The dream of higher ed is alive in Portland. That’s what we learned at the 2014 HighEdWeb conference, which made its first stop in the Pacific Northwest. As always, the conference was a great opportunity to learn, reflect, connect, and refresh our perspective for the challenges waiting back at home. A theme that pervaded many of the sessions at HighEdWeb was the idea of being human. The work we do as web content professionals is not about … [Read more...]
Managing the Copycat Content Request
September 30, 2014 by
You may have gotten the request. It could come via email, in a meeting, or during a chance encounter in the staff kitchen. “Say,” begins Steve the PR guy (or Jen the photographer, or Marie your vice president), “have you seen the social media hub (or the slider widget, or the faculty profile database) on Competitor U’s website? It’s pretty great. Can we do something like that?” And… that’s it. A thing. Maybe they saw it on a blog, or at a … [Read more...]
Planning Content Goals With Web Stakeholder Interviews
July 30, 2014 by
In an earlier post, we talked about using focus groups to better understand your web users' needs. But external web users are not the only type of users we need to understand in order to create valuable and purposeful content. To create web content that works, we must also understand our internal web content stakeholders. These are all the people planning for, creating, curating, editing, approving, publishing and maintaining content, among … [Read more...]
Department-Level Content Strategy
March 19, 2014 by
The following guest post was written by Erin Martin, Web Communication Leader for the departments of Horticulture and Crop and Soil Science at Oregon State University. Last year, I scraped up enough funding to attend Confab Higher Ed, the inaugural higher education content strategy conference held in Atlanta. As I was wandering around, meeting inspiring folks and talking shop with people who get it — who see the value in thoughtful, mindful … [Read more...]
Why Duplicate Content Is Bad for the Web
February 27, 2014 by
Among the countless content problems found on websites, one of the most egregious and commonly cited is duplicate content. Content strategists — not to mention search engine optimization (SEO) professionals — love to hate on duplicate content. As soon as we spot it during a content audit, we quickly bring out our metaphorical red pens. Begone, duplicate content! But why? For those of us on the other end of the table, it’s easy to dismiss … [Read more...]