I haven’t posted for months. Not because I don’t want to, I do. The dearth of updates stems from an ever growing perception that what I write is hypocritical. By virtue of this site, I claim to have knowledge and insight into matters of strategy, IA and design, but in the 18 months I’ve spent …
Author Archives: Mike Rivera
The Trouble With Titles
I recently took steps to get out of my current, part-time MBA program and into the executive version. To get some questions about the switch answered, I met with a program rep. One of the topics she wanted to cover was whether I met the minimum requirement of 10 years work experience. Having been in …
There’s A Happy Medium Between Centralization & Decentralization
One of my main points of advice for higher ed websites is the idea that operationally, a decentralized management approach to the web does not work well. The opposite–centralization–does. But that doesn’t mean some aspects to a decentralized approach can’t or shouldn’t be employed. It just shouldn’t be the foundation for how to manage the global …
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Marketing ≠ Visitor Experience
I support the centralization of web operations in higher ed. Decentralized website management poses too many problems which centralization can alleviate. But gaining support for it poses problems within a system historically based on a decentralized system. One of those hurdles is the perception that a centralized approach kills the ability to market a school effectively. …
Review: The eduStyle Guide to Usable Higher-Ed Homepage Design
Over Twitter, Cody Foss requested reviewers for a book about higher ed homepage design titled The eduStyle Guide to Usable Higher-Ed Homepage Design by Stewart Foss, Cody Foss and Andy Foss. I’m all over those kinds of requests and wrote back. Mere minutes later, I had downloaded the PDF and added the review to my long …
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Lessons Learned: Let There Be Web Divisions
This is the first post in a series about the lessons I’ve learned during my first year as a web geek in higher ed. In 2007, Jeffrey Zeldman proclaimed, “Let there be web divisions.” I can’t agree with him more. He specifically points out that the web shouldn’t be managed by either marketing or IT …
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4 Steps to Determine the Optimal Page Width for New Sites
A recent problem has prompted me to write about the best way to determine a new site’s width. It may seem like an easy decision to make (it certainly can be), but a few moments of thought may make you reconsider your first choice. There are four steps: 1/ Research Your first step is homework. …
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The 1-to-1 Relationship
Karlyn Morissette once again posts about a great topic for universities: how to solve the problems we all know exist as web people who work in the higher ed space. I agree with her views that we need to brainstorm, promote and implement solutions since we all know very well what the issues are. So, …
CMS- Proprietary or Open Source?
HigherEdWebTech has a series of excellent suggestions in response to Karine Joly’s call for cost saving measures for higher ed websites. One suggestion was to go open source. I think that’s an excellent idea- one grounded on social media principles of harnessing the power of crowds. I imagine many who read that last phrase would nod in agreement. …
The Speed of Twitter
I haven’t been a long time user of Twitter, but now that I have Twitterific forever occupying the lower right corner of my monitor, I’ve increasingly noticed how much quicker the twittersphere is at reporting breaking news than traditional news sources. A couple of interesting take-aways here: