The fire hose is spouting content nonstop. Somewhere in that stream, serendipitously, content is being created that organically aligns with your school's brand. On top of all the other hats we wear, "volunteer fireman" is now added to the list. Panicked? Don't call 911 just yet. Tthere are several ways that, using a variety of free tools and tricks, we can draw on content from the community to create a dynamic, real-time representation of our brand, powered by authentic, organic content. Web thinkers like Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel have called content curation the "next evolution of digital storytelling" and "the next big thing to shake the Web." It's no longer enough to simply aggregate. We must take the process of how we already read and filter the Web and turn it outward, taming the herd of content and hitching it to our brand. I will demonstrate the success I've had turning content found via social media monitoring into "found art," curated into a blog on the Tufts experience called Jumble (http://blogs.uit.tufts.edu/jumble). I will also offer a variety of take-home ideas that are easy to execute and affordable. And I will hopefully not mix as many metaphors in my presentation as I have in this abstract.

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This session will give an overview of several generally accepted methods of using CSS for presenting content on mobile devices, describe how these methods affect each other, offer some best practices on their implementation, and wrap up with a "how-to" session for setting up and optimizing a Web page for presentation on the iPhone's screen.

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It is increasingly difficult to find an American college or university that has not adopted one or more social media tools. However, while the media has changed, the mechanics of one-way communication have not. Many institutions see Twitter as little more than an additional broadcast channel, and Facebook as a third-party repository (or replacement) for the exact same content provided on their official school site. And what’s so social about that? </span><span>At Ithaca College we took a somewhat different approach. We realized our audiences — prospective students; parents; currents students, staff, and faculty; alumni — wanted to engage IC, not just listen to us drone. We used social media to reach out, to listen, to gauge opinions about the College, and to share the stories and ideas that make Ithaca unique. People have responded to the unique voice of IC on social media, one they recognize as distinct and personal. The bulk of this presentation will focus on Ithaca’s success in social media, and how finding the iconic voice of your institution will help you better engage and inspire the people you want to reach. </span><span>Adapting what has been learned at IC to the University of New Orleans (an under-funded public university newly introduced to the world of competitive higher ed marketing by Hurricane Katrina) has offered a very different set of challenges. The final portion of the presentation will concentrate on building from scratch the voice of an institution with an as-yet-undefined new identity.

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"Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal...!"

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The realm of search engine optimization is always changing. There are always new tools and ideas that impact how content is indexed and recognized online. A prime example is the aggregation of links on social networks, all of which push users to our websites. In this session I want to talk about smart steps university Web developers can take to get their sites and content to the top of search engine results, including best practices and tool utilization. I will focus on tools such as the new woorank.com, Google Webmaster Tools, and other Web widgets and scanning software. This will be a great session to begin your journey into understanding SEO.

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As Twitter's growth and hype continue, it seems like everyone is getting in on the act -- athletes, actors, politicians, and even educators are joining the virtual conversation. But what happens when that virtual conversation becomes the main event? How should presenters and educators prepare themselves for this reality? And what responsibilities do audience members have when thoughts shared amongst friends can suddenly become "trending topics?' Join us for a conversation focused on the need to understand how the crowd in the cloud and the sage on the stage can coexist to create an environment of engagement, respect, and conversation, including first-hand observations of some recent "tweckling" incidents (some closer to home than others).

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Brainstorming is a great way to generate new ideas. How can we get more out of a brainstorming session? In this interactive session we will explore effective brainstorming techniques and activities. Attendees will collaborate on creating a "mind map" and have the opportunity to practice their newly acquired brainstorming skills with fellow session attendees.

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Every website needs usability testing, but we have so little time, staff, money, and other resources. Yet our bosses expect us to test thoroughly, so we need to impress them, too. What to do?!? The trick is to keep it simple—<em><strong>VERY </strong></em>simple! This presentation will show you how to conduct usability testing that is fast, easy, and free. And with the help of a fancy schmancy technique that you will learn during this presentation, you'll impress your boss with stunning results.

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Web professionals collect a lot of data: information that could serve as a powerful tool for colleagues around campus. What data are <em>you </em>collecting? What <em>could </em>you be collecting? Who might be able to use it? How might university decision-making be enhanced by this information? We will share examples of data collected by the Office of Web Services that have been used by offices around Xavier's campus to make better-informed decisions. The session will challenge Web professionals to evaluate our data and realize the possibilities that exist beyond our Web function.

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Professional video production firms charge thousands of dollars for their work. This presentation brings you quickly through some of the ways you can produce Web video cheaply and quickly for university websites.<ul><li>What you absolutely need to create effective and engaging video</li><li>What you can skip, or postpone to invest in later</li><li>When is it good to create your own resources</li><li>When is it good to outsource resources</li></ul><p>This presentation will include lots of examples to illustrate the points, as well as take-away materials so attendees can obtain a good base of knowledge to get going on Web video production right away!

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Limited IT staff? Limited funds? Find out how one large, public university banded together to purchase and implement an enterprise-level content management system. By maximizing university-wide IT talent and author content, we’re creating a stronger, more cohesive and consistent Web presence. And we’re making new friends. Because of the strong, grassroots support for an effective system, we received financial commitments from several campus areas, thus convincing the university to provide central funds for the bulk of the purchase. Similarly, we did not have adequate centralized IT staff to implement the system, so we recruited talented IT folks from across campus to work together to build the system. The collaborative effort is proving to be a model for other university-wide initiatives. We’ll share our planning documents, schedules and secrets for encouraging collaboration to maximize ROI and speed the delivery of Web content.

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At Portland Community College we have a huge student body, a gigantic amount of Web content, and a tiny little Web team trying to manage it all. Over the years, we have built a collection of custom Web apps to help us out. These work well, but take time and massive resources to maintain. All the while, content creators continue to ask for new features found in third-party sites like Flickr and YouTube. Lately, we have been learning to let go and have other websites do the heavy lifting for us. This is where the Application Protocol Interface (or API) really shines. It gives you programming access to much of the data and features provided by a Web application without building one from scratch. Using API code gives you the ability to leverage the big Web apps for managing content, while still keeping the final content displayed inline on your website. We will explore how Web APIs can be used to progressively enhance and manage the content on your institutional website. This semi-technical session is an introduction for anyone interested in leveraging APIs. It will provide a background, go over the tips to help you avoid pitfalls, and provide the code to get you started.

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Learn the latest Web project management lessons from a thirteen-year Web development veteran. There are things YOU can do to help manage the project load and the impact the projects you have. Learn to apply basic project management techniques to Web development and see how a PM approach can influence the administration, allowing you to gain control of your project list again. Web developers typically have tens if not hundreds of projects going all at once. Having a way to help manage the nightmare can mitigate the work stress!

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Digital imagery is a great way to engage visitors on any college website. Compelling photographs connect prospective students to the institution and reconnect alumni to their alma mater. In the ever-changing world of digital photography there are new tools and techniques to produce better quality results, faster. This session (a follow-up to last year’s successful “Photoshop Secrets for Eye-Popping Images”) aims to arm Web designers with even more tips, shortcuts, and methods for producing spectacular digital images. With Adobe Photoshop and photos from William &amp; Mary’s historic campus, this session will explore techniques for enhancing photographs for the Web. With a special focus on typography, Camera Raw and High Dynamic Range photos, this session is ideal for people with a wide range of experience with Adobe’s Creative Suite. We’ll even touch on some of the coolest new features in Photoshop CS5. This session will not dwell on abstract technicalities; instead we’ll take every day problems and explore various ways of solving them. While helpful to anyone who prepares photos for the Web, this workshop is most relevant to those already familiar with the basic functionality of Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.

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Location-based services continue to grow thanks to increasing numbers of location-aware mobile devices -- not to mention big players like Facebook, Google, and Twitter getting into the act. Services like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Brightkite are perfecting the "check in, take a picture, leave a review, and earn a virtual badge" concept that’s helping the location-based services market grow to an estimated $3 billion business by 2013. But how can colleges and universities get themselves on the map and do more than simply check in? Location-based services can help universities improve and personalize campus tours, collect and share student-created geotagged content, incentivize student attendance at university events, build alumni communities, provide near real-time customer service for students, faculty and staff, celebrate campus history and mythology, or even track a senior administrator for a day. During the summer of 2010, NC State University began to rollout location-based mobile applications and websites designed to create the kind of authentic content, coverage, and community engagement few other Web efforts can duplicate. This presentation will discuss creative ways universities can leverage location-based services. The discussion will cover strategies for managing the concerns that loom large for administrators—privacy, unflattering reviews, and inappropriate content—in addition to unique considerations that come with partnering with a vendor or creating your own applications.

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How do you compare one vendor's content management system against another? They all say they do RSS, blogs, and Web standards, right? What sets them apart from one another? In this session I present a framework and vocabulary for describing CMS features, architectures, design goals, and tradeoffs. The goal is to teach you how to break through the marketing hype to be able to compare products between each other and against your set of needs.

