direct lines can you draw? Did that conversion result in a return? What can I do better next time?
• ROI Calculator
• Buying names does not result in high ROI, wasting time and making people mad
• Saying "We should have a Facebook page" is not a marketing strategy

Interactive Maps: Making Them Work for You (opens new window)

• There is a lot of incorrect data all over printed maps, a lot more than you think
• Scope creep on building an interactive map is crazy, set some simple goals and define phases
• Biggest step is to determine how you will get this data on to the map
• Conversion time for the map overlay takes about 100 hours per update
• A lot of campus building don't have mailing addresses. Hand held GPS will help
• No one comes back to use something confusing, keep it clean like Google Maps
• Search is a nice feature to free up your interface

Better Living through Minions: A Guide to Student Workers (opens new window)

• Took a survey of 130+ web offices
• "Students are our most valuable resource" - Cheap, Abundant, Resourceful, Innovative, See things in a way that we can't
• Students are mainly from career services, faculty recommendations are second
• Students do mainly small web tasks, copy-paste, data entry, tech support
• Students are not managing social networks, tutorial development, database work
• 17% changed plans after working for the office
• 97% feel they are learning skills that will help them after they graduate, regardless of their field
• Replacing students for FT staff is not free, they have to be told to do everything
• 86% of web offices use student workers
• 79% of the web offices say their operations would hurt without students

Pop Culture Communication: Microsites, Major Impact (opens new window)

• Things that were once the things that were only for uber geeks are now part of every day life. Mainstream has taken control of technology.
• Micro sites are all about the story, the auto industry is the best at making micro sites
• Its about a one night stand with your audience, sharp spike in traffic then all goes away
• Main stream media gives you third party credibility
• 1. What is important to you, the other side is that is important to everyone else
• 2. Timely, Why is it news today?
• 3. Video, Media is competing with TV, it doesn't even have to very good, most of the time good video looses credibility
• Preparing. Keep your site a secret, Prepare you site for traffic, Create a media page with all the assets, Setup a Google Alert, Have quotable quotes, Media love to hear a great alliteration, pay on words and colorful analogies

Maybe the Purpose of Our Redesign is Only to Serve as a Warning to Others (opens new window)

• The homepage is controlled by a long standing committee, Painted themselves into a corner with the page and the comittee
• Created a two level committee level, What it did was remove the politics from the decision making process
• Having a team of web nerds alone is not enough, You need to have a team that does everything, not just individual tasks
• Budget is what is defining the scope of the site
• Do the research, if you don't know whats broken you can't fix it
• Did surveys and the open ending questions gave the best responses
• The number one reason a redesign site fails is the content
• Students hate marketing, they can smell 1/100000 part marketing out of anything
• Just because you wear a suit or have eye balls you can critique the design
• Budget, budget, budget lets you focus on what you need to do instead of what you want to do

Cross-site Scripting: What Is It, and How Can You Protect Your Site from Becoming a Victim? (opens new window)

• Browsers adhere to the same origin policy, XSS tries to bypass that
• Indication of a larger problem with your site
• 233% increase in the number of malicious sites in the last 6 months
• Anything that has a browser and runs JS is susceptible
• It can spread very very fast, faster than regular virus's
• Three types of attacks - Non-persistent/Reflective, Persistent/Stored, Local
• Loading an off site script to take over the DOM and rewrite everything
• How to fix your site - Be paranoid, Don't trust the user or even the database, layers, layers, layers, Attackers are lazy

Building Relationships: Tying Together Students and Their 2.0 Tools (opens new window)

• Dance floors and college campuses are the same
• Follow the school on twitter is a 2.0 tool with 1.0 thinking
• 2.0 version of the directory - Photo, year, major, interested, social sites they use
• Promoting the groups that are already on campus
• Instead of asking for money asking for feeds
• Sweet spot is to get them as they come in the door as freshmen
• Never publish emails have a lightbox where they can fill out a form
• Writing quality increases when students are writing in a blog for peers and not for a single professor
• Emails that are being sent out are based on their relevant interests
• Current university mentality "We are going to spam you a lot and there is nothing you can do about it except ignore the emails"
• 80-90% sign in with Facebook, Facebook connect is the best way to connect, not LDAP

My Presentation

Starting a Web Office From Scratch: Trials and Tales (opens new window)

[slideshare id=2135016&doc=webofficefromscratch-091005162421-phpapp01]

Conference Lessons Learned

Know your audience. During the second keynote David Galper (opens new window) presented about college students and was completely out of touch with the state of the university student and the web. This was a great lesson about knowing your stuff and knowing your audience because immediate feedback doesn't lie.

If you follow the Twitter hash tag #heweb09 (opens new window) (noon till 1 p.m.) you can see some of the comments. What it came down to was the speaker was out of date and out of touch, not to mention who ever designed his slides had no concept of visual composition.

I won't go into too much detail here but our conference hash tag became a trending topic on twitter and there was a few articles (opens new window) already (opens new window) written (opens new window) on the backlash (opens new window). If you are interested how bad it really was checkout this Ustream of the presentation (opens new window).

Overall Take Aways

This group of people are simply amazing, most web offices are underfunded, understaffed and under appreciated. But still the higher ed web workers charge on, doing whats right for the end user and sharing all along the way. I feel humbled to be part of such a great community.