For the past decade Dreamweaver and Contribute were the primary web workhorses at Luther College. In 2005 EZ Publish, an open-source content management system (CMS), was chosen to process admissions applications. The following year EZ Publish was decommissioned, and the entire admissions site and home page were moved into a commercial CMS, which failed to meet expectations. The process of moving content from Dreamweaver and Contribute into a CMS was only begun in earnest when Reason was chosen in January 2009 as the top candidate from an extensive list that included both Drupal and dotCMS as finalists. What is Reason? Reason user interface for a typical site. Note the customized Luther content types, Flickr Slideshows and Twitter Feeds. Reason is an open-source web-based CMS licensed under the GNU General Public License; it’s ideally suited for small teams operating on a limited budget. It was developed by higher education (Carleton College) for higher education. Unlike Drupal it is a full-featured CMS out of the box. Luther College runs Reason in a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) environment although it can also be installed under Windows and Mac OS X. There is no cost for the software itself; technical support via the Reason discussion group is outstanding; and content contributors on campus give it thumbs-up for ease of use. With knowledge of PHP programming, Reason can be extended and customized to suit the specific needs of the institution. Reason’s feature list is substantial. At a glance it includes:

ability to create an unlimited number of sites with a single installation and to share content across those sites a WYSIWYG editor called Loki (TinyMCE, FCKeditor and others can also be used) full version control a large number of content types, including blogs, newsletters, images, text blurbs, events calendars, attached documents, and multimedia built-in integration with LDAP for authentication and identity management ability for an administrator to assume the role of any user a WYSIWYG form editor to create and edit web forms automatic generation of RSS feeds for common data types such as blogs, newsletters, and events

Deployment At Luther College, Reason is deployed on a dual-core Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU running at 2.80GHz, which more than adequately handles the over two million page requests the server receives each month. Reason’s required MySQL database operates on a separate and similar server, and there is also a devoted server for development and testing. Initial setup began in late February 2009. Installation requires a system administrator with Linux knowledge but is nothing out of the ordinary. Integration with LDAP went smoothly. By early March a skeleton template of the home page had been moved into Reason. Much of April was spent learning the Reason administrative interface and becoming familiar with the Reason code base. In mid-May a design concept for the new admissions site was finalized and June was frantically spent developing its template. On June 30, 2009, just over four months after our initial kick-off, the home page and redesigned admissions site went live in Reason. Fast forward almost a year later: 140 sites are now in Reason, about two thirds of those live and the balance in development. The goal is have all departments currently using Dreamweaver and Contribute deployed in Reason by summer’s end then commence to move sports and music. Did I mention that there is a complete site redesign of http://www.luther.edu thrown into the mix due to be completed in October 2010? Staffing Reason form creation using Disco. Note the Luther customizations to the Email of Recipient field. Luther College has three FTEs devoted to supporting the web for its 2,500 students, 180 faculty, 500 staff, 22,000 alumni, 20,000 prospective students, and the general public. The reality is that resources are needed to maintain a CMS, open-source or not. With an open-source product staff are required to maintain a server, write templates, develop style sheets, create content, customize code, and support users. With a commercial product resources are needed to maintain a server, write templates, develop style sheets, create content, convince a vendor to customize its code, and support users. Instead of paying the high up-front cost of a commercial CMS and on-going yearly maintenance fee Library and Information Services reassigned one of its full-time programmer/analysts specifically to Reason system administration, writing extensions to Reason, and training and supporting the 150 or so content contributors on campus. In addition the Publications Office has two full-time staff members dedicated to web work, one of whom is responsible for writing content critical to the marketing mission of the college and assisting Reason users, the other for developing templates and style sheets, writing custom modules in Reason, and supporting campus wide web infrastructure. A student worker is also devoted to web work for 10 hours each week during the school year. What Reason could do better Luther College’s current web architecture makes extensive use of http proxy to take advantage of different back-end servers, including Reason. One complaint of Reason is that it doesn’t behave well under an assumed name. The server name is hard-coded into much of its code base, and the Loki editor automatically converts any relative link to absolute. So /admissions/students becomes reason.luther.edu/admissions/students, instead of letting Apache prepend the appropriate http://www.luther.edu during proxy. Reason does this by design since a Reason site may be based on a virtual server name such as sports.luther.edu and music.luther.edu. Carleton College does not make use of proxy but rather redirects most of its web traffic to its Reason server hosted at apps.carleton.edu. For example carleton.edu/admissions gets redirected to apps.carleton.edu/admissions. Another annoyance is the Reason console’s lack of ability to select a group of items to be included on a page all at once. For example if a user wants to include 20 images on a given page each must be selected one at time from a list, with a page refresh each time. The process needs to be repeated for each of the 20 images. Support It is an understatement when I mentioned earlier that technical support for Reason is outstanding—it’s phenomenal. I would go as far as saying that Reason’s unofficial support exceeds the service received on any platform campus wide. When a question is posted to the Reason discussion group, Nathan White or Matt Ryan at Carleton College reply back usually within the hour with a detailed and accurate remedy to the problem. On several occasions Carleton’s web group has welcomed us to campus for day-long tutorials and coding sessions. Documentation is certainly adequate, and for you budding authors out there, the Reason bible has yet to be written. There has even been talk of Reasonpalooza, the first ever Reason Users Group conference, rumored to be held next winter in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Extending Reason to integrate with other systems Twitter Feeds is a Luther College customized content type available to any Reason site. The beauty of open-source programs is that you don’t have to wait for a vendor to develop a requested feature—you can do it in-house if you have an experienced PHP programmer on board. Reason is laid out in such a way that it is easily extensible. A directory called reason_package has the complete Reason code base, and a corresponding directory named reason_package_local contains any user modifications. Reason is smart enough to first look for local customizations before loading the core modules. Luther College has developed several extensions to Reason including:

site-wide integration of Highslide Javascript thumbnail viewer an image slideshow that loads images directly from a Flickr account enhanced media capabilities to include YouTube videos customized Twitter feeds

By default, when a thumbnail of an image is linked to a corresponding full-size image, the larger image appears in a pop-up window. Luther College easily changed this default functionality to utilize Highslide instead. The Image Slideshow module is fairly basic in Reason. Luther College enhanced this module and then went one step further to serve images directly from Flickr. The campus wide response to the Flickr solution has been overwhelmingly positive with many departments jumping on the bandwagon. Luther College moved much of its video hosting to YouTube during the 2009-10 academic year. The publications office was spending too much time creating and encoding Quicktime videos then embedding them in Dreamweaver and Contribute pages by hand. By writing an extension to Reason’s Media Works module, placement and styling of a YouTube video is dictated by Reason template instead of haphazard positioning of an html embed tag in the main content. Note that the thumbnail used to link to the video itself is loaded directly from YouTube. Student groups in particular needed a solution to incorporate Twitter feeds. Reason not only has a way to extend modules but also a method to create or customize a content manager itself. Luther College’s Twitter feed content manager has its own administrative form in Reason designed to gather information about a specific Twitter account. Be aware that writing a content manager can be overwhelming at first and is certainly more involved than extending a module. But once completed it is fully integrated within the Reason framework. Other projects in the works are a campus wide e-commerce solution and a Reason interface to Google Calendar. Although users can sign on to the Reason server using LDAP, single sign on from Reason has yet to be integrated with other campus services. Conclusion In .eduGuru’s most recent CMS survey Reason topped the customer satisfaction list in the open-source category. Luther College has been very pleased with Reason and can vouch firsthand for the high marks Reason received in the polling. If we had it do all over again, we’d choose Reason. For those currently searching for a CMS I would definitely take a serious look at what Reason has to offer.

No related posts.

This weekend, we had a question come in via Ask the Gurus wondering if we knew of any resources that rank content management systems according to their level of compliance to 508 accessibility standards. Accessibility being the great rainbow unicorn that it is, I was not aware of any list that had been put together to date with that kind of information (beyond a basic yes/no field on some matrix sites). Frequently, CMS vendors will tell clients that their system is 508 compliant, when what they really mean is that the pages they output will be 508 compliant (assuming you’ve written compliant templates to begin with). Not much attention is given to the CMS’s interface itself, even though frequently state’s require system interfaces to be accessible as much as the site itself.

So, two things faithful readers. First, if you know of an existing list, please share it in the comments below. Second, we’ve started a Google Doc spreadsheet to begin cataloging systems and giving them pass fail marks on various checkpoints dealing with the systems’ administrative, development, and management UIs (except the first column, dealing without output). In detail, based on WCAG 2.0 checkpoint levels and 508 guidelines (as they equate to WCAG 1.0). The hope is to provide a specific apples to apples comparison of how different CMSs stack up. This is a pretty large undertaking, and I can’t stress enough how important it is that you share any information you may have or know through experience (even if it just means only filling in a couple data points). This will be a big collaborative project that will have a lot of value outside of higher ed as well, so please share and pass on this post to anyone in the web development community that could contribute! Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/loriwright/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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I promised a followup to the mobile site roundup, and by jimminy I deliver. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably caught wind of the release of Pittsburg State University’s new mobile web site. This has been a big step for us for a number of reasons. Our deployment isn’t perfect, we aren’t as feature rich as some, but what we have done is create a great foundation to move forward on. Here’s how we did it.

First, a couple thoughts. If you are waiting to work on the mobile web, you’re already behind. You should be planning now, at the very least. Higher education is notorious for playing catch up on technology issues, don’t let that happen here. Don’t make excuses. The mobile web is not going away. It’s not a fad. It’s not something that you want to sit and wait to “see what happens.” In the brief history of the web, we’ve seen only a couple major paradigm shifts in the Internet. The first was the shift from a small, infantile web where a few companies had staked territory, to one where anyone and everyone could have a site. Suddenly the web flattened out. The second shift was to the read-write web, a place where not only can you have your site, but you can contribute to others. The web socialized, it began to get a personality, and it was your personality. Now, we are moving to mobile devices – the next shift. I don’t look at this as a technological shift (by itself) because the change occurring isn’t just about the hardware, it’s about how we design, architect, and consume information. The ubiquity of mobile devices and the rapidity with which they are penetrating society is something entirely different from what we’ve dealt with before. So, the good stuff. First off, let me be clear. I’m a one man army, like many of you. This project wasn’t the result of the effort of a team of a dozen people over 6 months. It was me, a couple weeks, and a lot of lost sleep. To do this, I committed to the idea that it would be a pet project. I went home, and lived mobile data and code until 1:00 or 2:00AM every morning (as my wife would probably angrily attest to). I did this because I understood that in terms of priorities, it just didn’t really fit in the 9 to 5 for me right now, but it was also something that I believed couldn’t sit around and wait for my normal project schedule to lighten up. Maybe you’re luckier. If you’re not, do what you have to do. But like I said, don’t make excuses, don’t tell me that you don’t have enough resources to get this done, because you do (you just might need to keep a little extra coffee on hand). Besides, it’ll make you look great to your boss, assuming your boss doesn’t mind you going off all maverick and coming back with cool new tools. And I won’t lie to you, you might have to take a chance on this that people will see it and be on board with launching it, especially if you’re doing it like I did as a side project. Part of me feels that you have to be willing to take those risks though when you’re in web development. Playing it safe means you’ll only ever be average. Mobile Analytics Stats I started with analytics, because strategy starts with informed planning. For a while now, Google Analytics has had built in visitor segmenting by mobile devices or carrier. Mobile web is still very much in a maturing phase, and one of the big questions you should consider is how to target users needs. Now, here’s quotable quote #1: Yes, a well coded, properly built site should be able to be used on any device. That is the ideal, and it is not unreasonable to say “this is what I want to strive for.” But, this project isn’t about converting your normal site into a mobile friendly template so it works everywhere. In my case, I saw that over 83% of my users were on devices with WebKit based browsers. Based on that fact, I decided to take a slightly different route, and I’ll explain why as we go on.  I started with the idea that users coming to our site were coming for specific tasks, and I was able to back that up with analytics (logins and email the big two). Now I had a starting place to build around, knowing that I had certain things to cover that mobile users were definitely doing. . That’s not to say it’s okay to ignore that other 17%. What I’m doing is trying to provide a killer experience to the biggest audience I can, with the goal to roll the rest in as best we can over time. Rather than taking a long time to get everyone, I’ll take a little time to get most people, and deal with the long tail. jQTouch Website jQTouch is a jQuery plugin for websites that allows you to rapidly deploy mobile sites that are feature and function rich. The catch is that it really only works in WebKit browsers. So, question number one you need to answer is if the feature tradeoff is worth it. In my case, I said yes. I was willing to sacrifice the 17%, not just because of the features, but because jQTouch gives you the added bonus of allowing you to build and deploy a site relatively rapidly. But, there are also other platforms, such as the MIT Mobile Web framework that would similarly enable you with somewhat better compatibility, albeit lest whizbang factor out of the box (plus we aren’t a PHP shop). Another benefit of jQTouch is that it can effectively allow you to build an entire site in one HTML file (obviously including CSS and JS includes, which add a not insignificant amount of overhead, I recommend compressing them all). Once the page has loaded, it can give you access to a large amount of information very quickly, without page load delays in between. I use this for most of the core navigation and pages, then use the built in AJAX detection to handle things like the news feeds and events which change frequently. I should note that our content management system, dotCMS, allows me to be extremely flexible with dynamic content reuse on our site. Doing custom things with content used elsewhere on the website is an extremely painless process for us. I hope you are just as lucky in that case, because it will dramatically improve your development process. If not, RSS feeds can be your friend. What it amounts to is jQTouch lets you design a mobile site that can behave very much like an iPhone application. Why would you want that? Because it’s not about pages anymore. Mobile usability is a completely different realm from our normal websites, so it’s not good enough to just do a mobile compatible layout (this goes back to the earlier point). It’s the information that is important. You have to take into account how people are using your site from a mobile device, because their activities will be substantially more action and goal driven than they would be sitting behind a PC. We are stewards of information, and webpages are the vessel. But the terrain is changing, and that means we need a new vessel for our information. It’s about the content, the context, and the motives Now, quotable quote #2: Never stop improving! Ever. Our initial feature set was based on two things: what our analytics told me about where on the site people were going while using mobile devices, and what I could easily integrate without polluting the interface (news and calendar). From within the mobile site and from the site’s PC based about page, there are links to recommend features or report bugs. Believe it or not, the people using your site will tell you what does and doesn’t work for them. You just have to be listening. And once in a while you might have to get out and ask. My point is, don’t make guesses about what your users need, let them inform you. Over time, you might discover certain features go stale as user tastes, trends, and expectations change. Be prepared to cut away things that didn’t work or don’t work anymore to make room for better tools. User needs will change. But you have to be paying attention in order to address it. Along with that, you need to set some kind of goals, so that you know what to strive towards. But be realistic. Don’t come out saying you want to do something that would completely require a change in the fundamental way someone expects to use the site: for instance, getting 10% of admission applications from mobile devices isn’t exactly realistic, because that’s not an activity you would expect people to be doing from a mobile device anyway (or maybe they are, if that’s what your analytics tells you, in which case that’s pretty awesome on its own). Start with reinforcing anticipated behavior and building expected behavior. So, to recap:

Start checking your analytics, get out and ask people, find out what mobile users are doing on your site now. Figure out what you can easily, and rapidly get out to those users from that list, plus anything else that could be valuable. Pick some kind of framework or model to base your site on. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Don’t run before you can walk. Change how you think about “web content.” Consider how and where it is to be used. Set up a couple goals, something simple, something realistic. Build it. Include analytics in it. Watch. Listen. Measure. Improve it. Make new goals. Repeat steps 7 and 8 until you die.

Once your site is out in the world, you can start to really refine the experience. If you have the developer backing, you can even easily turn that site into an actual mobile app using tools like PhoneGap, letting you kill two birds with one stone. Suddenly, not only are you maintaining a mobile site, but you’re covering five different mobile app markets, with barely more overhead than the initial site. I will be presenting on mobile web strategy with HigherEdHero.com July 29th at 12:00PM CDT, so mark your calendars if you want to get more information on this topic.

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One by one, colleges and universities are taking the next step in web development and moving towards addressing mobile needs. The mobile based web has already begun its move to create another technological generation. In this way, the Internet (as a proper noun), has truly become a force of nature. Its ubiquitous nature is an evolutionary trait, grown out of a fight for dominance. We can no more stop its move to our handheld devices any more than we can stop a landslide. We cannot complain about the workload. We cannot whine about resources. We have to address it, and we have to nurture it, or we will eventually become a victim of it.

Today, it is completely unimaginable that a university would exist without a website. Bad, good, awesome, terrible – it doesn’t matter, you have one. It is expected, demanded, and if you didn’t, it would have a devastating impact on the impression people have of your school. We are little more than a stone’s throw away from this same trend for mobile web. Over the next two years, expect this demand to grow exponentially (and I’m not speaking hyperbolically). Start researching now. Learn what others are already doing, and begin to craft a strategy so that you will be ready to make the move. First, here are some suggestions when you start thinking about what you should do to design your mobile web site:

Having a mobile site isn’t just about making your current site look pretty on mobile phones. Usability is different. Accessibility is different. Trends are different. The same as with your current site, starting a mobile site means researching your audience(s), and building the tools to meet their needs. Mobile web is about more than the iPhone. Yeah, there are a lot of them out there, but don’t forget about Blackberries, Android based phones, Palms (though they’re future is uncertain), and Windows Mobile, to name a few. WebKit is cool and renders pretty well, but it isn’t as ubiquitous as you might think. Sites are better than apps. A well designed mobile web site will serve you better and be easier to maintain than trying to keep up with several different mobile applications (even if the apps themselves are really cool). If you have the resources, then go for it, but only if you feel you have done everything with a mobile web site that you can. Besides, if you can’t do a mobile website well, what makes you think you can handle one or more mobile applications? Set goals. Once you know your audience and needs, decide what you’ll provide them and how to determine if it was a success. Once you’ve done that, begin looking at the problems introduced by a mobile platform, and then set new goals to fix them. Goal #1: Never stop setting goals. Don’t be afraid to compromise. Like I said, whining about our resources won’t change the fact that we’ll have to address this need, but we can acknowledge that we might not be able to do it perfectly. Do what you can, plan phases into your feature roll out, and admit (to yourself, your peers, your bosses, and your audiences) that good work can take time. This might sound in conflict with #2, but we still have an obligation to balance the ideal with reality. Don’t reinvent the wheel. It’s hard to be revolutionary, and if you are, you risk alienating audiences with predefined expectations. Your mobile site might end up looking like someone else’s, and that’s okay. Make your tools good, usable, and valuable. People will forgive you even if you aren’t setting a new standard. I’m not telling you to not try new things, just don’t try to redefine the standard. Measure and adjust. Let me say that again: MEASURE AND ADJUST. This might surprise you, but this concept applies to stuff beyond mobile web development. Being successful at what you do means you need to measure goals, and make adjustments accordingly. Even the most successful efforts will turn stale over time. The web is like a living thing (I’ve been really going with these comparisons lately, huh?), you must maintain it. Feed it, groom it, and take care of it. If you stop measuring and adjusting, you are not doing your job.

So, now the fun part. I want to showcase a handful of sites for you that are out there that you might be able to get some ideas and take some cues from. This is obviously not an exhaustive list. It’s not a perfect list. It’s in no particular order. And I also have to admit I only went through these on my iPhone, as I unfortunately lacked anything else as I worked up this post. But, of the several dozen sites I went through, these all had a little something extra to bring to the table. 1: Virginia Tech – http://mobile.vt.edu/ Virgina Tech’s mobile site is a great example of a site with a nice smattering of a little bit of everything. The layout is simple, and the theme is fairly eye-pleasing and easy to read. While their mobile map implementation is simple, it is a nice touch and can be useful for visitors who come to campus. On that note, they dedicate a page to visitors, though I think that would benefit from a parking location map under the parking info section. 2: MIT (http://mobi.mit.edu/about/) – http://m.mit.edu I’m not really sure how you can expect MIT to not make this list. For one, they have probably one of the most technically heavy mobile sites available currently. Two, they’ve actually released their framework for anyone to use, and that’s just super nice of them. Sure, it’s not going to win any design awards, but they have crammed a ton of tools into a limited space, and made them flexible and useful. They have also kept their audience in mind, not wasting space on tools that simply wouldn’t be useful to the average, geeky student there. 3: Adelphi University (http://m.adelphi.edu/info.php) – http://m.adelphi.edu/ I share Adelphi as an example of a simple, but appealing mobile site design. They’ve named their page (AU2Go), and followed the Apple tradition of icon based “app” links. The “Today at Adelphi” is a great idea for a tool, giving users a quick snapshot of things taking place that day. Ideally, this would be more than just an event list, and could include more engagement, specific calls to action, and multimedia to reinforce those activities. The campus directory is a nice touch, even if it lacks people search. I also found it interesting that they specifically broke out the art exhibitions and have to wonder if that’s a result of specific community targeting, or just a “let’s do it because we can” feature. 4: West Virginia University (http://m.wvu.edu/about/) – http://m.wvu.edu/ Like Adelphi, West Virginia also sticks to the button theme. But, I find WVU to have successfully created a mobile page that I just find exceptionally pleasing to look at. The colors are nice, the icons are sharp, and the color theme is easy on the eyes. They’ve gone the extra distance to actually pull their YouTube feed right into their page, a nice touch, as well as provide a directory search within the mobile framework. The map, though a little slow, is very well implemented. Lastly, check out their athletics section. If I had to pick a favorite, WVU might just be it, as they’ve done a whole lot right and very well. 5: Roanoke College (http://www.rcnewsblog.com/?p=933) – http://i.roanoke.edu or http://m.roanoke.edu/ Roanoke took a simple approach to their button tools. That’s okay. What really makes them stand out is the fact that they have used their mobile home page as more than just a bunch of button links, and have gone so far as bringing in news and multimedia to share the space as well. You have to scroll the page to see it all, which can get missed since the page doesn’t provide any indication of more content “below the fold” of the mobile viewport. I like that they thought outside the box on that though, and it doesn’t feel awkward at all when using it. They are also one of the only sites I saw that included a dining menu too, something that even as staff I would find useful, as I like eating on campus once in a while. Lastly, they took the time to do two versions of the site, one specific for iPhones, and one more generic (both links above). 6: Oxford University – http://m.ox.ac.uk/ Across the pond at Oxford they’ve also gotten in the game. What made them stand out to me was that they have built in their iTunesU section for mobile devices, and have also made campus webcams available for viewing. While I’m not sure how useful the webcams would be, it is certainly darn cool. Looking at their mobile domain name also makes me giggle a little, for no good reason. The map, in my opinion, needs work. It has really been built with campus people in mind, and as someone who’s never been to England in the first place, I couldn’t even use it. So, nothing super great here, but a couple unique touches that are nice to see. 7: Ohio State University – http://m.osu.edu/ Last but not least is Ohio State University, which is right there with WVU for sites that I have stolen ideas from really like. Right off the bat, on the iPhone you’ll notice they’re making use of the GPS (I assume for things like the directions page). The page itself is well designed, and is easy to look at and make sense of. They broke away from the more common button/icon based navigation, which I thought was nice to see. The search tool is top notch. They were also one of the only mobile sites I saw that included a section for mobile media, like ringtones and wallpapers. I would be curious to see if they are tracking stats on that tool’s usage. All in all another very well planned, designed, and executed mobile site that their users should be proud to have. Tools The mobile world is still a little wild and untamed at the moment, and it is important to make sure you have the necessary tools to make sure you mobile site behaves as expected. Here’s a handful of resources to get you started, in hopes that they can make your tasks easier. Use them to populate your toolbox with to prepare you as you look into building or enhancing your mobile presence. Simulators/Emulators

Opera Mobile Simulator Microsoft Device Emulator 3.0 Blackberry Device Simulator iPhone Test Center/Emulator More reading on mobile device emulators

Scripts

jQTouch – A jQuery plugin for mobile web development on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and other forward-thinking (preferably WebKit based) mobile browsers. Documentation isn’t great, but the tool is pretty awesome. Look back soon for an article outlining our experiences using jQTouch to develop Pittsburg State University’s mobile site. MIT Mobile Web – A project designed to allow developers to collaborate on developing Mobile Web Sites primarily for higher education institutions to provide mobile access to information to students, faculty, staff, and visitors. Detect Mobile Browsers – A PHP script to detect and handle users showing mobile user agents. WURFL Project – Not a script, per se, but a configuration file crammed with mobile capabilities. They feature also feature Java and PHP APIs.

Sites/articles

AdMob – A mobile analytics system. Google Mobile Blog – This is linking specifically to their post talking about the introduction of mobile based tracking built in to Google Analytics. Mobile Analytics Revisited – This is one of my past posts looking at ways to track and use mobile analytics with Google. Mobile Web Design Trends for 2009 – Even though it’s a year old, this article from Smashing Magazine still has a ton of good and relevant information in it. Jakob Nielsen on Mobile Usability – Always thorough and extremely useful, Jakob looks at a number of issues facing mobile site usability.