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Students now almost universally carry cellphones, and an increasing number are using smartphones to browse the Web. As a university we must see and respond to this by offering our services such that they are accessible by mobile devices. Mobile strategy today means deciding whether to focus on mobile apps, a mobile website, or a combination of the two. At Texas A&amp;M University we actively pursue both technologies. We were the first public university to have a mobile suite in Apple's iPhone app store, but we have also been insistent on providing a mobile website that allows anyone to access our services, no matter what phone they use. While we will explore the advantages and drawbacks of each method, the focus will be on development of a mobile website. We will explore the decision-making process that goes into what kind of information to offer, topic areas that have proven most successful on our campus, and the technical challenges of writing code that acts the same across the gamut of mobile devices.

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The Web is not just for people any more. Software agents, including all of the major search engines, are now crawling the Web and consuming not just human-readable text, but also semantic data and metadata embedded in normal Web pages. But a survey of the semantic Web landscape reveals a morass of conflicting terms, overhyped SEO techniques, and cynical detractors saying our current Web technology stack is "good enough". The reality is that the next big breakthrough in Web search technology will come from the harvesting and sharing of semantic data: either data embedded in the pages of today's human-readable Web or through linkable open data sets shared via the common communications standards we already know (HTTP, URIs, and XML). Popular CMSs like Drupal have begun to embrace the semantic Web, automatically generating semantics for the content served. In this talk, I'll present four patterns for integrating the W3C's semantic Web standards into today's higher education websites and applications. Each pattern progressively builds upon the others, culminating in a model for a fully-semantic Web application. Examples will highlight techniques that provide new capabilities or are not easily accomplished through normal practices of relational database-backed Web applications.

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As an academic institution founded by the Sisters of Mercy, Saint Joseph College offers distinctive curricula that prepare both undergraduate women and continuing and graduate students of both genders to meet the challenges of their professional and personal futures. While SJC clearly had a significant story to tell, we realized that our storytelling vehicles were outdated and ineffective. The college's outdated website loomed large, and the decision was made to redesign the site and implement a content management system. A redesign, of course, entails much more than selecting a vendor. The process of effective Web redesign centers on institutional collaboration. Added to our collaborative outreach was the implementation of a new strategic plan; the decision to undertake a new branding initiative to drive enrollment; and the introduction of the new content management system - all moving forward at warp speed. Little did we know that we were headed into the perfect storm. Ultimately, this effort proved to be the catalyst for changing the college's culture of communications. This session will outline a successful brand roll-out, the lessons learned about Web redesign, the ways in which a content management system can help you survive the "stuff" coming downstream, and the outcomes we continue to realize as a result of our ambitious undertaking. This session is especially relevant for those in Web communications and marketing roles.

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This session will focus on ways institutions have creatively and effectively used online video (produced professionally and in-house by staff or students) to market to prospective and accepted students. Attendees of this presentation will walk away with a list of ideas of how to highlight students, faculty, events, activities, and more. We’ll also see compelling statistics to encourage use of YouTube and discuss the importance of cross-promoting videos on other social networking sites.

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So you have just installed a JavaScript code on every one of your pages to track visitors on your site. Maybe you used Google Analytics or some other service and you’re collecting all this great information. Well what do these terms mean and what metrics should I care about? After a quick explanation of terms this presentation will dig into how to filter Google Analytics for more exact and effective data. From here we will explore reports that are actually valuable to higher education and actionable steps that can be taken from this data. Finally we will talk about best practice techniques and explore analytics beyond your website, monitoring your institutions identity across the Web.

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LOLcats ... demotivational posters ... Tales from Redesignland ... What more do you want?

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The growth in Web content and complexity added to the explosive popularity of social networks are the ingredients that are leading us to a social search era. In this context, refining your website to be positioned among the top10 results in search engines user queries is one of the best and cheapest ways of getting the right people visiting it. Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the process of optimizing a website in order to get a privileged position in searches. On the other hand, the spread of social networks platforms has become a very influential factor to SEO in two different aspects: 1) the links and content that come from social networks affects search engine results ; 2) the user-generated content created in \social networks (videos, pictures, texts, etc.) are important digital assets outside of the websites that need search optimization as well. Social media optimization (SMO) refers to the process of optimizing a website in order to make it attractive and easily spreadable through social media channels. Besides being able to drive huge amounts of traffic to a website, SMO can raise positive dialog about the website brand. In this sense, search and social media are more dependent on each other in producing good promotion results. The presentation will address the main aspects of SEO and SMO for brands considering there Web presence, including universal search, social search, and mobile search.

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…and Facebook and YouTube, etc. Perhaps you've dabbled in social media personally and have some ideas on how your institution might participate. Or perhaps you've read about the impact of social sites and worry about being left behind. But how do you convince your boss that something called "Twitter" is a worthwhile investment of your time? On the flip side, when and how do you convince a department that maybe a Facebook fan page is *not* really necessary? This session -- totally revamped for HighEdWeb 2010 -- will cover both strategies and specifics to help you demonstrate to your boss, your VP, or your board the real value of social media.

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The men's basketball team at Butler University captured the hearts and imagination of sports fans around the world as it progressed to the championship game of the 2010 NCAA championship tournament. Behind the scenes, a dedicated group of IT professionals watched the traffic to their main public website grow from 10,000 visits per day to almost 140,000 visits per day. While the basketball team dominated the hoops on the basketball court, this group of individuals jumped through hoops of their own, working around the clock to monitor and modify network traffic to accommodate the flood of traffic to Butler's website after the team won the Sweet Sixteen. Moving swiftly to react to the trend, this team utilized multiple tactics to prepare for the overwhelming amount of attention they would receive. Combining virtual servers, traffic manager technology, a combination of static HTML and CMS, redundant database servers and a few other tricks, the team was able to improve capacity with each win and be ready for the final flood of traffic during the Final Four and final game.

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Serving up dynamic data is not only a given, but a must as the complexity of our Web projects continuse to grow. Learn how techniques used by Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia keep their sites running fast and their costs down as their content continues to expand. If your Web application is being syndicated worldwide or has just outgrown your Web server, there are simple approaches to caching that can be implemented to solve potential performance problems. This presentation will describe what caching is and how it can improve your site’s performance and sustained growth. Since no one solution works for everyone, different methods will be discussed including file, memory, and database caching. Each method will be explored in-depth to provide a better understanding of the problems each are meant to solve. Several practical examples will also be reviewed to demonstrate effectiveness and ease of implementation in real-world scenarios.

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A priority for developers practicing Agile software development is to re-evaluate the role of documentation in the software development lifecycle. On many traditional software development projects, the outcome of the analysis and design phases is a lengthy technical specifications document which is turned over to the developers with the charge, “build this.” In reality, adhering to “the plan” rarely happens, because life is not static--the plan changes as new information is revealed. Hence, Agile developers place a lot of value on continuous face-to-face communication with the customer, iterative development, and minimalist documentation. We seek lightweight development techniques, so that we spend the bulk of our time on writing software, not writing documents. This presentation will detail how our team has combined four simple techniques—1) task-based scenarios, 2) personas, 3) user stories and 4) paper prototyping--into an Agile approach for gathering requirements and designing interfaces for custom applications. The primary advantage of this approach is that it is very light-weight: functional requirements can be generated very quickly, so that coding can begin earlier in the project. The deliverables are essentially stacks of sticky notes and hand-drawn sketches of interfaces. That’s it! It may not be appropriate for the development of campus-wide ERP systems, but in our experience, it has worked well for our small- to medium-sized Web applications.

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Maybe you don’t even know what search engine optimization (SEO) is? Search engines are the first place that nearly everyone goes when looking for something. Having your site displayed at the top of results for relevant searches is a powerful way to get visitors to your website. In a sense it’s a way to provide free traffic to your site. Also because when people search, they are usually looking for a specific thing and being able to provide it to them you are gaining a relevant visitor. Unfortunately, when people think about SEO immediately those emails of spammers who guarantee #1 results in search engines come to mind. SEO doesn’t have to be black magic, pixie dust, or snake oil. College websites already have the authority to rank well in search engines, but are you getting the most exposure and relevant traffic that you could be? This presentation will go through the fundamental and approved methods for on-page optimization, off-page optimization, and implementing these best practices into your marketing efforts going forward. These actionable steps will be practices that you can take home and begin implementing on your site right away.

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WordPress is arguably the best-in-breed blogging platform available today, and is being used on campuses large and small. Thanks to its active development community, flexible architecture and ease-of-use, it is being adapted and morphed into many different types of tools, all the while remaining open source and free. More and more campuses (including ours) are turning to WordPress as a content management system, but its practically begging you to let it do more for your institution's website, some of which may surprise you -- think job postings, classifieds, alumni communities, heck even a learning management system. This session will highlight some of those uses and show you how WordPress could make your life (and your campus constituents' lives) much easier.

