An editorial calendar is invaluable in ensuring up-to-date, well-organized, on-task content. But to make it work, you can't just use an Excel template you found via Google and call it a day. An effective editorial calendar, says Brain Traffic's Melissa Rach, has to be customized to match both the purpose and the prioritized particulars of your content. While it requires a bit of work up front -- and, as we wrote about earlier, an editorial … [Read more...]
It’s the Strategy, Stupid
July 28, 2011 by
What do the letters "CMS" mean to you? Do you read them as "cry myself to sleep" because your campus content management implementation has been largely ineffective? If so, where does the problem lie: with the tool, or with the strategy supporting it? If you let the tool lead the process, you end up ignoring the pressing content needs and concerns that, ideally, should shape both the selection and implementation of a CMS. This is why at last … [Read more...]
Image is Everything, Except When it’s Not
July 19, 2011 by
One of the most valuable weapons we have in our web content arsenal is a good photo. However, employing photography as meaningful web content is more difficult than it sounds. Do we have the resources both to shoot photos and format them correctly for the web? Are the photos we have available to us high-quality? And how do we select the right photo for the job? MIT's Elizabeth McManus, writing for the university’s WebPub User Group Blog, lays … [Read more...]
Content First, or Content Forever?
July 12, 2011 by
A few weeks ago, Rick and I appeared on Higher Ed Live to talk about A ‘Content-First’ Approach to Higher Ed Web. It sounds great, doesn't it? While we addressed the need for a content-first mindset, Sara Wachter-Boettcher elaborates to clarify the need for content-process mindset. How do we achieve this? By better thinking through the structures that support our content. Wachter-Boettcher cites higher ed websites as exemplary for a "beyond … [Read more...]
A Website That Listens
June 21, 2011 by
On our social media channels, we may have this conversation thing all figured out. We ask and answer, listen and learn, share and engage. But what about our websites? Are we extending our mastery of the social web to our .edu? Are we integrating those conversational principles into our digital home base? Jordan Williams, who has helped create several interactive features on the Middlesex School's website, implores us to create mechanisms for … [Read more...]