Weekly round-up 4.1.11
An interesting example of the way in which colleges and universities are becoming more interdisciplinary: “Roughly speaking, Le Laboratoire is a sort of public scientific laboratory with a focus on art and design, while the Idea Translation Lab adds a higher education emphasis in bringing this model to Harvard students and faculty.”
“EDU Checkup is the idea of Nick DeNardis who is the associate director of web communications at Wayne State University. One of the many tasks in my 9–5 is to review and benchmark other university web sites. I use EdyStyle.net, a higher education web site gallery as a tool to find and score other university web pages. After viewing hundreds of sites I decided to record what I am looking for and my live review of sites so others can see what I am looking for in a good university web site.”
“A good consultant is good at listening. Have the consultants you are considering feed your situation and issues back to you. The one who has the deepest understanding and insight is the one most likely to do the best job for you. That is probably also the one who asked the most probing questions before crafting a proposal. Watch out for the consultants whose approach is ‘cookie cutter’—replace the last client’s name with your brand’s name and the proposal is ‘good to go.’”
“Twenty-three percent of college presidents in the United States are female. A group of four influential female presidents gathered at the National Archives here Thursday evening and argued that this percentage should be much higher, so as to mirror the majority female student population in higher education. The presidents—H. Kim Bottomly of Wellesley College, Catharine Bond Hill of Vassar College, S. Georgia Nugent of Kenyon College and Teresa A. Sullivan of the University of Virginia—spoke on a panel about ‘the changing roles of women in academic leadership’ for the Archives’ 4th Annual Forum on Women in Leadership.”
What Is a Landing Page and Why You Need One
“The reason we use a landing page is four-fold: (1) they help parents find information about what matters most to them; (2) landing pages limit the number of options a prospective parent has when viewing the page; (3) they decrease the amount of money we spend on SEM (Google and Facebook Ads) because we have achieved a higher conversation rate using landing pages; (4) We now have the ability to track the success, or failure, of our online ads, our landing pages, and our marketing email messages.”
Web Redesign Wisdom: 3 tips from Nick DeNardis (EDUCheckup & Wayne State University)
Three don’ts when it comes to web redesign: (1) Don’t allow input from everyone with the expectation that action will be taken on it. (3) Don’t go through more than three design iterations. (4) Don’t hold up the launch because of a handful of slow moving departments or people.