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An online brand consists of words, images, calls-to-action, and site structure, which is then pulled together with consistent elements and navigation. How do you roll out an online brand with limited resources in a decentralized environment? Learn how one university incorporated Web site templates and training classes to create a successful “self-service” website program. Taking the focus off technology and helping users see that content and site structure are the keys to success allows online brand rollout to proceed more quickly, while ensuring the campus community understands how to make their websites more effective.

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What do you do when you have a website on end-of-live hardware with out-of-date software, and you have new virtual machines and software to run everything? Upgrade! Not so fast. How do you upgrade without disrupting service and within a reasonable amount of time, and without endless staff resources to throw at the project? This presentation will explain how the College at Brockport upgraded its aging SAMP environment to run on a set of virtualized LAMP servers.

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University of Washington Web designer, developer, producer, generalist, instructor, social media expert, and copier operator Dylan Wilbanks looks for ten lessons the higher ed Web can teach us about the university and the Web -- and how we can change how the university presents itself on the Web. As he prepares to close out his tenth year working on the Web in higher education, he will look back at his successes, if he can see them amid the flaming wreckage of all his failures over the last decade. His hope is to inspire those in the trenches of the university Web --writers, coders, marketers, all -- to hang on to the optimism that the Web and higher education instilled in us... or to convince them that working as a Wal-Mart greeter may ultimately be more fulfilling. The lessons will be about creating change within the ivory tower, seeking to fight the glacial pace of change with a blowtorch, an ice pick, and an obsessed determination Captain Ahab would find disturbing. Topics will include: Dealing with older faculty (and using their blind spots to back-door change); turning the university website from an “institution first” stance to a “students first” stance (in other words, user-centered design); using the glacial pace of change in the university to your advantage (by being bleeding edge without actually having to bleed); finding content for cheap/free when you have no writer (and relying on the long tail to find the content’s audience).

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With the growing presence of smartphones, modern colleges have been presented with a powerful new platform to deliver specialized content to the campus community. From creating customizable study tools to concentrating the core functionality of a college website, mobile applications represent an opportunity to remain at the forefront of cutting edge technology while creating unique tools that are most useful outside of traditional computing environments. During this session, we’ll take a look at two of the mobile applications that NKU has developed for the iPhone/iPod Touch. During the first portion of this session, we’ll discuss the development of NKU’s flagship mobile app, iNKU. With the development of iNKU, we’ve consolidated some of the most useful content that our online presence has to offer, such as our campus directory and schedule of classes. We’ve also created tools which are new with iNKU, like our TANK bus schedule app and streaming radio. During the second portion of the session, we’ll talk about NKU’s flashcard application. Intended to encapsulate the same functionality as paper flashcards, this app is a promising digital version of the time-honored study tool. Users can download specialized ‘decks’ of study questions with which they may quiz themselves.

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In 2009, the University of Missouri Division of IT began a project to develop an IT systems status notification and alert system. The purpose of the project was to provide a central source for all IT system alerts -- scheduled maintenance, network or application outages, e-mail problems, and so on -- that could be searched and archived. Alerts could be posted by a small group of managers or on-call staff at the IT operations center. The alert system needed to be able to categorize alerts by affected service (so that a user could bookmark a page that listed only alerts of specific interest), as well as offering RSS feeds for all alerts and individual service alert categories. What do these requirements suggest to you? To our team, it sounded like a blog! Considering our limited budget and the alternatives, which were to either create a custom application or purchase a vended application, we opted to try WordPress. Other project requirements included the ability to output structured data (XML), so the system could be used to "push" current status alerts to other external and intranet sites; Active Directory integration, so we could use security groups to limit posting access; automatic e-mail alerts sent to individuals or mailing lists, according to category; custom fields for event severity and current status (active/resolved); and several other functions. WordPress was not a perfect fit, but it was able to bring us close enough to the primary project goals that we could develop the rest on our own.

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Presenting information for alumni poses a significant challenge: alumni are widely diverse in geography, age, and interests, and the information and services we provide for them are similarly diverse. How can we direct each alumni visitor to the appropriate content without forcing them to choose among a huge bucket of options? As part of a recent redesign of the alumni-oriented parts of our site, Carleton College's Web team developed a strategy of progressive personalization, which addresses this problem by providing a customized experience across the full spectrum from anonymous visitor to logged-in, fully known individual. Come see how it works and learn how we pulled it off.

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This is a time of immense budget pressure. It is also a time of more and more buzz around new technologies, social media, the cloud, and many others that affect the use and implementation of web systems. Clearly, the college website is mission critical to the success of any institution. How can we make its management cost effective and innovative at a time like this? It is often said that the best way to learn is by doing. Utah Valley University (UVU) has gone through implementation of four completely difference CMS solutions in the past nine years. They have definitely learned by doing! Come learn how a Web content management system (CMS) utilizing a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model in the cloud has helped UVU control its hardware expenditures, reduce the man-hours associated with site deployment and maintenance, and improve website speed and performance. Learn about the questions asked; the lessons learned; and the pitfalls to avoid in choosing, implementing, and supporting a CMS solution. Finally, discuss whether a SaaS CMS would benefit your institution too.

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Even though the specification is still being written, HTML5 can be implemented for your website today. In this workshop presented by Christopher Schmitt focused on real world solutions, attendees will learn about the new HTML elements and their semantics, HTML5 form elements, incorporate audio and video without Flash, new JavaScript API like geolocation, and more.

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A website in an academic environment is a project in constant production with stakeholders that range from front-desk staff to the dean. How do you move gracefully across layers of leadership to redesign a college site in order to present a new and cohesive Web experience to your students and the public? Learn what the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota did to make this a success. By focusing on people first, a workflow was developed that built on the existing responsibilities of staff in each unit. With roles established, a new website and the technology to build and maintain it quickly came together. With people working collaboratively, traditionally tricky issues such as implementing new software, political buy-in for new visual designs ,and setting priorities were implemented with ease. This two-part presentation starts with the college's Chief of Operations who will discuss how the college tackled such issues as Web ownership; Web control; and relationships between the university, college, and college academic units. The second part of the presentation features the college's Web and Multimedia Lead. who will share how he developed trust across units to build a peer-group of Web editors. Putting the core college site last, this investment in people allowed the centralized Web services of the college to function in an open and collaborative way. When at last it was time to rebuild the core college site, it was done with input from every academic unit. The result? A brand new site with complete support and ownership from the college community.

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Many colleges and universities have begun using video to tell their stories. While the narrative approach is a natural way to communicate, it doesn't mean much to organization leaders if there's no a return on their investment. To make a big impact in the minds and hearts of our leaders, we simply have to tie video to our strategic plans. What do you want to accomplish with video? We'll take you through the process of deciding if video is the right tool to meet your needs. Next, we'll discuss whether or not you actually want to make your own picture show, or if you should bring in a professional team. Then, through our case study, we'll talk about how one small school took on in-house video production and impacted recruiting in a big way. Whether you want to recruit more students, bring in more donations, or recruit more volunteers, this session will impact your bottom line positively. You will leave with a plan for using video to meet your goals and a timeline for achieving them.

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After several years working for colleges in one capacity or another, one year ago I defected and joined the ranks of higher ed vendors. It's the same industry, but a whole new world...and it's been a wild ride. This presentation will be a brutally honest recap about what I’ve learned along the way about managing people, projects, and expectations. It will discuss new ways of thinking about working with those around you (building trust, active listening, and utilizing negotiating tactics) and managing all of the projects on your plate at any given moment, from defining scope and requirements to predicting (and handling) roadblocks. Finally, if you're thinking about making the jump to the other side of the fence, this presentation will show you how to get noticed, what to think about before accepting that job offer, and advice about how to acclimate after you do.

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Our users have evolved: they no longer settle for a simple, one-way street of data entry. They want Web forms that interact and understand. Technology has also evolved: the increasing adoption of mobile devices introduces new challenges in form design, and the emergence of HTML5 provides new techniques for increasing usability. As users demand a better experience and technology becomes more sophisticated, evolution of form design requires these interactions to become creative, perceptive, and more human. This presentation will discuss the evolution of form design by showing techniques and real-world examples that improve user interaction with Web forms. Emphasis will be placed on best practices to consider based on past research and case studies. Learn how to leverage HTML/CSS markup to create forms that are accessible, semantic, and flexible for various styling options. Finally, we’ll look to the future by discussing what mobile devices and HTML5 have in store for Web forms.

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"We are controlling transmission... We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear." <em>(The Outer Limits, 1963-1965 and 1995-2002)</em> What happens when traditional media sensibilities are brought to social media? What can we learn from our experiences? Participate in a discussion of several case studies of social media failures and successes in higher ed, including: a giant traveling cut-out squirrel, a rivalry between the official newspaper and crowdsourced news site, a facebook admin's flame war with fans, and more!