Hopefully you can walk away from this with some ideas and ammunition for your mobile project. If you have any additional resources that you’ve found particularly useful that aren’t mentioned here, be sure to share them in the comments. We have recently completed the first step of designing our mobile web site using jQTouch, and will be launching it shortly (thanks to those of you that assisted me by lending me your eyes and phones for testing). Just after the formal launch, I’ll be outlining and discussing the process we took, and how we’ll be handling the site moving forward, so keep your eyes open for that post coming up soon to answer additional questions you may still have. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chadwho1ders/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

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When we started using OU Campus in October of 2006, we signed up for the 25-user license package, and opted for the SaaS (software-as-a-service) model or ‘hosted‘ plan, where OmniUpdate handles the hosting and delivery of the service to us, and all CMS users access the system solely through a web browser . At that time, our public website was served from an ANCIENT HP NetServer, which looked like a desktop PC on steroids (see http://360tech.com/catalog/images/NET SERVER 2.jpg for an example of what I’m talking about). That HP NetServer had a robust 18GB RAID 0 array, and was running FreeBSD Linux, version 4.3. It was a 600MHz dual-processor system, and it weighed at LEAST 4,000 pounds (or so…).

To allow OU Campus to publish to this server, we created an eDirectory user (we are a totally Novell campus) and granted FTP permissions through our firewall to their system using their servers’ static IP address (which we setup in the “Accounts –> Sites” of OU Campus…very straightforward), and I added that IP address to the Linux server’s ‘hosts.allow‘ file. Selectable editable regions In June of 2007, we migrated the website off of that Linux dinosaur (it had been running faithfully since August of 2001 at that time), and onto a Dell PowerEdge 1750 1U Rack mount server running Novell NetWare 6.5, Apache, MySQL, and and PHP. This server was a dual 2.8GHz Xeon CPU system with 36GB RAID array and 2GB RAM (so a BIG step up). We used a combination of Novell network copy and OU Campus to move the site over to the new server and publish the up-to-date content (site export and import in OU Campus is very nice). In August of 2009 (of course, on the first day of the Fall 2009 Semester @ about 10:00 am), the hardware in that Dell PowerEdge 1750 server experienced a major problem, so we switched over to a Dell PowerEdge 1955 Blade server (with similar specs as the 1750 above) and were back online within 20-30 minutes. Manipulating site configuration in OU Campus during these moves was no problem at all. Getting our site ready for editing was not difficult, although it was somewhat labor-intensive to add editable region tags to each ‘existing’ website that I wanted to hand over to individual departments for editing. OmniUpdate’s staff tagged a large number of pages for me, and offered to assist me in the setup of my initial couple of templates, although at that time, the website that I had inherited had no rhyme or reason to it (there were at least 6 or 7 completely different page layouts, not to mention the endless series of “one off” web pages/sites that had been created by individuals who were clearly not familiar with how to put together a website, yet had been given ‘carte blanche’ FTP access to their site’s publicly available web directory on the web server), so I told them I would just start slowly, tagging individual websites as I trained each department to edit their own content. Find and replace At the same time, I slowly began removing these aforementioned individuals’ direct FTP access to our web server, and began ‘nudging’ them towards using OU Campus as I tagged their particular departmental website for editing and uploaded it into the CMS. Every single one of them, once presented with a basic overview of the OU Campus interface, fell in love with it immediately and were relieved to not have to use DreamWeaver or FrontPage anymore. Additionally, these users use the CMS all of the time (user adoption has been 100% here for each person trained), and they always have nothing but good things to say about OU Campus each time I talk to them. Currently, I still do not have a single ‘template’ created within OU Campus (chock up that stroke of brilliance on my part to foregoing OmniUpdate’s offer to create them for me back in ‘06, yet I have never set the time aside to create them since…). Fortunately, you don’t have to have templates in the system to use it, however, having templates does give you more control over what happens when a new page is created. I do have plans to setup some templates in the near future (for content repurposing at the time the page is published using XSL and XSLT transformation to output multiple file types and content formats from that single publishing action), however I have not yet put them together. File browser popup Staffing requirements to manage OU Campus has been just me. I don’t have any other web staff here with me, and I’ve never had a student worker to assist me, so the overhead to manage existing users and incoming web publishing approvals is very manageable. With the simplicity of administration of OU Campus, I don’t honestly think another staff member is necessary. We increased our user license count to 100 this past fiscal year (which quadrupled our available user accounts, but only doubled our cost), and every new department and/or user that I train eases the deluge of incoming update requests just a bit more each time. At this point, we have setup 40 of the 100 available user accounts, most of which have been handed over to departments for managing their site’s content, so I would venture to say that the actual ‘user’ group on our campus is effectively double that number at this point in time, and I have been getting requests from other departments to set them up as well, so I anticipate that number rising dramatically within this next year…very good news. Our annual cost of ownership was initially just under $12,000.00 (on a 3-yr. contract with a 25-user license), and it is currently $25,000.00 (for 100 user licenses) plus $4,000.00 annual support. We host the website(s), our ‘vvc.edu’ top-level domain and a full Class C IP address range ourselves, plus we have an on-campus OC3 backbone connection from a partnership with Verizon (we get a portion of the OC12 that we host on our facility for them), so that lowers our costs in that respect. The only salary to factor in to this would be mine (I’m the only web staff member at our institution), but I’d be doing this work with or without OU Campus, so that cost doesn’t apply to this study. Editing an RSS feed As we have increased our usage, OU Campus has never had any issues with reliability or stability in any way. Additionally, I recently created a new program website for our college that is hosted on Network Solutions’ servers, and OU Campus easily connected to and provides full editing access to that site (I setup the first page of that site with editable CMS region tags, so that has been a very simple and painless roll-out on the new site). This coming year, I plan on integrating OU Campus with our campus bookstore’s online store site (provided by “Campus Hub”) as well as exploring options for integrating it with Microsoft’s SharePoint Server content, as well as publishing XML course catalog data from our student information system, and providing a XSL/XSLT transformed web front-end for searching through our existing course information without having to edit any of it within OmniUpdate at all (I’m also planning on having that output a searchable, mobile friendly, course catalog web interface…so we’ll see how that goes…keeping my fingers crossed here…). In just about every way, OU Campus has met and exceeded my expectations.

Users love it and consistently USE it after I train them Once you get a page / template setup with editable regions, and you start creating new pages (or, even better, as your users start making new pages), it’s a pretty “hands free” setup for non-technical users to fully contribute to and manage their online content from anywhere with an Internet connection.

Content pages and options The only thing that has been a challenge for me has been when I give users too many options on their WYSIWYG toolbars, and then they put all kinds of crazy colors and fonts on the page, and then I have to “reign them in” as I ‘take away their toolbar candy’ (like Font Size, Font Family, Text color palette options, etc.)…I know, I know…you’re sitting there reading this like…”What did you think would happen?”….and you’re exactly right. But hey, we learn from our mistakes, and I’ve since stripped just about all ‘formatting’ options from the toolbar, and I’ve been working on incorporating CSS styles into the toolbar’s “Styles” drop-down menu, so that the users will be able to style their content, without breaking the page layout/design/etc. At this point I can’t claim to be a power user of the OU Campus CMS. We purchased it to put content management in the hands of the content creators around our campus, and it has done exactly that, but we’re not really pushing the envelope here. As far as integrating OU Campus with other systems, currently we’re not doing any of that, although I am planning a couple of projects like that (which I mentioned briefly above), so we’ll see how that goes. Based on my experience so far with this CMS, if the content can be accessed and manipulated, I am confident that OU Campus will have no problem providing management of that content. Built-in image editor and optimizer OmniUpdate support absolutely second-to-none. When you call them, they answer the phone (important!), they are extremely knowledgeable and can concisely answer just about any technical question you ask, and every question/issue I have ever had is typically resolved in less than 1/2 of a business day. Their support site (http://support.omniupdate.com) is extremely thorough, and they have setup a private Ning network for OU clients at: http://ocn.omniupdate.com. This is a very good resource, and a good way to get quick answers regarding questions you might have. You can also join the OmniUpdate group on the University Web Developers Ning network at: http://cuwebd.ning.com to get involved in discussions with other higher ed web development folks about CMS topics. Overall, I have been nothing but pleased with the simplicity of administering and managing the OU Campus system for our institution. It has definitely simplified my web content management strategy, it has improved the status of updated content on our website by providing an interface that our users consistently use, and continues to do so more and more each day. Keep in mind, however, that every CMS system roll-out will involve a lot of time to do it right, regardless of what CMS you choose, so you’ll want to be prepared to take that on, but take heart…it is worth it to put in that time.

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At Edinboro University we use a content management system called dotCMS.  dotCMS is an Enterprise-level, open source CMS and is based on Java.  dotCMS also integrates with many well-known open source technologies such as:

Apache Tomcat for the application server, Apache Lucene for its structured content and indexing, Apache Velocity for templating, JBOSS for Caching, Spring and Struts, and Hibernate to drive the back-end database structure.

dotCMS .edu Accelerator Site These technologies allow dotCMS to be very versatile in an enterprise by allowing it to deploy to existing database engines and Java application server technologies, as well as being fully extendable, customizable, and internationalizable. At Edinboro, We are running dotCMS with the bundled Apache Tomcat server and have both a production and a development/staging environment.  Each of these environments runs on its own front-end Windows server (dotCMS can run in both Windows and Linux Environments).  Both instances run off of one back-end MSSQL database server (dotCMS is database engine independent and is currently fully supported to run on MySQL, PostgresSQL, Oracle and MSSQL).  All three servers have two dual core processors, and twelve gigabytes of RAM.  We also employ a SAN for file-storage and backup. In the future we plan on adding an additional front-end server for the production environment (dotCMS fully supports clustering for scalability and high availability).  This will also include a hardware load balancing device. All this supports our nearly 300 content editors and publishers, as well as our roughly 350,000 visits per month and roughly 50,000 pages. Deploying dotCMS Deploying dotCMS can be a bit of work at first.  However, the product has come a long way in recent years to ease the entry barrier for new users.  You no longer have to create the database tables and load them with initial data; dotCMS does this for you the first time you start up.  There is also a bundled Windows installer for the most recent version (1.7a) that includes all the software you need to get started and sets it up in one, easy to follow installer. While it took us here at Edinboro a few weeks to get up and running, it is entirely possible to have a working dotCMS install in a matter of a few hours.  It can be as simple as downloading the current release, pointing it to a blank database and telling it to start.  This is in stark contrast to the good ol’ days when it took hours to get everything up and running.  Our original installation (based on version 1.5) took a few weeks to get everything hammered out, from installing the OS and database to configuring LDAP authentication (something that dotCMS now supports out of the box with minimal configuration). Once you have dotCMS deployed and running, the next step is getting your content and templates converted/imported/created.  At Edinboro we chose to take the staged approach.  We started by building our templates (originally we contracted dotCMS to do this for us) and then converted the top-most sections of the website.  Once we had the main sections of the website completed, we switched the system on and started training our users to convert their pages.  The initial work to get the templates and top most pages done took around 2-3 months.  Over the course of six months to a year we systematically trained our content contributors and worked with them to convert their department webpages.  All said and done the entire process, from vendor selection to switching off the old system, took a little over a year. Staffing needs Website Browser As I am sure is the case with most universities, the staff required to run a 50,000 page website and support nearly 300 editors is not necessarily what we are given to work with.  At Edinboro we have three core individuals supporting our system. I take care of the systems (software and hardware), development of web-based applications, as well as training and support for our content contributors.  We also have two people in marketing and public relations that take care of the content and design of main University’s webpages.  Ideally I would like to see a DBA (backups and database maintenance), a content expert, and another person or two to handle user support. Costs One of the nice things about dotCMS is that it is open source, so there are no license fees to worry about.  However, the company that supports dotCMS offers a number of support options and packages for the enterprise world.  At Edinboro we decided to go with their enterprise product and support.  Unlike other open source solutions that offer an enterprise package, dotCMS does not cripple their open source offering just to get you to buy into their enterprise package.  The enterprise package is actually a step behind the cutting edge open source product.  This allows dotCMS to offer things like a warranty and enterprise support without having to worry about the instability of the cutting-edge code as well as supporting the numerous clients that are on older versions of the software.  This doesn’t mean that the open source releases have not passed quality assurance and community testing, just that there is a version that has been locked down to the most stable code they currently run.  The enterprise license will currently run you about $4750 per CPU per year.  This gets you the warranty (if there is a bug they fix it for free with 24 hour response), automatic updates and hot-fixes, and web-based case management.  On top of that, it also opens up the enterprise support options which you can view here:  http://dotcms.org/support. Currently there is no support offered for the open source except what you can get from the community. Support and documentation Content Search Currently to get enterprise support from dotCMS staff, you will need to purchase an enterprise license.  However, that does not stop you from taking advantage of the growing community support options available.  The main method to access community support is through the official mailing list.  There are many dotCMS experts in the community and the company that regularly watch the mailing list and are there to answer questions as we can.  However, you first stop might be to jump into the IRC channel (#dotcms on freenode) and ask away.  There are a growing number of people in the channel there to help.  And when you’ve exhausted the community options and need to go the extra mile, there are a few 3rd party support options that include me (pardon the shameless plug) or eduGuru’s own, Michael Fienen. In the past year or so, dotCMS’s documentation has come a long way.  There is a great documentation wiki (built on dotCMS itself) that can provide a lot of detail on the inner workings of dotCMS.  The API is also available in javadoc format here: http://www.dotcms.org/api/.  Not to mention that Fienen has created a dotCMS Cheat Sheet and has a beginner’s book in the works. What is it doing well?

User Training and Adoption – It is very easy for my users to jump in and start working with dotCMS, and normally it doesn’t take me more than a few minutes to answer their questions as they come in.  The system is simple and easy to use with a built-in TinyMCE WYSIWYG Editor and pseudo-in-place editing (you can see the content in the page as you are editing but the editor opens in a separate page). Templating / Development - I have found Velocity (dotCMS’s templating language) more than powerful enough to code just about everything I’ve been thrown.  Velocity gets its strength from being able to directly access Java objects via View Tools.  Despite that, there are a few times where you really need some custom tooling or functionality that dotCMS does not provide.  With dotCMS’s plugin architecture and little bit of Java programming, you can accomplish these types of customizations with ease. Scalability – Of the open source solutions I have used, this is the only one that I have found to be scalable enough to suit the needs of Enterprise.  Most systems are great until you try to manage hundreds of users, but dotCMS really excels in this area.  dotCMS fully supports clustering. Structured Content – In my opinion where dotCMS truly shines is the Structured Content Engine.  Of all the systems I have tried, none have come close to the functionality and flexability that dotCMS provides. With just about every system there is a way to create dynamic structures of content.  However, it is usually clunky, not very well thought through, and tied to a specific set of content types.  Some systems even require a plugin or hack to even provide the simplest structures.  dotCMS uses a structured content engine called Lucene.  This is a very powerful system that sits at the core of dotCMS.  If you need to create new content types you are not limited to what the tool will provide.  Wrap that all up with a Lucene’s indexing capabilities and an easy way to pull dynamic content into your pages and you have a very powerful system in your hands. Multi-Site Hosting – dotCMS also supports multiple sites fairly well.  In terms of scalability and whether or not the system can handle it, it is not a problem.  In terms of managing multiple sites, the current (1.7a) version’s tooling works, but is clunky if you get more than a couple sites.  However, in the next release (1.9) this tooling has been completely reworked to make it much easier to manage the content for multiple sites.

What is it not doing well?

Entrance Barrier – Having this powerful of a system does come with a cost.  Even with the new windows installer, dotCMS is not just something you throw at a cheap hosting plan and have up in running in a few hours.  It is going to take some work to get up and running.  The templating language also takes some getting used to, just like any system, but since the templating is not written in a more popular language, you will need to learn some Velocity to get started. Integration – Integrating dotCMS with other systems is not overly elegant.  In all reality though, I don’t know of many solutions that are.  You can certainly directly access external sources via SQL, but tighter integration will require writing a plugin.  In this regard dotCMS is looking into a number of things which may help to ease the pain of integrating external data sources.  A few of these include switching to a UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) for all its content, and adopting the CMIS standard. Forms – dotCMS offers a couple solutions for building and handling forms.  At its current state, I have not found either solution to fit what I need.  The next version of dotCMS has integrated the Front End Content Submission plugin into the product. Staging / Push Publishing – Currently there is no way to stage content on a staging server and then push that content to another system.  This also hurts plugin development as there is no elegant way to package up and ship content to another system. They also plan on addressing this with UUID’s in version 1.9, but full UI support for doing this won’t come until later down the line.

What should I consider before moving to dotCMS? When you get down to it dotCMS is a great open source option for higher education.  There are some things dotCMS might not be the best option for.  If you are looking to host a site on a cheap hosting package, dotCMS is not an option.  It is going to take root or administrator access to the machine you are going to host it on.  Another thing to keep in mind is that while you can build just about anything in dotCMS, you have to build it.  It’s not like Wordpress or a wiki where the functionality to do certain tasks is already provided.  It certainly can be built and you may even find some good resources out there to get you 90% of the way, but in the end, you are going to have to build things out. So there you have it.  dotCMS = Enterprise Open Source Content Management.  If you have any questions or want to get a hold of me you can certainly post a comment. Otherwise, I can be reached at @chris_falzone on twitter or you can email me at cfalzone@cfalzone.com.

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Have you ever heard the phrase how you can have too much of a good thing? That’s sort of how I feel about Facebook’s move to add Community Pages. I understand it. It’s not that it doesn’t make some sense. But it feels very much like a case of execution before consideration. They thought it was a good idea, so they just ran with it. I’m a huge proponent of the idea that companies don’t own their brand, the consumers do. Brand is ephemeral. It’s an idea, a perception, an attitude, an emotion – all had by your customers. You can try to shape it, to mold it, but ultimately the only thing you actually own are your trademarks.

But, in terms of user generated content, that doesn’t mean you give away the keys to the kingdom. People are still adapting to their role in the social brand development space. They need a garden hose, yet Facebook is handing over a fire hose. Hannah Feldman of Clark College contacted us about this issue recently via our Ask the Gurus section out of a concern for this new change in Facebook’s system, and I thought it was more than important enough to open up the discourse to everyone. The issue she noted was that some folks had listed “Clark College” as an interest (or maybe as their employer, or college they attended – it can get sucked in from anywhere), and as a result, Facebook made a community page for them (actually, it appears that they have made several). Like many of us, they have put a lot of time and effort into setting up their own page for people to become fans of like.When you are dealing with communities, especially if it is a small one, it is enormously important to cultivate them and concentrate them. When people have to hunt out and think about which page to like, it ultimately hurts engagement and people miss out on the real dance (remember students joining the fake Class of 2013 pages last year?). Facebook Quick Results FAIL for Clark College One of the most immediate effects is that now, a quick search for Clark College doesn’t even turn up their main page in the top eight. That’s some fine SEO work there, Lou. I mean really, Facebook, you value an algorithmically generated page with 9 likers (?) over their established organizational page with almost 900 fans (screw it, fans is easier to say, and so I’m going to)? At least Lewis & Clark can sleep well tonight. Actually, most big players have nothing to fear in this instance, for whatever mysterious reason. It’s all the smaller players that really need the exposure the most that seem to have been overlooked. And sure, maybe that could be overlooked, except for one thing: the community pages are worthless. Let’s just call a duck a duck here. Big pages are just scraping and displaying information from Wikipedia, and small pages just do a regex match for people’s status updates and aggregates the hits. That has an obvious effect: the community page for Clark College is showing people mentioning Lewis & Clark College. And you know how I mentioned that big pages seem to fair the quick results storm okay? Don’t worry, Facebook has reserved the right to co-op your pages and turn over it’s development to the community, and there’s pretty much no information on what rules or standards apply to that policy, besides “If it becomes very popular (attracting thousands of fans)…”. This is what I meant when I said too much of a good thing. You can’t just open the flood gates and start creating pages algorithmically from the interests, et cetera that people are putting in. Something like this must be balanced, tempered. At least for now, fans of Clark College are now forced to do a hard search for their school if they want to actually engage with them. What’s to be done? At the moment, I can find very little, besides getting loud and angry. There appears to be no “flag this page as erroneous” feature, or anything like it. Write Facebook and explain your displeasure, and see if we can motivate the development of better checks and balances. I wouldn’t suggest signing up to be notified when they are ready for help building the pages yet, one because there’s no information on when that will be or what it will enable, and two because I’d hate to do anything that would appear to be supporting this process before there’s a clear path to how it’ll help us fix it. Social networking is a dance. You throw a party, help people get out on the floor, and get out of the damn way. People have a good time, they talk about that time you threw an awesome party, and you take credit for that couple that met there and got hitched later. Instead, Facebook has turned into that loud, obnoxious girl that spills her drinks on people and trips you when you’re trying make your move on the cute girl with the Jimi Hendrix obsession. We just want you to throw an awesome party and stay out of the way, Facebook. In today’s web, brand dilution is a huge challenge to deal with when marketing your school (or ANYTHING), and Facebook just walked up and dumped a bucket of gas on the fire (no more metaphors or similes, I swear! Especially because a bucket of water is probably a more fitting comparison in this instance…). AllFacebook.com takes a good look at brand impacts from this as well, using an excellent example with Coca-Cola. I’m waiting to see how they answer this issue, but my worry is that some of the damage is done. My initial thought is just how much actual, human interaction it will take to clean up this mess, and I just don’t think they have it, and in this case I don’t really think you can just rely on the “community” while claiming “hey, that’s how Web 2.0 works, baby.” I wish I could say there was a silver lining. I wish I had a bulletproof suggestion for how to make sure your brand management isn’t tossed to the wind. I don’t. Community pages are designed to be “dedicated to a topic or experience that is owned collectively by the community connected to it,” which is fine for pages about Pogs and brewing your own beer. It’s trouble for companies though. I doubt this story is anywhere near over.

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In the beginning, Le Moyne College’s main website was powered by a set of static web pages with a small dose of custom-written ASP to serve as our first entry into content management.  As typically happens on campuses everywhere, as Le Moyne began a branding revision in 2008, one common theme that was echoed across campus was the need for a better distributed content management system that could be easily extended to content providers.

The problem?  Our budget was extremely small, eliminating the more commonly-implemented CMS tools.   Knowing that we wanted to use an open-source tool that would grow with us and utilize our .NET skills, we began to look at DNN.  Much like Duke’s use of Drupal, we also rely on DNN as a framework and a content management system. DNN calls themselves the “most widely adopted web CMS for business-critical .NET web sites”, touting the fact it can serve as a CMS or a development platform.  DNN uses a three-tier architecture model with a core framework that supports extensible modules.  Third party modules can be (and in our experience need to be) added to extend the functionality.  The look and feel of a DNN site can have unlimited customization using skins and containers (think templates). The LeMoyne.edu Environment Online registration has helped automate much of our Admission staff workflow We’re currently running the Community Edition of DotNetNuke (version 4.8.4) and are in the process of upgrading to Professional Edition 5.3.2.   We’ll talk about the difference between Community and Professional editions later on. In terms of hardware powering the site, we’re currently running IIS 6 and SQL Server 8 on a Windows 2003 server, but are beginning the process to upgrade to a Windows 2008 server with IIS 7 and SQL Server 2008.  We’re also planning to implement Active Directory, which will eliminate the need for us to use the native DNN security roles and manual account creation. We currently have roughly 300 users in our system falling into 2 categories:  those who are content creators for the lemoyne.edu site (accounting for the majority of users) and those who have access to restricted portions of our site (such as our Board of Trustees Members, those taking part in a Cultural Competence Initiative sponsored by our Physician Assistant Program, and class-specific portal sites for students in an Advanced Journalism class).   Access for content providers is role-based, which users being assigned to one of 65 current security roles. Out of the Box and into Production The best part of the deployment experience was getting under the hood to see all the things the system could do and finding tools to simplify 99% of the custom processes that we’d had to write when we were using a system of largely static HTML. Sample skin code with DNN tokens We faced a couple significant challenges, however.  The primary one was communicating to the campus that change was coming.  What worked in our favor was the project was part of the larger integrated marketing initiative, so that eliminated the question of “Why does this need to be done?  The site seems pretty good as it is.”   The other huge challenge we faced was to change the campus mindset from organizing the site’s information architecture by the campus organization chart to an audience-based and task-based structure.  Some of the biggest battles on our campus came not from the decision to move to a content management system or deploying the technology, but from getting buy-in from campus offices that the changes were needed. Another challenge I faced during the DNN implementation was to convert the templates created by the local design agency we were working with into CSS-based skins.  All the designs were given to us as table-based layouts.  Creating skins within the DNN framework is a fairly straightforward process once you understand the token and class structure that’s used in DNN pages (called tabs) and containers that hold the DNN modules used on a tab.   (http://www.skinningtoolkit.com is an excellent resource to dig into how the DNN pieces will fit together on a skin.  We also invested in a subscription to DNNCreative Magazine http://www.dnncreative.com/ which contains video tutorials for everything from skinning to developing modules, to working with the DNN core functionality) Deployment went very smoothly because we’d had DNN up and running in a live environment, had the server technologies in place, and had the Microsoft-based skill sets.  Out of the box, DNN comes with a pretty solid feature set, but we did find as we began bringing the content into the system, we had to find some third-party modules to supplement the core functions.  As an example, we discovered that the DNN core video module could not be configured to not auto-play videos, so we purchased a YouTube-like gallery for less than $100 that gave us better customization of playback, plus provided tagging, user comments, and categorizing videos.  On the other hand, DNN’s core Repository module was a perfect tool to allow us to create collections of files that had detailed descriptive information, author contact information, and file size that was not only categorized and searchable, but also allowed community features such as user rating and reviews. We actually deployed the system two months ahead of schedule.  Our deadline was shifted with the college’s new president coming to campus and identifying the website as a strategic priority for redevelopment.  I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him it couldn’t be done! Staffing Requirements Sample text editing screen System, module, and user support is handled through Information Technology.  Our Communications office is responsible for design of new page elements and ensuring that our content providers stay in line with the college’s design and marketing standards.   There is one student worker within Information Technology that also provides support.   This model is working well for us and because of the size of our institution; the partnership between IT and the Communications groups works well.  While additional staffing would allow us to move further with development, budget constraints are preventing that conversation from happening for a while. The Bottom Line When we first launched our DNN site, the biggest annual cost of ownership was an support subscription through the DNN Corporation ($6,000 annually).  DNN has shifted their model to now have two editions:  Community and Professional.  Community remains completely open source, but the Professional edition now includes support ($1,999 annually).    The Professional edition (which we are in the process of implementing) includes new features like more granular permissions, as well as version control (both of which are lacking in the Community edition).  We typically spend around $1,000 annually on licensing new modules to enhance our environment and on training. Keeping the Lights on We’ve been very happy with how our site has scaled and performed since deploying DNN.  We’ve seen a 200% increase in traffic to the site since we’ve launched.    One unintended benefit has been that DNN’s user creation and security role functions have helped us answer the question of how to remove access to student workers.  In our static system, we relied on FTP to post content to the site, so removing accounts had to be done manually on the server.  DNN lets us set an expiration date for our users, which has helped us support offices that use a high volume of student workers to contribute content to the site with the knowledge that when they leave the institution, their access will be removed as well. One area where it has not scaled well for us is URL re-writing.  We have purchased a commercial module to help with this following our upgrade, but currently we use a pretty cumbersome system of creating IIS redirects to provide vanity url’s and landing pages.  Another area where we have had issues is with the lack of version control (we tried a couple commercial modules to help, but they were difficult for our content providers to work with).  We’re looking forward to version control in the professional edition. Pushing the Envelope Video gallery integrates with Amazon’s S3 service From what we’ve seen and heard from the DNN community, the size of our implementation by far pushes the limits of a typical DNN installation (we’re currently serving 2,100 pages through DNN). We’ve created an online training library using a couple of the modules which has helped us reach a broader number of users that couldn’t attend in-person training during the work day.  We’ve also implemented Amazon’s S3 service for video streaming and storage.  Our video module integrates seamlessly with S3 to eliminate the need to have video files stored and served from our campus network.  One of the features we’re starting to roll out to a greater audience across campus is using the child portal concept as a framework to allow a class to create content.   We’ve also been able to successfully run a commerce platform allowing us to accept admission deposits online, as well as provide laptops for purchase to the campus. Does it Play Well with Others? We’re at the beginning of a portal redevelopment project, so we haven’t done much in the way of integrating any DNN features with our ERP system or vice-versa.  As we move forward with our Active Directory implementation, logging into DNN will be seamless (we currently manually create accounts and assign users to the appropriate security role without any password synchronization). We’re in the middle of our first project where course information will come out of our ERP system and we’ll use the XML module to display that data in DNN to have updated information from our College catalog readily available online (instead of a pdf of the catalog). What if I Need Help? If someone doesn’t want to purchase a Professional Edition license which includes an online help ticketing system, there are still plenty of sources for support.  DNN Creative has a very active community of DNN users that have been a great resource for troubleshooting.   The main DNN site also has an extensive community of active developers. We’ve also had very good luck working with our module vendors.   One cautionary note is that DNN will not provide support for any third-party modules that have been added to your DNN installation.  It will be interesting to see if that position changes based on DNN’s relatively new partnership with Snowcovered (a warehouse of third-party modules for DNN) I’ve also had good luck following a couple recognized DNN leaders (@WillStrohl, @leesykes, @mitchelsellers) on Twitter for quick answers to questions or recommendations of best practices. Will it Work for You? The primary reason we selected DNN was because our skillsets aligned perfectly with the .NET platform and we had the SQL and IIS infrastructure in place.  At the point where we selected DNN, the cost of commercial alternatives was prohibitive as well. A couple things that we really liked that may not appeal to everyone included our commitment to enhancing or deploying third-party modules.  Because of DNN’s commitment to open source, developers are welcome to tweak the modules, as well as develop their own solutions. We also were very attracted to the flexibility to develop skins (or templates) within the DNN framework.  But that is a process much like building an HTML template from the ground up. While it might be present in future versions, reporting can be a bit of a challenge as well, but I’ve been able to write some custom SQL queries to generate the answers we need (the biggest example is who has permissions to edit specific modules within the system) We also had to make a pretty sizable commitment going in to training because it was a dramatic shift in how things were done on campus (although I’m sure that’s true with any rollout).  So in addition to creating skins, implementing and configuring the modules we needed, and bringing content into the system, we held over 20 training sessions on campus (the one thing that worked against us was that the implementation took place over the summer, so it was difficult to reach large chunks of departments).  I’ve been developing a series of videos using Jing that we’re posting on our training site to cut down the in-person sessions conducted in the future and address the commonly-used features of the modules.

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Wednesday we received information that was both surprising and almost unbelievable from a friend and reader of ours over in Colorado. After some digging and communication with other contacts we have confirmed with other schools and the CO State Controller that it appears that the state of Colorado has advised state agencies, including higher ed, to halt the use of Facebook indefinitely. Yes, you read that correctly.

Here’s the issue, as we understand it. Recently, section 15 part 2 of the Facebook Terms of Service was brought to the attention of the state attorney general. That section reads: 15. Disputes 2: If anyone brings a claim against us related to your actions, content or information on Facebook, you will indemnify and hold us harmless from and against all damages, losses, and expenses of any kind (including reasonable legal fees and costs) related to such claim. The apparent problem is that the CO state constitution forbids such an agreement. Indemnity is the paying of damages or a sum of money paid in compensation for loss or injury, in this case if you were to do something that got Facebook sued, you agree to pay them back. The issue in point seems to be CRS §24-30-202(1), which states that the state controller has to approve any “contract,” in this case including the Facebook TOS, with regard to the agreement of paying any money out. As a result, they determined the best course of action (legally speaking) was to advise state agencies to suspend the use of Facebook while they work to negotiate around the issue of indemnity. The state attorney general had no comment about the specific instructions or advice given to the organizations, nor about what actions are currently being pursued with Facebook. So, here’s the thing. It’s not that Colorado is going all “we hate Facebook” on everyone. It’s nothing like that at all. It’s a case where the wild world of web site terms of service is coming into conflict with the realm of state contract law, and people weren’t sure how to respond. As we understand it, the state is or will be negotiating with Facebook to find a resolution to this issue, at which point we can assume agencies will be allowed to resume their use of Facebook (hopefully) normally. But how long that takes, and how successful they are will be variables that we’ll have to wait to find out about. Facebook has never, and reasonably would never actively use indemnity as a weapon to go after users – imagine the PR storm that would follow. More likely, it’s boilerplate legalese that is there just for general protection in cases of serious abuses. What’s more, this issue isn’t just about Facebook, it’s just what started it. Here’s MySpace’s (it’s actually even worse): 17. Indemnity. You agree to indemnify and hold MySpace, its subsidiaries, and affiliates, subcontractors and other partners, and their respective officers, agents, partners and employees, harmless from any loss, liability, claim, or demand, including, but not limited to, reasonable attorneys’ fees, made by any third party due to or arising out of your use of the MySpace Services in violation of this Agreement and/or arising from a breach of this Agreement and/or any breach of your representations and warranties set forth in this Agreement and/or any Content that you post on, through or in connection with the MySpace Services. And YouTube: 5. Your Use of Content on the Site G. You understand that when using the YouTube Website, you will be exposed to User Submissions from a variety of sources, and that YouTube is not responsible for the accuracy, usefulness, safety, or intellectual property rights of or relating to such User Submissions. You further understand and acknowledge that you may be exposed to User Submissions that are inaccurate, offensive, indecent, or objectionable, and you agree to waive, and hereby do waive, any legal or equitable rights or remedies you have or may have against YouTube with respect thereto, and agree to indemnify and hold YouTube, its Owners/Operators, affiliates, and/or licensors, harmless to the fullest extent allowed by law regarding all matters related to your use of the site. And probably one of the scariest ones, Ning: 22. Indemnity You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Ning, and its successors, subsidiaries, affiliates, co-branders, contractors, employees, all third-party advertisers, technology providers, service providers or other partners, and each of their respective officers, directors, agents, shareholders, employees and representatives, from and against any third party claim, demand, loss, damage, cost, or liability (including, reasonable attorneys’ fees) arising out of or relating to: * Your Code, Your Content or Your Social Network; * Your use of any Non-Ning Code or Third Party Applications; * Your use or misuse of, or connection to, the Ning Platform; * Your breach or alleged breach of this Agreement; * Your violation of any rights (including intellectual property rights) of a third party; * Your use or misuse of any User data (including Ning Member Data and Network Member Data), including, in violation of the Ning Privacy Policy and * Your breach or alleged breach of any agreement or policy between you and other Users. Ning reserves the right, at your expense, to assume the exclusive defense and control of any matter for which you are required to indemnify us and you agree to cooperate with our defense of these claims. You agree not to settle any matter without the prior written consent of Ning. Ning will use reasonable efforts to notify you of any such claim, action or proceeding upon becoming aware of it. Anyway, I think you get the idea (note that I couldn’t find anything in Twitter’s TOS about indemnity or holding harmless). It’s not that these companies are all “RAWR, WE’RE GONNA TAKE ALL YOU’S MONIESSS!“, it’s just that this is extremely common, protectionary contract verbiage. But, regardless of how innocuous it is, it clearly can have a real world impact on those of us in the public sector, where we have higher rules and laws dictating some of our activities. In Colorado’s case, it’s not that they are responding to a problem that arose, they just want to prevent any issues from happening in the first place. Even if we all know that the threat of any liability here isn’t worth breaking a sweat over, the laws are the laws. Welcome to the world of state employment. Here’s the advise I can give you: inform yourself. Know what your state’s position is on indemnity clauses in web site terms of service. Ask your legislative liaisons and campus lawyers questions. Once this information gets out very far, you can bet Colorado won’t be the last one to go through this situation, so be sure you are prepared and know your state’s legal traps. And in the same breath, READ TOSs! I know the minute I say that everyone goes “Yeah! We should!“, and then immediately goes back to checking boxes and clicking agree to everything. But the reality is, in private there’s not much risk, but in our day job the rules change. Make sure you understand where these conflicts can happen. I’ll keep this post updated as we get more information and as news develops. If you’ve been through similar experiences in your state or school, be sure to share them in the comments below.

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Lately, I have heard Drupal referred to as a “framework” in addition to a content management system. After building several Drupal sites, I would have to agree. A core Drupal installation gives you very little to start with. However, with the help of widely-used contributed modules, you can build anything from a personal blog, up to http://www.grammy.com or http://www.whitehouse.gov.

Or http://www.duke.edu. Duke University’s information technology units have historically followed a decentralized model. As a result, Drupal isn’t “the” CMS at Duke, it’s one of three supported by the central web services team. WordPress and Cascade Server are the other two, and many others can be found across the university as well. That said, however, Drupal is gaining in popularity, and increasingly more division and department websites at Duke are built in Drupal. We also redesigned our institutional homepage in Drupal in the fall of 2009. Duke’s centrally-hosted Drupal instances run in a LAMP environment (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). However, Drupal can be installed on a Microsoft IIS web server, and it can use a PostgreSQL database - although these aren’t recommended. Our homepage receives around 27,000-30,000 visits per day, and it handles this with ease. A simple Drupal installation is fairly straightforward: Download the most recent version from http://www.drupal.org, put the files on the web server, create a database, and run the install script. However, Drupal is very bare-bones out of the box; the current version does not even include a WYSIWYG editor. It is almost always necessary to supplement the Drupal core with add-on modules. And, if you do not find a contributed module that fits your needs, a developer with decent PHP chops can write a custom module, and even contribute it back to the community if desired. This can be daunting to people who are accustomed to getting more out of the box with their CMS. However, the bare-bones core is actually a boon to developers, as it makes Drupal very easy to customize. That said, it’s tempting to go overboard with contributed modules. However, installing a large number of modules can be resource intensive and substantially slow your system down, so you have to find a happy medium. My main caveat to anyone considering Drupal is the need for adequate development resources, preferably in-house. While it is certainly possible to get a Drupal site up and running without HTML or programming experience, it would be a very difficult task and your site will mostly likely not look very good, to be perfectly blunt. Templates are created with HTML, CSS, and some PHP. You can either build your own templates, or install an existing theme. If you want to create your own template, you don’t need to be an expert in PHP but it is necessary to have a basic idea of the syntax. PHP is not needed to install modules, but if you want to embark on creating your own, then it’s a must. The central IT unit at Duke has three developers and two systems administrators who work directly with Drupal; individual school and department units have their own IT staff and are responsible for their own Drupal installations. Our central web team is always building new websites, and maintaining Drupal is only one of our responsibilities. Once a site is up and running, our only involvement is upgrading Drupal periodically or building additional features onto an existing site if the client requests them. Drupal is free and open source, and we host our sites in house. Therefore, all of our costs are absorbed into hosting costs and staff salaries. This, of course does not mean that Drupal has been completely free for us. As a case in point, the Duke.edu redesign consumed a large percentage of three developers’ time for over two months, which kept us from working on other projects. Drupal has an option for multi-site installation: running multiple websites off of the same code base, with each site getting its own database (it’s also possible to run multiple sites off of the same database or to share tables; for example, a user table). Multi-site simplifies upgrades substantially. We have some websites running off a multi-site install, and some standalone instances. This is due primarily to our decentralized organizational model than a limitation of Drupal, per se. High availability was one of our main concerns when we first started thinking about using Drupal for the Duke.edu site. Since content is stored in a database and files are PHP, the site is already more resource intensive than one comprised of flat HTML files. There are a number of caching mechanisms built into Drupal as well as additional modules that can boost the caching further. We enabled these but just to be on the safe side, we also used GNU Wget, a tool for retrieving files and outputting them as flat HTML. When site visitors go to the Duke.edu front page, they are actually viewing a flat HTML file rather than dynamic PHP output. Wget is triggered regularly by a scheduled cron job so to the content stays fresh. This cuts down on page load time substantially. Duke uses a Google Search Appliance and a custom people directory search program. Because these systems were already in place before our redesign, we chose to wrap them in the site template, rather than build them into Drupal itself. However, we were able to incorporate data from other systems into Drupal directly. We use a module that not only pulls in items to the homepage from the news site and institutional calendar, but also allows content editors to cherry-pick which items should display. They enjoy the ease with which content is imported from these other systems, but also the editorial control the cherry-picking affords them. Drupal has a module for incorporating Shibboleth authentication, which Duke’s Division of Student Affairs has implemented on their installation. Since Drupal is open source, there is no official support built in. That said, however, the Drupal user community is wonderfully helpful. http://drupal.org has links to tutorials and documentation as well as the user forums. I initially found the myriad resources on the internet to be sensory overload, so I actually found a book to be most helpful when getting started (“Using Drupal” published by O’Reilly, was my favorite). Lullabot provides a variety of instructional videos and training as well. I’ve also found my local Drupal users’ group to be an invaluable resource. Even though most Drupal developers I’ve met through the group work outside of higher education, they have been very helpful when troubleshooting and brainstorming. Drupal is known as “developer-friendly,” in the sense that it is highly flexible. One of my favorite aspects of Drupal is that it allows you to customize the format of your data to the logic of the content, rather than squeezing your content into a predefined set of form fields in which it might not logically fit. Editors have reported to us that content entry feels more intuitive to them in Drupal than in more rigidly defined CMS’s. The downside of this is that you get very little out of the box with Drupal, and the developer learning curve is relatively steep. There is a lot of configuration that needs to be done at the outset just to get a site off the ground. It’s crucial to have a Drupal developer (if not more!) on staff, or the resources to hire an outside firm. However I would be remiss if I did not mention Acquia, a company that provides products, services, and technical support for Drupal, and founded by the creator of Drupal. Acquia offers various pricing models with differing levels of support and maintenance, all the way up to a fully-hosted option. I personally have never used Acquia, but have heard only good things about it. Acquia might be a good option for organizations that would like to use Drupal but do not have resources available to keep up with support and version updates. As much as I love Drupal, I will be the first to admit that it is not the best tool for every website — which is why we support three CMS’s in our web office. A small standalone departmental site consisting of only a few informational pages and maybe a listing of news stories? I’d probably build that in WordPress or Cascade Server because the structure of the site is simple and I could build it much more quickly in either of those than in Drupal. But a website in which the clients want a blog, a database of case studies that can be searched in a variety of ways, a discussion forum… and they’ll probably want to add additional functionality later? That site would be an excellent candidate for Drupal. Our next steps for Drupal at Duke? Build more Drupal websites, of course! All kidding aside, our major priority is investigating ways to speed up the rollout and upgrade process for our standalone instances, as well as developing a slightly more streamlined hosting model overall. We are also looking to establish a more cohesive Drupal user community at Duke. Increasingly more departments and organizational units are adopting Drupal as their CMS. But because of our decentralized IT structure, Drupal developers at Duke often operate in isolation from one another. The global user community is one of the greatest benefits of Drupal, so we need to take our cue and foster greater camaraderie among Drupal developers within our own institution.

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Would you like your very own, shiny copy of The Cluetrain Manifesto by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger? Of course you do, it’s an awesome book, and I want to help you get it. And believe it or not, it’ll be FREE (as in beer).

Harry C. Edwards of Amazon.com writes about the book: How would you classify a book that begins with the salutation, “People of Earth…”? While the captains of industry might dismiss it as mere science fiction, The Cluetrain Manifesto is definitely of this day and age. Aiming squarely at the solar plexus of corporate America, authors Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger show how the Internet is turning business upside down. They proclaim that, thanks to conversations taking place on Web sites and message boards, and in e-mail and chat rooms, employees and customers alike have found voices that undermine the traditional command-and-control hierarchy that organizes most corporate marketing groups. “Markets are conversations,” the authors write, and those conversations are “getting smarter faster than most companies.” In their view, the lowly customer service rep wields far more power and influence in today’s marketplace than the well-oiled front office PR machine.
The Cluetrain Manifesto began as a Web site (www.cluetrain.com) in 1999 when the authors, who have worked variously at IBM, Sun Microsystems, the Linux Journal, and NPR, posted 95 theses that pronounced what they felt was the new reality of the networked marketplace. For example, thesis no. 2: “Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors”; thesis no. 20: “Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them”; thesis no. 62: “Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall”; thesis no. 74: “We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.” The book enlarges on these themes through seven essays filled with dozens of stories and observations about how business gets done in America and how the Internet will change it all. While Cluetrain will strike many as loud and over the top, the message itself remains quite relevant and unique. This book is for anyone interested in the Internet and e-commerce, and is especially important for those businesses struggling to navigate the topography of the wired marketplace. All aboard! Fair disclosure: See, I picked up a copy of the first printing a while back. Shortly thereafter, I got a copy of the revised edition. Naturally, I don’t need two, so I’d like to pass on my copy of the first edition to one of our readers as a way of saying thanks for being awesome like you are. “So Michael, basically you’re just pawning your old junk off on us?” Yeah. I am. But I promise it’s totally in great shape, and the information is far from out of date. And regardless, did I mention free? So, how do I get this little prize gem of a book? It’s darn simple, let me tell ya’ (that’s how we say “you” in Kansas-talk). Down under this post is a section for comments. Tell me why you want it and how you hope to use the information to help people become better at what they do, or make you better at what you do. Be sure to enter your Twitter handle or a valid email so I can contact you if you win. That’s it. And remember, if you lie in your answer, I probably can’t tell, so just make it a good lie. At some point in the future, maybe this afternoon, maybe the next Groundhog Day (okay, probably more like in a day or two) I’ll pick one of the entries by some fancy criteria that involves randomness combined with non-randomness, and I’ll give that person the book. And look, I’m not saying that tweeting about your entry with a link to this post and the hashtag #wincluetrain will necessarily help your chances at winning, but it might help your chances at winning. #justsayin I’ll ship the book anywhere in the US for free. For our international friends, I’ll ship it to you, too. I think that covers everyone, right? Extraterrestrials, sorry, my transporter is down for repairs.

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At the end of February, .eduGuru set out to begin another round of research on a trend in higher ed web development. This time, we took a look at the CMSs being used from school to school. Which CMS to use for a university is a question that lingers in forums and on mailing lists frequently, and it’s our hope that you will find the following information helpful in deciding which system will be best for you. Additionally, we’ll be following up with a series of guest articles over the next couple months that will discuss their experience using the top CMSs from this list for their school’s web site. This post will be fairly long in order to review all the data. If you want, you can download the data now and review it on your own (this data has been edited to provide anonymity to the contributors. Additionally, this research is released under a by-sa Creative Commons 3.0 License. It is provided as a zip file with .xls, .pdf, .csv, and .ods formats for your convenience).

“This is one of the more political and important decisions a university makes. Every system has its benefits and drawbacks, but it is almost impossible to compare systems. This is especially true since you really don’t know the system until you’ve been using it for years, and at that point it is too late to switch or be able to evaluate other products.”~ Survey comment The golden question: Which CMS should I use? Well, as you can expect, that’s not a simple thing to answer. As you can see in the chart below, the top four (excluding in house solutions), is spread pretty evenly. OmniUpdate comes out at the top of the list, which isn’t surprising given the length of time they’ve been around, and the fact that they have produced a higher ed targeted, feature rich CMS. The other three – dotCMS, Cascade, and Drupal – run neck and neck, which is interesting, since these three systems are all quite different. But, that does emphasize the point that different schools will have different needs, and will choose a CMS to fit those needs. Always take the time to properly identify what needs and requirements you have before selecting a CMS.

PHP and Java rule the roost as programming language, with PHP just barely leading. Together, they make up more than half of what is being used in higher ed. This is good news for those looking to staff up on programmers, since these two languages are also generally in the top four most popular programming languages in general (along with C and C++), meaning applicant pools should be bigger for them. I realized I made a mistake and left Ruby on Rails off the survey, but it turns out that it has definitely not hit the radar, and was written in by only one school. Note: some survey entries were modified for uniformity and to correct incorrect platform language identification.

Schools were fairly evenly split in whether or not they had more than one CMS available on campus. Larger schools, with good reason, were more likely to offer multiple CMSs as opposed to small schools. Wordpress was one of the most popular secondary CMSs, probably as it sees significant use as a blogging platform, rather than primary site CMS. In fact, the secondary CMS reports showed additional penetration by other open source CMSs as well, like Joomla and Drupal. These systems will generally prove easier to deploy in a supplementary capacity since they usually have shallower learning curves and quicker turnaround times.

By and large, schools host their own CMS. I believe this is perfectly reasonable, since we normally have access to heavy iron more than capable of hosting a web server, and we’re connected to pipes with equally available bandwidth. The largest exception was OmniUpdate, which was mainly hosted by the vendor. They made up 75% of the responses that said they were hosted by their vendor. Of OmniUpdate users specifically, only one-third host it themselves. It should be noted, however, that this is intentional on their part.

Over half the schools (53%, 58% when unknowns are excluded) host only 5,000 or fewer pages. There was significant dropoff after 100,000 pages. This data roughly mirrors the demographics of survey respondents – 65% were from schools of 10,000 students or less. Small schools are more likely to have fewer pages, 75% have 10,000 pages or fewer versus 51% of large schools.

High traffic sites might be concerned about the number of pages they can serve without taxing their hosting resources. Surprisingly, if you serve over one million pageviews in a month, you are in the minority of universities. Note that some systems, such as Cascade, do push publishing to a second server, or others might have something like a Squid proxy running, so the CMS itself isn’t necessarily responsible for serving pages to a visitor. These statistics do not take that difference into account. Also of note, nobody serving over one million pages a month reported using Wordpress or Drupal.

One quarter of respondents don’t make usage of their CMS mandatory. About half (47%) do, with another 28% having flexible rules. It would seem the trend definitely is towards trying to get people to use a central system. A slightly higher percentage, 35%, of larger schools don’t make CMS usage mandatory. Otherwise, statistics between large and small schools are relatively similar.

An interesting result, there appears to be relative consistency in the number of contributors schools have at each level, with a peak between 101 and 250 users. Only seven systems were being reportedly used with more than 500 users (each with only one vote): Contribute, Luminis, Plone, OpenText, Cascade, Ironpoint, and Drupal. The average satisfaction with a CMS appears to drop over 500 users as well, dropping by half a point among those users. “Choosing and implementing a CMS can be done within a small organization like ours. However, getting the culture to change to accept distributed ownership of web content is much tougher!”~ Survey comment

Regardless of the reason why, almost three quarters of users surveyed said they’d use the same system again, whether because they just liked it, or because it would be better than risking a switch to a worse system. The rest would either switch because they want a better system, or because options now are better then when they first deployed their current CMS. This metric didn’t take into account those who might be on the fence as to what they would do. Large schools were more likely than both small schools and the average to reuse the same system. Users of Contribute and custom/homegrown CMSs were most likely to want to change (71% and 62% respectively). That doesn’t include Serena Collage users, all of whom would change for obvious reasons (the product is no longer being supported). “The real answer to the question about whether we would choose the same platform again from us would be: We’d do another analysis before concluding anything. Since we haven’t done that in ~4 years, for now we’d stick with what we have, but if we were really considering things again, we’d spend several months on a market analysis before concluding anything.”~ Survey comment

Overall satisfaction was rated on a scale of 1 to 10. No conditions were set on how to rate the satisfaction, so this is very qualitative. The average score was 7.04. Contribute failed miserably out of all the CMSs (based on a minimum of five schools reporting usage). OmniUpdate took the crown, doing better than a 9 overall. Reason, a PHP based open source CMS developed out of Carleton College, came in second at 8.6, and dotCMS took third at 8.08. Schools using custom or homegrown solutions were more than a point under average, falling below a 6. Smaller schools were more likely to give higher marks to their CMS, though the total average score swing between large and small schools was only about a quarter point.

Top three paid CMSs*:

OmniUpdate Hannon Hill Cascade Ektron

• Based on reported satisfaction, minimum 5 ratings Top three open source CMSs*:

Reason dotCMS^ Drupal

• Based on reported satisfaction, minimum 5 ratings ^ dotCMS does offer a paid enterprise branch Top three used CMSs*:

OmniUpdate dotCMS Cascade

• Based on number of surveyed schools using them, excluding custom and homegrown CMSs If you download the raw data, you can read all the comments, pros, and cons people listed with each system. For the sake of brevity, I only included a couple here. This article will be followed up in the coming weeks by several guest posts discussing all the top used CMSs to give you a look inside other people’s experiences. In those posts, we’ll include some of the specific pros and cons that survey respondents submitted. Direct your thoughts and questions in the comments below, and we can continue discussing any of the metrics you’d like to.

[Results] Higher Ed CMS Usage by Michael Fienen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.Based on a work at doteduguru.com.

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If there is one question that serves as the elephant in the room for higher education web development, it’s: “What CMS should I use?” The question is common, but not at all simple, and research data is not easy to come by. We would like to provide some helpful information in this area, and have began work on a series of articles that will feature different schools and the CMSs that they use. While there is no right answer to the question, we want to help you make educated decisions.

The first step we wanted to take is to get a snapshot of just what was being used. We’re asking you, our readers, to take five minutes today to click the link below and fill out a quick survey so that we can show people just what is popular today, and provide a handful of examples for those researching CMSs to check out (and be sure to tweet, email, or share the survey with colleagues at other schools). We’ll follow up with a report on the results, and then begin a series of user contributed articles talking about their experience deploying and using particular CMSs. (And be sure to check out CMS Matrix if you need a tool to begin doing comparisons with.) Our hope is that this will help provide some stepping stones for those designing, redesigning, or realigning a site who need a new CMS to serve as the foundation for their university’s site. We appreciate any information you can share with us! Start taking the survey » photo credit: bionicteaching

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I should probably feel terrible for making a play on Ray Kurzweil’s famous book title, because I don’t think I’m quite good enough to borrow from someone like him. But, I did it anyway. I know, I’m without shame. I’ve come to terms with that. I want to go a little editorial on you all here, and look at a growing problem among higher ed institutions (and the private sector as well): How do you handle the mutliheaded monster that is the state of your web site?

Everything is coming together. Slowly, steadily, it’s all about to come crashing together in an energy producing, gamma ray blasting, supernova explosion. Twenty years ago when the first colleges and universities started getting in to the web (and ten to fifteen years ago when it became more commonplace) the web was a very decentralized and amorphous thing. Rarely was there central control because there was no central to do the controlling to begin with yet. Part of our issue with centralized control now is that frequently colleges and departments started sites entirely on their own to begin with, and now don’t want to give up that freedom (whether or not they are doing good things with that freedom). That’s a problem many of us are dealing with, generally with varied success. Usually the move to an increasingly centralized control can be made or broken on the backs of high level buy in. That is crucial, especially with what I’m talking about, something that can span departments, colleges, and the university on the whole. The issue I’m seeing is way bigger than that. It goes beyond who should be allowed to put content on the Art department’s web site. Look at your web presence – the whole thing. You likely have a web site that is all front facing and public, right? What about an intranet? Student portal? E-commerce platform? Student information system? Alumni portal? Athletics, fundraising, help desk, housing, event ticketing, blog system… The web isn’t just about a stack of HTML files anymore. This is the problem. Of all of these systems present on campus, how many different people are involved in running them, and how many of those are working together (better question: how many are working against each other)? How many are even under the same authority? I’ll happily throw down a stack of money that says you can’t even name everyone responsible for the whole of your web site. Peter Nissen of JBoye.com talks about some of the reasons decentralized control doesn’t work. Despite all of this, we still have a core client to address. They might be in different audiences, but they are all web users, and they have common expectations. Is there someone responsible for looking at a housing management system that can say “Hey guys, this system has some serious usability and integration problems, and I don’t think it’s going to be a good fit in the overall web presence.”? I can answer that for you: you don’t. You should. I’m sure there are a couple exceptions out there that have gotten over this hump (and PLEASE share your experience in the comments, I’d love to see what you have to say). We see similar issues with content. Kristina Halvorson, in her book Content Strategy for the Web, looks at the web like a news show, newspaper, or magazine. All have to have multiple content types and sources, all reach an end user, and all need to have a central point of oversight to make sure it’s right. Where’s our editor-in-chief? The Singularity in this case is user expectation with respect to our systems. Your web visitors don’t care that you have a dozen different systems and applications running to make their web experience happen. All they know is that if it sucks, then you must be failing. They get angry, they get frustrated. They want a simple, seamless experience. If you’re familiar with the MVC style of programming, users want a single, standard view, not dozens. And to put it simply, the systems are starting to get good enough that our excuses for not working towards that goal are getting very thin. It might be hard, it might take time, but that’s our job. We aren’t here to just set something up, slap the school colors on it, and walk away. If you aren’t striving to do better than that, then you are probably falling prey to the very issues I’m talking about. Imagine if you will a cruise ship. Cruise ships have tons of components that make your vacation happen. Some you have direct contact with, some not. Engineers, cooks, stewards, bridge crew, medical, security, performers, and so on. Imagine if all of these people tried to make your cruise happen without any central management. It’d be a mess, a complete disaster. Every cruise ship has a captain. The captain might not know the fine nuance of the water reclamation system, but he can at least make sure their team coordinates with the right people when there’s trouble or when a common goal must be achieved. He can’t do the job of all 2,000 employees on the ship, but he is a successful planner. He dictates, directs, and designates well. He’s a 3D sort of guy (get it? 3D? Because he dictates, des… oh nevermind). That’s what we need. Our web sites need a captain. That captain doesn’t have to be a Python guru, or a master of Flash, or a jQuery ninja. But, he should know the heading and be able to make sure efforts are properly and efficiently coordinated. Their knowledge should be broad, but not always deep. That’s why you hire the experts in the respective fields for your specific tasks. Our problems aren’t going to get simpler moving ahead. It used to be a web site was a handful of GIF animations and a dozen HTML pages. Now we have CMSs, tens of thousands of pages, multiple servers, and all that just to maintain our front facing presence. In the coming years, these systems will have more crosstalk, not less. Expectations will increase, not decline. And the complexity of our sites will balloon. Centralized control might not be a popular idea to a lot of people, but it will become a necessity for success, regardless of how big your university is. That’s my prediction. The alternative risks a mess of code, duplicated efforts, and upset development teams. Without someone at the helm, to use a phrase from Twitter this morning, running your site will be like pushing a wheelbarrow of squirrels. That’s my rant for today. Our needs are going to come together, as users and providers, and we’re all going to be looking for something central to tell us what to do. We’re already near the event horizon of this problem. It will be up to us how we’ll handle crossing the threshold. Illustration by NASA/Dana Berry, SkyWorks Digital Inc.

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Okay, today marks the launch of an exciting new experiment – and hopefully permanent addition to the .eduGuru web site. We all have a lot of resources at our disposal in our day to day job, and we want you to consider us among them. So, to kick this off, note the new button in the navigation bar for “Ask the Gurus.”

The Ask the Gurus page is set up so you can send a question to us. This message will go to the entire .eduGuru staff, and will allow one or more of us to answer your question and give you some feedback that you’ll hopefully find helpful. This might be a question about which CMS to use, a good content strategy, or an opinion on a landing page design. Then, once a month or so we’ll feature some of the best questions we get in a post for everyone. You can opt out of that if you’d rather not share your question, or if you want to share the question but remain anonymous, you can do that to. We just ask a couple things:

We’re happy to help out and lend advice, but we aren’t a consulting firm. As such, we ask that you help us by observing the “use, don’t abuse” rule. The simpler your questions are, the more quickly we’ll be able to get back with you. We don’t know what kind of volume to expect yet since this is brand new, so be patient if it takes us a little while to answer you. If you want this to become a permanent component of the .eduGuru site, please, USE IT! That’s how we’ll know how successful it is. Understand that just because you say we can share your question doesn’t mean that we will. If you appreciate the tool, please let us know! We want to find ways to better serve our audience in 2010, and if you think this is a good way of doing it (or not), your feedback will help us direct our efforts.

Down the road, besides monthly posts, we’re also considering building a “knowledge base” of sorts out of the questions and answers that are produced as a result of this little experiment. We’ll be watching how this whole thing works out. We hope you like it and find it helpful!

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Towards the end of 2009, we started a new survey of higher ed web professionals to take a look at one potential way that you are using the resources around you. The question centered on a fairly simple, central concept: odds are that on your campus you have classes teaching the creation of different kinds of media, are you leveraging them to add media to your web site? I have to admit the response surprised me. No. No you aren’t.

Before I dive too far in to what we learned, let me be transparent. I personally don’t feel we got enough responses to be statistically significant beyond the general answer of no. A total of 42 of you answered the survey, half of those were from schools between 1,001 and 5,000 students. Rather than throw away the survey, I do want to share some of the points that I think were of value. Just keep in mind the reality of some of this information might differ from the snapshot we got, so use care if you want to make a case for something and are citing this survey. Despite the low return on responses, only 5% (2 people) said they do use content generated in courses on their site. That left the remaining 95% in the no column. No matter what, that to me was telling. It would definitely appear this is not a resource you are tapping, and that surprises me. However, out of those that said no, 44% said they had in the past, and 69% said that they would consider it in the future (that number goes up to 97% when including the ‘maybes’), the biggest barrier (34%) being inter-office communication. It would largely seem that the primary reason people aren’t doing this is that no one is getting together and talking about it. Concerns like the quality of results can be addressed if people got together and talked. But, that was barrier number two – according to 31% of you, you just don’t have a department on campus to talk to about this kind of content development, even if you wanted to. Obviously that’s a harder problem to solve. The reason I started this survey is because it’s a concept I’ve talked about a little with some faculty on our campus. We have interest, we just need to coordinate the effort. As a university, it seems like from an academic standpoint we have at least some obligation to help kids get their feet wet in this environment. That doesn’t mean letting them redesign the home page, but why couldn’t they help with a student landing page, or marketing efforts? We let television kids produce shows on cable, journalists and photographer are printed, and broadcasting majors make commercials for local radio stations. Yet those interested in the web appear to be given no real chance to interact in a live market. I find that very interesting and a little sad. From the results, here are a couple good comments folks made: “Using student work is just too hit-or-miss and you have to use what they make or no one will want to do the projects for you next time. It’s like having a contest and using whatever you get in contest entries. You might get lucky, but more often you don’t because it’s a conflict of interests. The students’ objective is to learn the medium and get a grade. The university has marketing goals that don’t necessarily align with the class academic goals. Bottom line is, it looks like amateur work and that’s not the image we want to give in our marketing.” What do you thing, is this right? What if you used higher level courses with clear content objectives directed by the teacher? If quality was your biggest concern, it would seem clear communication and planning could help with addressing that. “Our faculty are many years behind on technology, even our computer science instructors.  It makes it hard for students here who know more than they do.  They seem really afraid to even try anything new.  They also seem to not even want to continue learning – just waiting it out to retirement.” This is a more difficult, broad issue. How do you teach the best without the best teachers to begin with? This is one reason I advocate using our positions in higher ed to also be teachers when possible, even if it’s just a night course. So, what can we learn from this? Well, if you aren’t using courses on your campus to generate campus, you are in the overwhelming majority. If it interests you, work on communication. Don’t be afraid to talk to people about ideas you might have, someone has to start the dialog after all. A lot of people are willing to entertain the idea, so don’t ignore the value this approach to content development might provide for you. Better still, if someone comes to you with the idea be sure to vet it properly. Good ideas for web won’t always come out of your office. Click here to view survey results. [Download PDF] photo credit: ekai

