Information Is Not Inherently Useful or Usable

A common perception in higher ed is that the role of content owners is to simply publish information. If it's on the website, they’ve done their job. How many times have you been told, "Well, did you look on our website? It's there"? As part of a collection of humorous cartoons on content challenges, Bruce Ryan of 4 Syllables highlights the importance of content owners, contributors and publishers taking responsibility for conveying … [Read more...]

Higher Ed Takeaways From Confab 2011: The Content Strategy Conference

Last week Meet Content attended Confab: The Content Strategy Conference. We joined web content professionals from around the world to talk content and eat cake. (Seriously, our host Brain Traffic was not kidding when they said the days of content and cake were coming — the subsequent sugar highs were not just metaphorical.) To our delight, higher ed was well represented (check out our higher ed Confab Twitter list). In fact, organizers … [Read more...]

Web Writing Guidelines for Content Contributors

As web professionals, we owe a lot to our content contributors. Your college website has tons of content, and no one person can do it all. The more you enable content contributors to write for your site (supported, of course, by a thorough editorial process), the closer you will be to your shared goal of creating great content. Here are some web writing guidelines to help make that happen. 1. Keep your audience in mind. Consider who will be … [Read more...]

Web Professionals as Change Management Specialists

In an interview with Randall Snare from the CS Forum in London, content strategist Karen McGrane compares her work on the web to change management—a concept that hits home for academia. Generally, colleges are slow to adopt web strategy. As higher ed web professionals, we're not just content, design, development and marketing experts—we're also change management specialists. We help web stakeholders adapt and better utilize the web … [Read more...]