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Academic websites are a key component of the recruitment process. We know our future students (and their parents) are looking at these websites when choosing a college or university. So, why do these sites often fail to make the grade? The presentation will share how Missouri State University was able to systematically address our academic websites by gathering support, obtaining funding, and developing a workflow that involved both content and marketing experts. We'll also share templates that helped structure the content gathering and design process, making it easier and faster to obtain great results.

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What good is a map that you can zoom, click, stretch and interact with if you can't take it with you? You know where the lecture hall is, but how do you get there on your bike? Let's ask the visitor in the parking lot how cool your map is when they are trying to find the admissions office. Maps are now used everywhere and growing in popularity. Can your map keep up? This session explores how to use the new Google Maps V3 API to make all your map dreams come true -- including the one where you're the campus hero for the stellar new iPhone/Android application. One map that just works everywhere. Based on experiences with the <a href="http://www.missouristate.edu/map/">Missouri State Map</a>.

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* How can you convince your boss you deserve to be paid more? * What's the best way to organize a Web department? * How do you motivate Web workers in a higher ed environment? * How do you say no (or "yes, but...")? * What's the worst problem with the Web in higher ed? * Should sub-sites have common, branded templates or unique designs? * How do you win arguments with faculty members? * How can you move from reactive to proactive projects? We'll tackle these questions and more in a brutally honest panel discussion featuring Nick Denardis (Wayne State University), and Matt Herzberger (Florida International University) and moderated by Chas Grundy (University of Notre Dame).

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Higher ed has a problem with its websites. Many of us are past that first big hump of "The Millennial Redesign." We've plopped down money on a shiny new CMS. Our design is hip and groovy. But an issue snuck in when we weren't looking. Centerpieces have become a staple component of the ever important home page. The problem is that they have homogenized us. We're all doing it, and we're all doing it the same. This presentation will look at a number of sites and their centerpieces, look at common themes, address why our current trend is a problem, and make suggestions as to where we can go and what we can do to stand out and differentiate ourselves.

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Mobile tagging (QRcodes, Data Matrix, etc.) is the process of reading a 2D barcode using a mobile device camera. By allowing the encryption of URLs in the barcodes, mobile tagging can add a digital or online layer to any physical (offline) object, functioning like a gateway from the physical to the digital online world. Since mobile tags are simple tags that can be placed on virtually any physical thing or person, and since cell phones with cameras have become a very inexpensive and pervasive device, the mobile tagging process is one of the easiest and simplest ways of creating mixed realities between on- and off-line realms, especially augmented reality. The use of mobile tagging is endless, ranging from expanding the information on packages, bus stop routes, museum objects, personal identification, to applications in art and education. The presentation will a) introduce the concepts of mobile tagging and mixed realities/augmented realities; b) present the use of mobile tagging as a tool for augmented reality c) teach how to create and use the tags (QRcodes and Data Matrix); d) show real cases of use.

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As institutions of higher education migrate to Web-based course management software (CMS), the weaknesses of these first-generation tools become apparent. Most CMS's are often multi-layered, poorly organized and difficult for students to navigate. When students and professors become more tech-savvy, more is demanded from these Web-based tools. One alternative to the CMS is social networking site Ning. Librarians serving as adjunct faculty in the Armstrong Interactive Media Studies department discuss their use of Ning for course management. Offering multiple levels of Web 2.0 functionality, Ning allows users to actively engage and participate in course content. Informal feedback from students supports instructor assumptions regarding the ease of use, personalization, and collaborative nature of the tool. Instructors found Ning enhances communication with and among students and serves as a hub for all multimedia projects. This presentation will demonstrate how instructors engaged students utilizing tools such as Twitter, RSS feeds, API capability, blogs, and podcasts via Ning.

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Higher education websites always have a steady supply of visitors. It's great to see the numbers in Google Analyics fluctuate each day and trend upwards over time, but are your visitors finding what they came for? This talk is a high-level-to-in-depth look at tracking what visitors are searching for in real time from your site. We'll go beyond the consolidated "popular keywords" list to an actual trend list with grouped phases and pages. The goal is peer into the visitor's mind and figure out why they are searching for "address" on the Contact Us page or "Professor Smith" on the Faculty Information page. Higher education websites always struggle to accommodate two audiences, internal and external. Search results based on location don't lie, it's easy to combine real internal searches with reasons why quicklinks and extra menus may or may not be functioning as optimally as they should. It's time to go beyond pageviews and user paths and look at real-time search analytics.

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Last March, after two years of research and development that involved people from all over campus, we finally launched our new homepage… and stepped behind the ‘green door’ into a new world of managing our university’s Web presence. Because we radically refocused the purpose and message of our homepage, instituted a new Web governance structure, adopted a new HTML framework, and implemented a new Web content management system, we find ourselves in a radically different Web world. A world where departments that never really communicated before have to work together on a daily basis to keep the homepage up to date and working. A world where we have no choice but to share technical resources across units, not only to implement our new Web presence, but to manage and expand it. Some of us saw this coming, when we assembled a design team from disparate parts of the university to build the new homepage. Some thought things would go back the way they were before, once the homepage went live. But the reality is that we have no choice now but to work in different ways and work together in new ways. This presentation will examine how our redesign has affected our approach to Web management, changed our organizational structures, and forced new ways of thinking, learning and cooperating across departmental lines (not only our ‘Web team’, but also on our public relations and IT management). In addition, this presentation will outline both pitfalls and best practices for planning for, managing, and dealing with these fundamental changes in how your campus may have do business after the launch of a redesign. There may be lolcats.

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Content is why people visit your website. Period. So why is quality content so easily discounted? Why do we neglect this critical website element that we rely on to attract, inform, engage, and retain site visitors? Answer: content is massive, political, and time-consuming. A college website contains thousands of pages with limited content contributors, editors, and managers, all with different perspectives and priorities. Web content strategy is an essential discipline that author Kristina Halvorson defines as "the practice of planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content." In this session, learn how to implement and maintain effective content that drives marketing, engages users, and increases website conversions.

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In 2009, Oregon State University launched a national campaign called "Powered by Orange." With a languishing economy and dwindling advertising budget, we were tasked with raising awareness about OSU and its impact on our region, and in the world. And we were asked to do this with a reduced budget. poweredbyorange.com was born, and it became the cornerstone of a multifaceted, award-winning campaign. For the first time, television advertising was abandoned and social media was embraced. Instead of buying TV air time, we hired a social media specialist. Instead of working with an external agency, we did all of the creative work in house. Heavily driven by social networks and Web tactics, the campaign also had comparable efforts in print, live events, and media relations. We did a lot of experimentation along the way. And in the process, we learned quite a few lessons. First, every virtual component needs a physical-world counterpart, for reasons ranging from mobilizing your internal ambassadors to energizing content contributors who eventually engage with you online. We also learned a lot about creating internal buy-in and alignment, to taking advantage of chance occurrences, ongoing efforts and peripheral happenings to advance our campaign. Powered by Orange is a Web-driven campaign with real-world connections. More than a year into the effort, we're still moving forward with new successes (and plenty of failures), and gathering some recognition and awards along the way.

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How do we design community-based websites that provide incentive for participation and involvement? In this top presentation from BoilerWeb 2010, we'll<br />explore different patterns of reputation used in Web applications and the methods behind their design. We'll identify technical characteristics associated with each pattern, outline uses in existing communities, and highlight examples of effective and ineffective implementations. Whether it’s a collaborative reviews community like Yelp, a cordial question/answer education community, or competitive game, reputation models are one of the driving factors behind user interaction. Some of the reputation patterns to be discussed include numbered levels, collective achievements, points, leaderboards, and labels. Interaction models include combative, competitive, cordial, collaborative, and caring, each encompassing a different spectrum of appropriate patterns. By creating an understanding of the visual patterns and models for their inclusion, a reputation system can be constructed to align user incentives with site goals. Social communities are no longer a niche subset of existing websites; they are a core component of our online behavior and pose several new questions we can ask ourselves before designing our own.

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On November 4, 2008 the nation elected the 44th president. That evening on CNN, the network revealed their new hologram technology. Funny thing is that it is NOT a hologram! it was a demonstration of augmented reality. Learn how it works, see examples of how to utilize this technology for communication, and get samples to do your own experimenting.

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As our mothers sign-up for Twitter accounts and listen to Pandora on their iPhones, we should take notice of the new prospects pop culture has made available for promoting our projects. Microsites provide unique opportunities to engage new audiences, extend our brands, and attract media attention. Because they can assume a life all their own, microsites are fun to develop, allowing for the ultimate in creative freedom. This presentation will explore several examples in which microsites were used as a key element in promoting strategic university initiatives. Practical techniques for developing creative new ideas, preparing for media coverage, and establishing metrics for impact will also be discussed. This session is intended for people with an interest in venturing away from typical development tasks. After all, how often do we get to take projects completely over the top?

