As I see posts about such things as dismantling journalism into it’s component parts, and think about how we’ve broken out CDs into individual songs we can download, [there must be a dozen or more instances of this] I wonder if we’ll lose site of the composition — like losing the feel of an album from start to finish, and more.

Are we destined for things all fractured into pieces? Or will those pieces turn into building blocks for future creativity (playlists are an example of that.)

This post is to get down a deep thought (not as deep as I can explore right now) and get back to work.

To ponder another time.

Max turned 6 month April 5, 2011. He’s 27 1/4” long and 19lb, 15oz.

Change living room to red

I have a brown/beige/white room with hints of greens and blues that I plan to switch out with red items.

• Rug, at least 8×6′ (IKEA or Overstock.com)
• Curtains - sail cloth curtains to match other rooms (Target)
• Accessories - I might add some storage ottomans in red or brown leather or vinyl; something easy to clean, for toy storage — Max will be crawling before we know it! (Target or Crate and Barrel)

Kitchen

I think I’m all set in the kitchen — I just need to get everything put in its place. The colors are red (dishes, appliances) and yellow (countertops, accents like towels). I’d love to put in new curtains and a new rug, but not necessities. (Target)

Clothes

I have no idea what size I am now or will be within the year, so I’m planning to get a few pieces each month as I change. I shop primarily at Gap and Old Navy.

Items Max-related

We’ll likely need these things within the next year:

• New car seat (see Babies R Us registry). Will be needed when he reaches 30 pounds — soonest will be late fall.
• Gates — I want to put gates to block off behind the couch in the living room so Max has room to crawl/play but 1/3 of the room is off limits (including the very hot radiator)
• Jogging stroller. When I can get moving again I’ll work towards needing this — hoping to need it when he reaches 6 months old (April/May.)

Random wish list items

Here are things I wish I could get:

• The knife sharpener selected as best by America’s Test Kitchen (around $120)
• New vacuum cleaner
• The Scooba. I love my Roomba vacuum and the scooba is its floor mopping cousin.

I panicked at first, but the second I hear his first cry I was beaming. Max was, and is perfect.

After Max was born I was sent to the recovery area where I had a complication of hemorrhaging. It took a couple hours to get it under control, but I did not need a transfusion. With the inducing of labor and the complications I had a tough recovery including excessive swelling. That complicated breast feeding as the swelling was choking my milk supply and prevented Max from being able to latch on. Later when the swelling subsided we found my shape was not conducive to Max latching on so I continue to work with a lactation consultant. In the meantime I am using a breast pump 6-8 times a day to produces as much milk for Max (we then supplement with formula.) I’m fighting to keep up with his rate of growth.

The first week Max lost too much weight, so we had to supplement with formula. The second week he caught up and we actually overfed him, so we had to adjust, and by the third and fourth week we found the right pace. He’s thriving. By his first month check-up he was a couple inches longer and a couple pounds heavier.

Max is perfect. Every issue we’ve had has to do with me, as it should be – I’ll take the complications any day over him. Once the swelling subsided I was feeling ready to do more, but found that the incision from the c-section was not healing properly. Instead of healing, a pocket of fluid had developed, but we caught it before there was an infection. I’ve had to work with the wound care center at the hospital and we’ve tried a few treatments. The wound is healing slowly and should heal in another 4-6 weeks. I had to wear a “wound vac” that applied negative pressure to the wound to keep it from forming more liquid, and that worked well but impacted the surrounding skin (irritation due to all the tape.) We had to switch to something that would use less tape, so the doctor altered the wound so I can take care of it myself.

I’m not in pain, and just slowed down a bit. I’ve been staying with my parents, which have been a tremendous help. Thankfully that is offset by the pure joy they experience having Max around. Max is a dream - - he’s perfect, lovely, and a joy to be around – all the bad goes away just by looking at him.

