Communicating With Students Beyond Email

In a discussion today, the issue of students not reading a certain group’s email newsletter came up. The group wanted a more effective way to communicate news since the emails weren’t being read and important information was going unnoticed. Intuition tells me that students today still use email, but more frequently opt for other methods …

The Case for Centralization

I recently wrote about the perils of decentralizing web operations. In this post, I’ll discuss the advantages of doing just the opposite — centralizing. But before I get into it, let me provide context to the discussion. I have no issue whatsoever with decentralization in terms of content. What I do have an issue with is …

Why Decentralization Doesn’t Work

Many traditional universities (most? all?) take a decentralized approach toward their websites, both in terms of creation and maintenance. It’s thought that a decentralized structure where each division, school, college, department and administrative unit effectively controls their space and content on the web is the best way to manage the overall site. Core web teams …

A New Take on How to Find a Higher Ed Degree

In this screencast, I explore a quick and easy way to find degree program information instead of the common approach today which favors forcing people to navigate their way through a university’s org chart of colleges, divisions, schools, and departments before getting to degree information. This approach takes advantage of a centralized visual and navigational …

The New University of Denver Site In A Nutshell

At its most basic level, the new du.edu site will revolve around who visits the site. As you might imagine, every person who visits our site has a particular task or set of tasks they wish to accomplish. What this allows us to do is group the people with similar tasks into broad audience types. …