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The millennial generation has arrived. Technology is just another part of their environment. They don't use the Web to view websites, they use it to communicate with friends. They completely distrust traditional marketing approaches and instead will turn to their friends for advice. Higher education's approach to the Web must evolve to meet new expectations and take advantage of new opportunities. This presentation will focus on the intersection of emerging technology and the millennial generation, and the impact on college campuses. It will include a review of the latest research and trends on millennials with an emphasis on their use of technology and the impact on recruitment and retention in higher education.

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This admission cycle, we decided to implement a full-fledged social network as part of our prospective student portal, myIthaca. Not only were we amazed by the popularity of allowing accepted students to meet each other, but even more so that participation in the social network became the strongest instrument we had for predicting our incoming class. This presentation will talk about how we integrated an off-the-shelf social networking platform into our portal, how we gathered data for predictive modeling, and how we involved members of the campus community in the yield process. We will also look briefly at our plans for keeping the newly formed community intact by extending the social network into our portal for current faculty, staff, and students.

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Web analytics has the reputation of only being useful in a commercial context, but there is much it can offer institutes of higher education. It can help optimize marketing efforts, help you measure and improve the usability of your site, and help you create a more engaging user experience. In this session we will cover analytics basics, present a few case studies of evidence-based decision making from analytics data, and then focus on Google Analytics as an analytics tool.

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Stony Brook University will share the best practices and lessons learned from its recent project to create an online student course catalog. The automation project?s goal was to go green and reduce expenses related to the printed undergraduate bulletin - a 500-page publication that is almost always out of date by the time of distribution. Now, with an online version of the catalog maintained using the OmniUpdate Web content management system, the catalog can be updated and managed easily, and uses XML to take course information directly from the university's database. During this session, Stony Brook will review the reasons behind the project, give a technical overview, demonstrate the online application, and discuss the university?s next-step development plans.

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Higher education has great enterprise services, but these services exist to students, faculty and staff as fragmented functionality. UW-Milwaukee has applied various Web services that fuse and leverage existing enterprise solutions. This presentation will use real-world examples to establish what problems Web services can solve and how. Demonstrations and code examples integrating Zimbra with ColdFusion and LDAP will be shown, but the concepts, methodology, and best practices are applicable to any language and any enterprise service with an API.

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Beautiful photography is a powerful way to engage visitors on any website. Great photos are even more compelling in higher education; they give prospective students a sense of place and link alumni to their past. Unfortunately, many Web editors aren?t familiar with the tools that can transform ho-hum images into eye-popping pictures. Using Adobe Photoshop and examples from the William and Mary website, this session will explore techniques for color correcting and enhancing photographs for the Web. With a special emphasis on Adobe?s Camera Raw, file compression and the magic of meta-data, this workshop is ideal for those with only a beginner?s understanding of Photoshop. Instead of delving into abstract technicalities, this session will be task-centric. We?ll take a common problem, such as I want to intensify the sky and clouds in this photo or I?d like to lay text over this photo and explore the tools and techniques that will accomplish that goal.

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The decision has come from top administrators - we'd like to highlight specific academic programs through the use of integrated websites and print materials; we'd like to influence high school seniors and increase enrollment; and we're not sure what all of this means, but you have a month to figure it out. Such a challenge was given to Xavier's Web services, marketing, and enrollment teams. We will share the successes and challenges of three separate offices from three separate divisions coming together for a common project. What resulted was a coordinated marketing and communication effort that integrated Web, print, email, and video. As Xavier University anticipates its largest freshman class in history, we will share the details of a specific integrated marketing campaign that yielded measurable results: website visitors, actual visitors to campus, and increased enrollment in the targeted academic programs.

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Twitter represents a new way for colleges and universities to connect with their students. Approaches to higher education Twitter accounts vary in their purpose and audience. New Mexico State University?s Division of Student Success (DSS) focuses on using Twitter as a support channel where students can find timely information, ask questions, and connect to campus resources. This approach led to the development of a Twitter team made up of both students and staff that can serve as a beneficial model for others. In practice, the NMSU Twitter team effort continues to evolve into a wider network with families, alumni, and prospective students. In this presentation, members of the team will share how the seemingly simple idea of using Twitter to support students required us to assemble and manage a team, develop a presence, institute and examine practices, integrate tools, and include administrators in the process.

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What does it take to start a Web office? We are here to tell you the good, the bad, and otherwise. Since the Web is such a hybrid field it can be challenging to find your perfect home. Most choose IT, marketing or strike out on their own. We?ll give you tips for partnerships, things to watch out for when starting a Web office, goals, getting buy-in, and developing policies and guidelines.

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The Princeton University Office of Information Technology (OIT) provides centralized Web hosting and development services to the entire university community. Our model for providing this centralized service has been very successful and challenging at the same time. This talk will discuss the services we provide to the university community, the collaboration required within OIT to ensure the success of the service, the challenges we are facing, and some of the solutions we are developing to address those challenges.

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Prospective students are one of the key audiences for your school's website, but they are also the hardest audience to understand. How do you engage a population that by definition is constantly changing? And how do you move beyond just dispensing information to involving and inspiring prospective students? Carleton College's Web team recently completed a full reimagining of our admissions site that grappled with these questions. This presentation will explore that process. We'll cover our research with prospects and what they did and didn't like about our website and those of our peer institutions; our concept development and testing process; the multiple levels on which we engaged our admissions staff to assist with content development; our wireframing and visual design process; the technical framework that allowed us to implement our new concept in about a month; and lots of geeky post-launch stats that suggest we're on the right track.

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You've integrated technology into your marketing plan, but can you tell if it's working? Now more than ever, it's important to continually monitor your online marketing strategies to ensure they are optimized for success. This presentation will teach you how to develop your online marketing strategies in a way that allows you to measure their success, and we will walk through real world examples of calculating the return on investment of your online efforts. This presentation is about giving the audience practical, applicable information that they can take back to their institutions and start using immediately.

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Maintaining accurate, relevant, and timely (ART) content on your institution's website can be a challenge, especially when you have multiple content contributors with varying skills. At Widener University, we created six, two-hour professional development classes that provided the basics of HTML, Web graphics, writing for the Web, content management systems, and more. Campus participation included faculty, administrative, and office staff. Challenges included low to average IT and computer skills and a lack of general understanding about the Internet and the Web. Positive outcomes included a well-defined skill set and better understanding of the Internet/web that could be put to immediate or future use.

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Stanford University's School of Humanities and Sciences recently completed a two-year Web development project, rolling out three new academic websites. These department sites help lay a foundation in our school for bringing together traditional university academics and the social Web. Our community services platform infuses all the usual departmental information with fresh dynamic content, self-managed personal profiles, blogs, groups, discussion boards, messaging, internal and external event calendaring, multimedia imagery, login/accounts, and much more. Powering the front-end is a specialized Web-based CMS application, developed in conjunction with our vendor partner, that aims to decentralize site management for the department staffs. Will online social collaboration and academics live in peace? Come see our new sites in action and catch a glimpse into the underlying story that's still being written, sometimes without a table of contents!

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Web projects are especially fun to manage as they embody the true meaning of Agile Extreme development with a mix of people that have borderline behavioral disorders: Web designers, developers, clients, marketing people, writers, etc. To get things done properly, on time, and on budget requires adopting some form of project management. This session will offer up some strategies for managing Web projects in a higher ed environment.

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We made our foray into YouTube in early 2007, a time when YouTube was still largely experimenting with its higher education component. With the backing of the university president, we developed our channel with two broad goals in mind: to promote Texas Tech research and help boost recruitment. Our office broke away from the typical look of an academic website and gave the channel a cutting-edge look, inviting one of our design communication professors, who has an international cult following for his concert poster designs, to create our wallpapers and banners. Since launching the channel, we have partnered with students, faculty, alumni and university supporters to create content for our channel. This has resulted in some content that we don?t have the time to produce ourselves while also providing fresh sets of ideas and viewpoints.

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Duke University's campus, financial, and academic services are available on the Web through the different organizations that run those services. Users, however, don't know or care who owns a specific service, only how to obtain it. By offering up the services by service type, a major shift has occurred in how Web visitors locate the services they need. The two-year project led to the launch of over 20 different, yet connected, Services and Administration sites. These sites - with a consistent graphic look and feel, navigational placement, and Duke branding - run the gambit from Parking and Dining to IT and Security. This session will go over the specific challenges of bringing these groups together, developing a consistent informational tone, and actually building this many different sites (and wrangling content/content/content).