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Okay, I simply couldn’t resist tossing out a counterpoint here. This topic was started by Mark Greenfield (who was following up on a Steve Krug presentation) and continued here recently by my colleague Nikki. The reason that I want to run this from the other side is twofold: one, sometimes we just need a boost.  Web work is hard regardless, and I think sometimes it’s too easy to get hung up on the bad. Second, there are plenty of people in the private sector that would trade places with us in a heartbeat, since there are a lot of different upsides to doing web development in higher ed. So, if you are thinking about a career in higher ed, or considering whether or not to continue with it, keep these in mind. 1. Job Security Despite budget cuts around the country, we are still in one of the most stable parts of the industry available. If you’re an army of one, even more so. It’s not because you’re irreplaceable, it’s just that no one wants to hassle with replacing you right now. Most states tend to also have laws or unions that make it additionally hard to get rid of you after X amount of time. So, count your blessings, stay on your game, and you’re almost guaranteed to be here next year. Having that steady paycheck and the other benefits that come with the job can be worth more than the mere dollar number on your pay stub. 2. Flexibility Maybe my situation is unique, but around these parts they basically shovel vacation and sick time on us. They can’t pay us like our private counterparts, true, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t compensated in other ways. And that not withstanding, I know if I picked up the phone and said my kid was sick (hypothetically, since I don’t have a kid), or I was sick, or pipes burst in my house and I have to wait on a plumber, I wouldn’t get an ounce of grief about it. In some cases I could even say I’ll VPN in and get someone to forward my office phone to my cell. There just aren’t many jobs that give me that latitude. And maybe it’s just as simple as “I’ll be in at 8:15 this morning because I’m running late.” I’ve had jobs in the past where something as simple as that was a major issue. Sometimes not sweating ten minutes here and there can be a big stress reliever. 3. Leadership Opportunities Besides the chance for actual leadership classes and such, the number of committees and meetings we are exposed to come with a positive side effect. In the event you do plan to get out of higher ed, you have basically an endless stream of chances to get into leadership positions which you can reflect on a résumé. They might not be glorious or significant, but it still looks good. Use that as a chance to influence the things that bother you. Change the system a little here and there. I’d rather people be annoyed because I’m more ambitious than them, rather than have people think I’m lazy or complacent. A common complaint I hear is that someone’s coworkers are basically just trying to coast to retirement, and any initiative is met with resistance. Use leadership opportunities to change and improve the system for yourself and those after you. 4. Industry Resources This might not be true everywhere, but many schools have various contracts that allow us to get into the latest, greatest versions of different pieces of software whenever there is an upgrade. When we bought Adobe CS3 a couple years ago, it came with a built in, free upgrade to the next version as soon as it came out. So we effectively got both CS3 and CS4 for less that the retail cost of one part of the entire suite. When CS5 comes out, we can get that at a discounted rate. Likewise, if you play the “game” right, it’s pretty easy to keep yourself awash in things like multiple monitors (I can’t debug without them!), Wacom tablets (you try graphic design with a mouse!), cameras (you want web video made with a pad and paper?), etc. In a lot of cases, we’re some of the best equipped web developers out there. 5. Professional Development Okay, this one is a little iffy lately. In the past, things like conferences, manager training, certifications, etc have all been at our feet. Lately, not as much. But there will come a time where the tide shifts back on this. And even still, most of us at least have some kind of development options. Even if it means reaching out to someone like .eduGuru with an idea for an article you’d like to write for the community or something along those lines. There’s a lot you can do that doesn’t cost money that you can accomplish to improve your standing, skills, and position (see leadership opportunities above). In most cases, if you go to your boss and say “I’d really like to do X to help me with Y,” they’re very likely to hold the door open for you and give you the room to accomplish it, money notwithstanding. 6. Challenges I like to think about the things that face us in higher ed as challenges to be overcome. Short or moving deadlines, scope creep, audience targeting, budget silos, you name it. These aren’t barriers, they are hurdles, and the trick is to get good at overcoming them. You do that, and you can make it in web development anywhere, because everyone has these problems to one extent or another, and if it isn’t those problems, it’ll be something else. You need those critical thinking and problem solving skills. I have a job to do, and if there’s something in the way of that, then we need to deal with it. If you do it right, in the process you can set it up so next time it’s much easier to handle. So bring it. 7. You You are the reason I am here, writing at .eduGuru, and enjoying my day to day work life. You make the UWebD social network fun. You make me laugh on Twitter. You are there to help me when I need a second set of eyes on some code. The higher ed web developer community is one of the most open, friendly, active, helpful professional networks that I have ever seen. I can count on untold numbers of you to walk up and say hi to me at conferences, or email me with questions, or take part in surveys and research. I may be an army of one in the office, but I rarely feel alone. Bottom line is that I think that while we do complain about a lot of things in higher ed, I don’t think a lot of those issues are necessarily unique to higher ed. We just feel like they are, because the environment we work in is far from tuned in to how agile the web is, and we all reinforce each other since we identify with each other’s pain so well. We end up feeling like we’re riding an elephant in a NASCAR race, but we fail to notice all the other racers are on pacaderms too. photo credit: cobalt123

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For 2010, it is safe to expect that Twitter will not see a diminished roll in university marketing and admissions strategy plans. However, it’s hard to avoid that some people will be coming to the web guys to have them set up their admissions office with Twitter (or will do it themselves), but then will do very little with it, feeling like they ‘just need to have it to be current.’ Should that happen to you, I wanted to share some of the best uses of Twitter that universities are doing specifically for admission efforts so that you can pass them on as examples of what can be done.

First off, I advocate admission offices having their own Twitter account. For one, primary university accounts are (generally speaking) going to have extremely high concentrations of current students and alumni – audiences that won’t have much interest in admission related news or announcements (that’s not to say that admission messages can’t be selectively passed on to the main stream). Also, a separate account can then be shared amongst admission counselors/staff or tied to things like Facebook pages. After all, you don’t want important admission messages to get drowned out by other university information, or vice versa – segmenting your messages is valuable to making sure users get relevant, targeted content. The challenge is that the audience for admission messages is a moving target. Generally speaking, parents and prospective students will be in the sights of an admission office for about a year, give or take, before either choosing to not enroll or becoming an enrolled student. Either way, beyond that window they usually move into the responsibility of other handlers. That creates certain challenges with measuring success, since follower numbers maybe be prone to fluctuations as interested parties come and go (for whatever reason they may go). The best examples are in this list though not because of their follower numbers, but rather based on how they engage and what they do it with. If you are interested in measuring your own success, look at things like link clickthroughs, retweets, and engagements with other Twitter users. Have conversations and listen; remember, engagement means give and take. Before you go through this list, I want to just toss out one caveat. I generally find that many of these accounts do one or two things well, but at the expense of others. For example, they might retweet really great content but not engage others much, or they might engage great but not share interesting information sources. I encourage those that are looking to do something similar at their school to look at these and take the best qualities and combine them as much as your resources will allow. Also keep in mind I’m looking at these specifically as they pertain to admissions, and not as a mouthpiece for the university on the whole. In no particular order: University of California, Davis follow: @ucdavis Klout score: 29 Why they’re good: UC Davis has done a great job of engagement. They have been featured in 68 lists, as well as provide 10 of their own (great for passing followers on to other areas once they have passed out of admission’s hands). Their follower ratio is 2.6:1, with better than 1,700 followers currently. I love the amount of retweeting they do, as well as actively engaging with individual tweeters. This is probably the best admission office Twitter account I’ve seen. University of Oregon follow: @BeAnOregonDuck Klout score: 21 Why they’re good: They are doing a great job cross promoting videos through their Twitter account. Extending that, they are also using Twitter as a means to get people into other tools like Facebook and their virtual tour. They’ve gotten out there and are following more people than are following them, and have been featured in 31 lists. Louisiana State University follow: @LSUAdmissions Klout score: n/a Why they’re good: LSU has mastered the art of sharing (and they’re using HootSuite to do it, so they can measure just how successful they are at it). They link out to many admission related resources, as well as interesting school talking points, and are working the tour angle. Winthrop University follow: @WUadmissions Klout score: 9 Why they’re good: Winthrop’s Twitter account has got a fantastic personal feel to it. The voice of the people behind the account really comes through and creates personality. They haven’t just piped in an RSS or Facebook feed. This also allows them to do a decent job with some low volume retweets and an okay amount of direct engagement with other tweeters. University of Colorado at Boulder follow: @mycuboulder Klout score: 22 Why they’re good: I like that CU Boulder has done a good job both tweeting good prospective student resources and also retweeting other blogs and resources. They are keeping up a relatively high volume of tweets and have drawn in a respectable 730+ followers for it. They also do a “pic of the week” as their Twitter background, something to provide new and interesting content on their Twitter page to keep people coming back to see what they’re sharing. Drexel University follow: @DrexelAdmission Klout score: 13 Why they’re good: Drexel, like Winthrop, is another example of good engagement being provided to their followers, of which they have many. It’s very considerate seeing the occasional congratulations going out to accepted students following them. They feel very “present” on their account. University of Chicago Law School follow: @UChicagoLawApps Klout score: n/a Why they’re good: Don’t let the low tweet volume fool you. UChicago’s law school has been providing a steady and valuable stream of information to applicants since September 2009, and I think they show a lot of promise for the future. They communicate out where they are in the admissions process throughout the weeks, letting people know when different updates are being released and where they can get information at. It gives folks a nice little piece of insight into how the office is working. You may (and likely will) have other favorite admission Twitter accounts that you follow or refer to for inspiration that I didn’t list. If so, be sure to take a second and share them in the comments with why you like them so other people can check them out and learn from their inspiration. There are plenty of examples out there, and many are very good for their own special reasons. My list isn’t meant to be comprehensive, but rather should give people resources for inspiring people at their own schools. photo credit: William & Mary Law Library

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Good budgeting includes doing effective resource management. The web has to produce a lot of different media, and so making the most of our resources is extremely important. This is becoming increasingly important as we’re asked to do more with less. The neat thing about higher ed though is that we have access to a resource that our unique to our environment: students.

Recently, Nick DeNardis did some research into the state of university web departments. This is the next in our series of surveys, and we’re looking to see if and how you are using students to help create content for the web. This is not without a twist, however. We’re not looking at students that are employees for you, but rather the classes that teach areas relevant to the web, such as graphic design, photography, marketing, programming, etc. Classes provide an awesome opportunity to use coursework to foster an environment of creativity, provide opportunities to the students, and create content you might not otherwise have the ability too with normal, limited resources. Not everyone can keep a full time coder, or writer, and Flash developer on staff. With the right coordination however, you could get far beyond your normal means. So, take about four minutes to help out the community and fill out the survey below (even if you don’t work with classes, we want to know that too). The survey will be open through the end of the month, and the results will be published after the start of the new year. Start taking the survey » photo credit: durian

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Dear God, forgive me my sins, for I must speak the name of the Unholy One.  I mean Lady GaGa.  Let me be very clear on this point: prior to a couple months ago, aside from hearing some passing references to the name, I really had no clue who she was.  Frankly… I’m still not entirely sure.  But, she does happen to be one of the most unintentionally successful SEO examples in recent memory.

Tuesday morning on the Today show, Marissa Mayer of Google shared the top searches of 2009.  Well, more accurately, she shared the top rising searches.  Topping the list of rising image searches: Lady GaGa.  Now, maybe she’s actually brilliant (or more likely largely messed up in the head), because even though her music is basically crap (don’t argue with me), she’s built an awesome vehicle for herself in her madness.  While we can’t go off the deep end in ways that would impress the Lady, we can take away a few things. “People are always wondering what she looks like. She looks different all the time,” Mayer said. She has done a number of things very well.  First, buzz generation.  It doesn’t matter if people care about what she’s doing, they just want to know, because they are pretty sure it will be strange (hint: it usually is).  She’s no Madonna, but what Madonna did fifteen years ago, she’s stepping up to now.  Don’t worry whether or not people will care, because odds are they won’t anyway.  The trick is to simply make them want to know, make them want to not feel left out if they weren’t aware.  Wacky hijinks generate buzz and traffic, and students are an endless supply.  Not to mention that if prospective students are your target market, they will be substantially more drawn to the site if it has flavor.  That’s not to say you shouldn’t celebrate successes, like awards departments win and whatnot, just be aware that information like that is generally very dry, and very dull (though you could and should always try dressing it up), and you won’t hook fish with it.  Don’t be afraid to celebrate the occasionally strange and random happenstances on campus; it’s what gives you character! Be visually compelling!  Stand out from the crowd.  See the Mayer quote above.  This isn’t news to any of us, but it always helps to be refreshed on it, and I’m humiliated that Lady GaGa is so good at it.  If you are visually compelling, people will want to see what you are doing, and will return just because of their own curiosity.  Examples (all eduStyle award winners, either judged or people’s choice): Boston University – Bostonia, University of Texas – Medical School at Houston: Office of Communications, Humboldt State University- Sustainability in Mind, and the College of William and Mary.  The more a user, any user, is at your site, the more chance you have for donations, enrollment, etc. It’s all about finding a way to stand apart and stand out.  Lady GaGa’s music does not make her special.  I will line up female singers a mile long that are better.  But she took Britney Spears’ crazy factor, mixed in a little Lindsay Lohan, and refined it in to something that was marketable and put her on the map.  This is all old hat, but it shows just how effective the right buzz and image can be for a brand, and it shows how high maintenance the process is.  If Lady GaGa suddenly started dressing normally and acting like your mom on a day to day basis, she’d lose all her appeal; you must be creative AND maintain! photo credit: ★ BART

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