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As Web professionals, every day we use software that implements the HTTP protocol. Usually, the details of HTTP are hidden from our view: browsers, servers, programmers, and system administrators make it so the average user thinks http is simply a 4 letter symbol that goes at the beginning of a link. However, to a Web programmer or even Web designer in these days of client side XMLHTTPRequest scripting, knowledge of the details of how HTTP messages are constructed and interpreted can be useful. This session provides an introduction to the basics of HTTP including its concept of requests and responses, agents, error signaling and cache control, character sets, and media types. We'll cover techniques to inspect HTTP transmissions on-the-wire to help troubleshoot and debug your applications. We'll cover tips on how to speed up your website and applications by interpreting the contents of the communications between browsers and servers.

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When it comes to building or redesigning a website, everyone has an opinion. By conducting usability testing of your websites, you and others around you can temper those opinions and sometimes superheated emotions with data about how people actually use the site. By conducting Web usability of our own we were able to learn how potential site visitors interact with our site, witnessing first hand their successes and frustrations. Our usability testing took a number of forms, such as asking volunteers to perform tasks on our site while recording what we observed; distributing an online survey to our site visitor base; and asking volunteers to perform a card sort to organize site content into a limited number of meaningful categories. Not only did these strategies help us to better understand how visitors interacted with the site, but they also provided others in our organization the ability to make rational decisions.

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Reaching your audience today takes ingenuity and creativity. With audiences turning their attention to the Internet and away from TV, newspapers, and radio, universities need to get innovative in how they reach their audience. In this session we'll discuss how a promotional video to publicize a campus-wide festival went viral. Initially, the video was shared within the university and via Facebook. Before long, the video was posted on popular international design inspiration site NotCot.org and the blog of musician/record producer Mark Hoppus of Blink-182. Those two blog posts alone led to almost 30,000 views from around the world in a single day. More recently the video has been featured on Digg and Gizmodo.com. During the video?s first three weeks of release, the video received more than 120,000 unique views on video sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo. The video has become an example of how new media can be used to reach international audiences who help spread the word and pass it along, creating a powerful social impact.

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Does your institution often mistake its current marketing campaign for a brand? Does your institution?s leadership assume that the school colors are the brand, rather than just components of it? This session will focus on some different ways of thinking about and evaluating your institution?s brand, and will focus on some successful brands in higher education, including examples from larger institutions and smaller institutions, as well as some thoughts on how new technology such as social networking fits into branding.

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The University of Waterloo has the largest co-op program in the world. When we want to do something big on the Web, we hire a student, set the parameters, speak to them in their language, and are always astounded by the results. This presentation will cover strategies for getting the most out of your Millennials on the Web. We will look at case histories for some of our Web-based initiatives including our home-grown CMS, online forum, chats, Bayesian comment analysis, poster design, website usability, online video production, and virtual tour. We will also be sure to bring our fair share of the horror stories and jaw-dropping amazing adventures of our Millennials.

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Now more then ever it's important to listen to the conversation that is happening about you and your competitors online. Hearing what people have to say can help you with your social media strategy, website enhancements, and marketing initiatives. During this session I'll give you 10 reasons why you should listen, demonstrate different social media monitoring tools that you can use to listen to the conversation, and explore ways to measure the conversation.

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As you may have heard, video is the new Web. But getting started making original videos can be daunting, especially if you feel as if you have no experience, few resources, and little time. This session will meet you where you are. It?s hardly film school in a box, but it will orient you to key steps as you start making Web video. If you suspect you ought to get into video but don?t know how to start, or if you're looking to supplement professionally produced marketing videos with homemade, YouTube-style videos, this session is for you. We will discuss the whole life cycle of a short video, from pre-production brainstorming to post-launch promotion.

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Rolling out an online brand is more than the university marketing team sitting in a room deciding on colors and fonts. Branding starts with research and planning, and centers on institutional collaboration. Using the right communication tactics and involving the campus community in brand development builds the grass roots-level support that is critical during the brand roll-out. This session will outline a case study on a successful, cost-effective online brand roll-out, and is especially relevant for those in Web, communications and marketing roles.

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Every university has maps - campus maps, construction maps, parking maps, special event or service maps. When everyone uses different maps, this creates consistency issues and duplication of time and effort. Not to mention that finding the right map can be frustrating for your visitors. This session will outline a work-flow and framework for succeeding in building an interactive map platform that works for you.

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Facebook and Twitter - they're just for fun and socializing, right? Not any more. Online social networks, when used intentionally and effectively, can be powerful community-nurturing tools for educational projects and events. And while there can be modest costs associated with some of these tools and services, much of it is free and simply requires you to invest time and patience to get tangible results. This session will focus on social networking best practices, case studies, and examples of impressive ROI, all of which will demonstrate that social networking use has matured beyond fun and socializing. Social networking tools can be an integral part of enhancing higher education communications, professional networking, media relations, and community-building.

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We have all done the same old press releases: insert headline, byline, body. What we will explore in this session is how to, as Emeril would say, "Kick it up a notch." We will talk about how to create a press release that will draw in users and address the changing needs of the end consumer and increasing ease of use for the media. It?s important for us to adjust our message format and delivery to respond to the needs of today?s Web-savvy audience. In the presentation we will explore the use of images, video, tagging, RSS, social bookmarking, Technorati, and other tools to create a release that will be more engaging and useful to a broader range of users.

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The WVU Office of Information Technology has been working to implement WordPress Multiuser as a content management system. We are transitioning from a static HTML-driven website using Dreamweaver and Contribute. Currently we have about 18 content managers and have been looking for a more integrated approach to managing content, design, and user access. This session will describe why we chose to take a chance on WordPress MU over other Web content management systems and what we?ve learned from the process.

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Everything in college recruiting is changing. The forces of change range from the social Web to the need for authenticity to shifting student demographics to the increasing role of parents -- and now the economy. It's time for a revolution in how we recruit students. We have to use the communication tools that students prefer, which means becoming comfortable with social media. We have to be willing to give up some control of the message, which involves letting students see the real institution, blemishes and all. We have to see ourselves as sales people. This session will provide specific ideas as well as motivation for pursuing the changes necessary to succeed in an increasingly challenging environment. These ideas will include how to become more efficient, focus on core competencies, better manage outsourcing, retain key employees, redistribute budget dollars, enhance your leadership skills, and become more of a visionary.

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Conducting usability research can be challenging ? even with multiple team members. But how do get the job done if your Web team consists of just one person? In 2008, the College of Arts and Sciences Web Team at the University at Buffalo was streamlined to one employee. Performing usability research along with regular web projects for 30+ departments and programs seemed nearly impossible. Learn how this web team of one managed to beat the odds. In this time of shrinking budgets, this session presents useful ideas and efficient techniques to perform usability research with one-person Web teams.

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Cross-site scripting (also referred to as XSS) is still the number one form of Web attack. From government websites to Google and Apple, it seems that no one is immune. In my presentation, we?ll explore what cross-site scripting is, how an attack occurs, and demonstrate a live exploit. We?ll then discuss why cross-site scripting can be damaging for a website, and we?ll look at methods one can use to prevent a cross-site scripting attack.

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and Facebook and YouTube, etc. Perhaps you've dabbled in social media personally and have some ideas on how your institution might participate. Or perhaps you've read about the impact of social sites and worry about being left behind. But how do you convince your boss that something called "Twitter" is a worthwhile investment of your time? This session will cover both strategies and specifics to help you demonstrate to your boss, your VP, or your board the value of social media.

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CSU, Chico is in the middle of redesigning our home page. In our case, this process has been as much about defining who we are as a university and discovering the unique voice of our campus as it has been about creating designs and wireframes. It has been a messy and occasionally frustrating process. In this session, I'll provide an overview of what we've learned in our redesign process: things that have worked amazingly well, as well as those that were doomed from the start. But through the entire process has run a thread about how, by bringing all these voices together, we have begun to bridge communication gaps that had never before been breached on campus. About how, faced with this large undertaking involving units and personnel from all across campus, staff and administrators have had to begin to think outside their silos. About how a new voice of the university is emerging. And about how it could all still end in tears.

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Whether an institution has the ability to undertake a complete Web site redesign or not, editing the content found within the site can increase the site?s usability as well as create a positive user experience. We will look at best practices regarding content usability and how to apply it. Content revision may not solve all usability issues of a site, but it may be a good place to start for those institutions that are unable to address all three areas of usability: content, information architecture, and design. During our session, volunteers can have pages within their existing sites assessed. As a group, we can apply the information presented to discuss possible edits to increase usability.

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The people directory on most college websites still works on the online phonebook model and hasn't changed much in ten years. Web 2.0 has given us folksonomies; it's time that we used them to better connect the students. This session will cover the Red Rover project, currently running on 15 college campuses. With Facebook Connect, OAuth, and Google Connect, students can attach their preferred social network to the school directory. This mashup creates a rich profile for increased searchability within the educational context. The combination of various online tools, including blogs, Twitter, and delicious, can create streams of student created content. Whole new worlds of live assessment open up when we allow the students to combine their preferred Web tools and networks with the school Web presence.

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Back in the day, if you worked in a university public relations office, you spent a good deal of your time writing news releases about the great things your school was up to, and then distributing those releases - in envelopes, with stamps! - to reporters. So what happens now that the humble news release has broken out of its envelope to live a long and full life online? If you are struggling to find your feet in the world of Stumbleupon, Digg, Slashdot, and the blogosphere, this session will help, with real examples of successes - and cautionary tales.

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What we will explore in this session is how to, as Emeril would say, Kick it up a notch. We will talk about how to create a press release that will draw in users and address the changing needs of the end consumer and increasing ease of use for the media. It is important for us to adjust our message format and delivery to respond to the needs of today?s Web-savvy audience. In the presentation we will explore the use of images, video, tagging, RSS, social bookmarking, Technorati, and other tools to create a release that will be more engaging and useful to a broader range of users.

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Sure, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical for higher education websites, but how do you hit this moving target? We will take a look beyond META tags to see how Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has evolved. There's a great deal of information about SEO, but much of it is written for organizations with a fundamentally different mission than ours. So, we will place extra emphasis on the unique needs of higher education SEM. Since we all learn through cause and effect, we will take a look at how relatively simple site editing measures have changed Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Other points covered: "King Content" rules the SEO kingdom; organic vs. pay-per-click; keyword strategy and tools; what is a higher ed conversion; current weight of search engine ranking factors.

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WAVE is a free tool that can be used to help evaluate how accessible a page is for users with disabilities. Instead of creating a text-based report of accessibility errors or alerts, a WAVE report displays the original Web page with embedded icons and indicators that reveal the accessibility information within a page. WAVE has been available since 2000 and is currently used to evaluate nearly one million web pages each year. Recent updates to WAVE have made it more powerful in evaluating complex, dynamic Web content, including Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). This session will outline how to use WAVE as part of an accessibility methodology. This methodology allows thorough and accurate determination of the true accessibility of Web content.

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Adobe AIR is a runtime environment for rich internet applications that can be deployed on the desktop. AIR applications run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and are a hybrid between Web-based applications that run in a Web browser, and traditional desktop applications. Developers create AIR applications using existing Web technologies such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, Flash or Flex. AIR then packages the application in such a way that allows it to run on the desktop. In this presentation, we will discuss: 1. the anatomy of a simple Adobe AIR application; 2. strengths and limitations of AIR; and 3. how AIR can be used with HTML and Ajax.

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In recent years, the Office of Communications and Marketing at IUPUI has won numerous awards for its electronic media, especially related to podcasting. Why? IUPUI's approach is different. With just one full-time staffer, the department produces over 100 videos each year, distributed via the Web, podcasts, sites such as Youtube and Facebook, digital signage, campus cable, and traditional broadcast. This high-volume approach keeps audiences engaged with fresh content and allows the department to simply tell more stories. Discover IUPUI's model for video communication, including workflow, staffing, and funding, and how it all fits with other communications.

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As more users rely on the custom Web applications built at our institutions, testing and development strategies need to evolve to professionalize the software development to ensure the robustness of the applications. Test-driven development is a software design philosophy that emphasizes writing tests and implementing software to meet those tests. The foundation of this development philosophy surrounds writing tests for the fundamental pieces of the application, before the code for the application is written. This ensures that all features are accounted for before hand, and can lead to better understanding of the client & software requirements. This presentation will introduce the concepts of test-driven development, inform the audience of the benefits and drawbacks of this approach, and emphasize how testing can create more robust applications. Specifically, the talk will focus on unit testing for the underlying code, as well as functional browser-based testing for Web applications. I will introduce unit testing frameworks for major Web languages, as well as automating functional browser-based testing using Selenium.

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This is a live demonstration of WordPress installation and setup. The first half will cover the basics of installing the software, adding users, and installing themes and plugins. The second half will dig into the various user roles and how themes work, with an eye to using WordPress as a CMS rather than a simple blog.

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Years before Web 2.0, four visionary men proclaimed that "a powerful global conversation has begun." "The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual" stated that technology-enabled conversations among and between markets and workers would quash command-and-control hierarchy, mass market advertising and uninspiring corporate rhetoric. On the Internet, people in markets and communities could share knowledge and stories directly with each other ? in authentic human voices ? and by doing so, would get smarter faster than companies. In higher education, our markets and communities are among the most connected and comfortable with the Web 2.0 world. In this presentation attendees will discuss strategies, successes, risks, tools and steps towards changing organizational culture and adopting new communications models that will allow us to engage effectively with our markets.

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Across colleges and large universities everywhere, budgets are tightening and expectations are soaring to meet the demand of Generation Y and above. It's time to get our heads out of the clouds and start taming the cloud - the Web 2.0 cloud. With the recent advent of Google App Engine, Adobe AIR, and Amazon's S3, Web applications are going portable, and so is the data. No longer shackled to home-brew code and developers, users are flocking to the Web for applications, information, and communication. This presentation will demonstrate illustrate the tools and resources available to help university developers to tap into the 'cloud' - from file storage, office productivity, online conferences, to social network integration. Use the Flickr API to integrate with news release engine or slideshows on your site, the YouTube API to create a "youUniversity" channel on your site, or the Twitter API to start conversation.

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This presentation explores the multi-user virtual environment Second Life and the power of avatars as vehicles of personal expression and learning community identity. We will review a general overview of Oregon Community College Distance Learning Association's Second Life efforts - the necessary steps to generate and support a multi-institution pilot in Second Life. Questions presented include: What is Second Life? What is embodiment, and how do we embody through avatars? How does avatar expression support community? What do we know about community and best practices for education at a distance? How do we generate and support community at a distance through Second Life?

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By using a CMS, Princeton has increased the number of sites for which the IT organization provides operational support from a few to almost 200. This presentation will discuss some of the reasons we believe we have been so succesful, the challenges we are still facing to provide service approaching the mythical "100% uptime", and how this success plays into our planning for a major disaster scenario.

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This presentation is a case study of Ithaca College Human Resources' move from static pages to a home-grown content management system to a commercial CMS.

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In today?s world, emergencies can happen because of things like natural disasters (Hurricane Katrina), school shootings (Virginia Tech and NIU), or even terrorist attacks (9/11). Colleges and universities has spent hundreds of hours writing plans and going through exercises to prepare for these types of events, but do those plans include using the website for crisis communication? This session will show you how easy it is to leverage the power of free Web 2.0 technologies to create an emergency website that can been used even when you have no power or Internet access. Learn how the University of Wisconsin ? Green Bay, using free Blogger and Jott accounts, has set up the site emergency.uwgb.edu, and how this site fits into the campus crisis communication plan.

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Ozarks Technical Community College (OTC) in Springfield, Missouri, enhances its community relations, recruiting and marketing efforts with routine integration of videos on the college?s website. The initiative began in August 2006 by frequently showcasing college events, programs, departments and employees. Current videos spotlight the institution?s fitness center, the first-ever theatre production and the announcement of a new education center for the region. In addition, a video newsletter is produced every month, and the president of the college also addresses the community by recording a video to discuss new endeavors and news of interest. The webcasting effort utilizes many departments to ensure its success. The entire scope of the program will be discussed: the initial monetary and staffing commitments, as well as the production scheduling and time budgeting. Also, the presentation will elaborate on the positive impact on the institution, from community relations, internal and external communication, recruiting, marketing, and enhancing the college?s image. Several colleges and universities produce videos and post videos on their institution?s websites. OTC?s webcasting takes the process to another level, by offering a visual media that is fresh, updated, and dynamic.

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In this followup session to HTTP 101, we look at the HTTP protocol as a transport for manipulating resources. We introduce the concept of RESTful Web service interfaces, and discuss how HTTP requests and responses can elegantly implement such interfaces. In this context, we discuss more advanced topics such as conditional, partial (byte-range) and non-idempotent requests, as well as touch on cache control mechanisms.

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Texas State University is a mid?sized public university serving 28,132 students. In 2003 it embarked on a project to implement a university-wide Web content management system. After three years the project was in shambles; only a dozen websites were using the system, potential customers were avoiding the CMS, the development team was highly stressed and the original project manager was off to greener pastures. Fast forward 18 months... Within six months a new CMS was in place and at the end of its first year of operation 120 university websites were live in the system and over 500 users had been trained. Customer satisfaction was very high and 95.9% of users surveyed said they would recommend the system to others. The team was less stressed (it?s still work, right?) and were very happy with a product that what was faster, easier to program, easier to teach, more reliable and much less expensive. We?ll present what went wrong and what went right so you can learn from our missteps and good ideas.

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Although humanity has used colors in an intensive way for only the last 100 years, colors are very important in our lives because they define actions and behaviors. Colors instigate physical and psychological reactions. They attract, warn, excite, calm, and convey many feelings. The way we use colors in a website contributes greatly to the way the users react and feel. The presentation will explore color psychodynamic effects and the use of colors on the Web through several real-case examples. 3-D color effects on the Web will also be discussed.

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We've all gotten them: a silly image with some electronic music wishing us a happy birthday or reminding us to "hang in there." E-Cards are a quick and popular way to let a friend know that you're thinking of them...and they can be a powerful tool to let prospective students know the same thing. In the past year, Southeast Missouri State University has developed institutional e-cards for the general public and targeted cards for its admissions counselors. These cards provide a visually attractive way for counselors to introduce themselves to prospective students and are a great way to "break the ice," as well as reinforce a positive brand image for the university. We will demonstrate how e-cards can be created with inexpensive and easy-to-use software, and be created with simple photo images or complicated embedded Flash clips.

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We will discuss and show the various Web services that Xavier University has created to increase productivity and reduce the stress within the Web office. Some tools include: A smart 404-error page that uses a single XML file to redirect the user and an anonymous 'report this broken link' button. The broken link reports are processed using a tool that allows the Web services team to manage broken link reports, and returns quantifiable statistics. A Web standards and style guide for Xavier University?s content management system. CSS styles for font sizes, colors, tables, and feature boxes are defined on a demo page for campus web updaters to reference. Web services request form for handling incoming Web design/development requests.

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When used properly, Web site interactivity can help you present information effectively and bolster your institution?s reputation as a technology leader. However, many higher education Web developers are too understaffed and overworked to devote large amounts of time to learning or implementing new technologies. The JQuery JavaScript library is an easy way for you to add functionality to your site. This presentation will show you how to begin using the JQuery library on your own website. Topics and examples will include: * an introduction to JQuery * selecting HTML elements (traversing the DOM) * creating a menu using the accordion plugin * inserting remote content with AJAX * where to find more information. Basic familiarity with HTML and CSS will be assumed. JavaScript programming experience is not necessary.

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St. Louis Community College deployed a new website that integrates all campus locations and provides a user-centric experience targeting many types of visitors and their individual needs. We identified user experiences, new content, navigation, website organization, image and branding, and the look and feel required to successfully provide a sense of uniqueness and connection. Learn about committees and personnel, goals, decisions, branding, best practices and the Web content management system and processes the college deployed. Learn about the things that we could have done better to make for a more successful transition.

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The heart of every university is its students, and the nature of recruiting these students has changed significantly in recent years as more students shift their focus from print communications to the Web. There are many opportunities for Web professionals to be involved in enrollment area, where key questions need to be addressed: What are current admission practices, and what can Web professionals do to help? This presentation will tie the processes and needs of admission offices to the work of Web professionals, sharing the approaches of Xavier's Web services team to provide support to the university's enrollment goals.

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Web development used to be simple: all you needed to know to develop a website were a handful of HTML tags and how they appeared in a couple of browsers. Today nothing is certain: the Web is being accessed on devices that didn?t exist a few years ago, and when you factor in JavaScript, platform incompatibilities, and the need to accommodate assistive technologies,it?s enough to make ever the best Web developer?s head spin. This session will look at how you can ensure that websites and applications can be used by the broadest segment of users possible. We?ll look at: problems common to many ?Web 2.0? websites, progressive enhancement techniques that add advanced features, and emerging standards, such as WAI-ARIA, aimed at improving the rich web application experience for users of assistive technology. Experience with JavaScript and server-side programming concepts are recommended.

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In this session, we will explore Web accessibility in higher education from three perspectives. We will discuss results from a recent Web accessibility survey, conducted by Access Technology Higher Education Network (ATHEN). The survey examines colleges and universities' policies and practices related to web accessibility. We will share current practices at the University of Washington, where improving Web accessibility has become a campus-wide cooperative effort. We will explore strategies for influencing the accessibility of vendors' Web-based products.

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As Seton Hall prepares to launch the Luminis portal on campus, there is much to consider and do. We find ourselves working on the entire spectrum of the launch - from justifying why we need another portal since we already have a well-oiled Blackboard portal in place, to mastering the technical underpinnings of Luminis, to preparing content for the portal in a wholly revolutionary manner all the way to getting word on the new portal out on campus. In addition, the campus also embarks on a shift in strategy for email and collaboration platforms as well as identity management solutions and we will discuss how the portal pilot launch sets the stage for these oncoming pilots.

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Corporate, government, and higher education institutions now create their own style guides to maintain their institutional identity or brand. These guides are typically a compendium of preferred grammatical usage regarding punctuation and spelling. However, there is little by way of ?best practice? for creating a style guide for a website. How is a Web style guide created, implemented, and maintained? Do rules and conventions for creating a style guide for print documents still apply? This poster session charts the principles, processes, and prototypes one needs in order to create a hybrid Web style guide for an academic institution. The poster covers usability and accessibility principles, successful work flow processes, and prototypes based on exemplary Web style guides.

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Authenticity: it's the new buzzword in marketing, and it's especially critical when attempting to recruit today's hype-averse students. The millennial generation wants to know the real you -- blemishes and all. That means being less of a control freak, learning to find and tell good stories, being comfortable with student-generated content, using tools like blogs and social networks more effectively, identifying the intangibles that differentiate you from your competitors, and other practices that help students decide if your school is truly the right fit for them. This session will show you how to add authenticity to everything you communicate online.

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Like it or not, social networking technologies have changed the Web game forever. MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube, blogs and other communication and social sharing systems have literally taken over the Web activities of your student audience. How does your current website measure up to their expectations? Your Web strategy, and your website, must evolve with the times or your institution?s marketing, branding and recruiting capability-and even your own job-may become marginalized. This is your wake-up call; it?s time to embrace the change! Come learn about some new, creative and cost-effective tools and solutions that can be quickly and easily implemented-and that will put you and your higher education website into the competitive driver's seat.

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Cross-site scripting (also referred to as XSS) is currently the number one form of Web attack. From Google to the websites of Obama and Clinton, it seems that no one is immune to attack. In this presentation we'll explore what cross-site scripting is and how an attack occurs, as well as demonstrate a live exploit. We'll then discuss why cross-site scripting can be damaging for a website, and we'll look at methods one can use to prevent a cross-site scripting attack.

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Solid analytics when interpreted correctly provide you with true information about site visitors and how they use your site. Analytics can be used for trend analysis, benchmark comparison, setting the direction for future development, and justifying spending on certain areas. Analytical data, when presented correctly, is something that administrators and decision makers can grasp and act on instead of hunches and speculation. Understanding what data is valuable and how to present it in a nontechnical manor can be a challenge, but it's worth the effort.

We will look at some Web traffic rankings sites (Alexa, Compete, Quantcast), show how easy it is to install Google Analytics on a site, discuss some advanced filters to better parse and understand the data, and look at some actual Google Analytic reports and interpret the data explaining what terms like bounce rate, average time on site, and unique visitors actually mean.

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Leading a campus Web redesign is as much about bringing people to the table as it is about the technology needed for the website. Using the Web redesign at William & Mary as a model, we will present strategies for achieving buy-in and executing exceptional internal communication for university-wide projects.

The session will be especially relevant for those in leadership roles for Web redesign, including campus administrators, IT directors, Web project managers, and Web, communications and marketing professionals. Those leading campus-wide initiatives will also benefit from the strategies for communication, collaboration and consensus.

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In selecting a Web Content Management System (WCMS), a common mistake is to limit the selection process to sitting through vendor demos and building checklists of features. But vendor demos and checklists tell you little about how the WCMS actually works, how well the features are implemented, and how well the product works with your existing Web content processes.

At CSU Chico, we learned from our mistakes and experiences with our first WCMS and developed a process that allowed us to select a WCMS that better meets our needs and works with our existing content processes rather than against them. The keys to this process include developing realistic expectations of what a WCMS will and won't do, involving the right people in the selection process, identifying the real issues behind your desire for a WCMS, understanding your existing content processes, and developing a product review process that works for you.

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The age of video on the Web is here! Both content creators and users have high expectations and you may become caught in the middle. Learn how to create an accessible media interface that will allow your institution to deliver high quality Flash video with closed captioning, convey a consistent design across your Web presence, and remain easy to maintain even after your "small" project is unexpectedly scaled to include hundreds of videos.

First, we will take a look at the options for compressing the video content into the Flash FLV format. Next, we will create captions using the Media Access Generator (MAGpie) provided by the National Center for Accessible Media. This free application is easy to learn and exports captions into the W3C supported dfxp.xml timed-text authoring format. With the separate components ready, it is time to dive into Flash and start laying out a video player. I will show you that it is possible to create an interface customized to the look and feel of your institution. We will also explore the code needed to dynamically insert the individual video and caption files.

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