Nonna sent me home with

• tortiini soup, taco meat, pork and potatoes, a jar of salsa, a few cookies, and a slice of cake for breakfast.
• a bagel, cookies, taco meat, pork, and potatoes; all in snakc-sized baggies ’cause I have too many of her containers
• chicken, sausage, bread, muffins, and pastry. Yet I still stopped to pick up icecream.
• bagels, bread, meatballs
• cookies, a cheeseburger, bun, sauce, cake, checken cutlets, sliced bbq chicken, and pizza
• chicken, sausage, green beans, a bag of pizza flavored goldfish, and more chicken.
• peppers, broccoli rabe and sausage, chicken, a hamburger, bun, two loaves of bread, chicken scallopini, and cookies
• more turkey, more stuffing, and a large piece of fig crustatta she made me try before she’d let me take it with me
• turkey, stuffing, pasta and broccoli, and two loaves of bread
• something I think she said is veal, and pasta with meatballs and sauce.
• bruschetta, roasted peppers, risotto, and grilled chicken
• a hamburger, and some meatballs in sauce she let me have only after I promised not to freeze them.
• bruschetta, bread, pasta with zucchini, and sliced chicken with roasted peppers.
• a piece of chicken, some ribs, and cookies
• chocolates from Italy, danish, a hamburger, a bun, lentil soup, a piece of chicken, and a porkchop.
• chicken cutlets, zuccini, potato salad, a loaf of bread, and 62 movies.
• chicken cutlets, carrots, sausage, and two toothbrushes.
• Indian food from the neighbor, chicken cutlets, peas, and a loaf of bread.
• a porkchop, a burger, bread, sauce, and meatballs
• burger, cool whip, ricotta cake, pasta/broccoli, 2 shirts, some DVDs, and a pair of 4T socks
• veal, chicken, meatballs, sauce, pasta, bread, almond cake, and 2 quilts
• grilled chicken, pork roast w/ mushrooms, bread, & something I have no idea what it is, but she said it needs salt.
• peas and carrots, pork rolled with pancetta, and a loaf of bread.
• sauce, sausages, veal rolatini, pasta & zuccini, a loaf of bread, and a chicken cutlet.

It starts simple

Scenario: the office of security hosts shuttle runs to the local airport and train station during the holidays. Where should we post the information?

To answer the question we need to come up with two lists:

• the short list: a list with ideally one item: the primary location
• the long list: a list with many items to cover where users will look for the information.

Primary location: the permalink

The short list contains the primary location. The primary location can serve as the permanent location (or permalink) for the information, and can also serve as the place we want folks to look again when they seek an updated version of the information. It should answer the question, “Where do we want them to look for it next time?” This also serves as the immediate place to post the content: post it here first, then develop the related links and posts to support it.

The secondary locations gets folks to the primary location

The long list contains secondary locations to support the primary location. This also serves to put the information where people will find it effectively. Each location can either contain a full copy of the information – in this case the shuttle schedule – or it can hold a teaser to point people to the primary location. Sometimes you just want to give them what they seek without extra effort (e.g. extra clicks.) In other cases you want them to know where the information lives.

Different locations warrant different types of links

For the shuttle schedule I might have different ways of posting the teaser: a simple link to the schedule, or I might turn the schedule into a feed so I can post the next scheduled time plus a link to the full schedule, or we could have the full schedule fed into another location entirely. There are many possibilities, so I also look at many factors to justify placement and how far we want to go—does it warrant the work involved.

A single source of content makes it possible

Whether you just post a link or post the full schedule itself, the information should have a single source. You do not want to copy and paste the information in multiple locations, and then have to update each of those locations manually when the information needs to be updated.

Investigate why the content is needed

In this particular example, the shuttle schedule was provided one week before Thanksgiving. It arrived in a simple request, “Please post this on the Security website.” I asked why (sometimes my greatest asset, often my downfall) and got an answer like, “Because, students are asking for it.” I asked what it related to – what else would be done to get the word out. “That’s it.” Well, there we have a problem.

Work through the challenge

It would be less than a week to get the word out to students, who were already making plans to get to the airport and the train station for the long weekend. It wasn’t enough time to get it into the search reliably (another problem we have to solve.) And the current student population likely wouldn’t look for it (there wasn’t a shuttle schedule for the week-long October recess, so why would there be one for the four-day weekend?) Instead of posting it online, I recommended an email to the students (as they’ve done in the past.) In the future we’ll have ways to push this kind of information to the students from the web, but to be honest the majority of students just aren’t going to see it in time in this case. Under our current practice this information gets emailed and that’s what the students will expect.

Find your starting point, get it posted, then work through how it can be improved.

If I wasn’t leaving for vacation (within the hour) I would have posted the schedule, along with some links to it on other sites, and highly recommended a broadcast email—pointing folks to the schedule online. Instead, the office emailed the schedule directly to the students, as they’ve done in the past.

When I return I’d like to return to this challenge. What we need to do is put together the proper solution, and do our best to provide a starting point in time to post and publicize the winter break schedule. There is a larger need for this content, and the solution we come up with can be built upon each time a there is a shuttle schedule. Given the academic calendar we should have seven opportunities each year to post not only the schedule, but also staged improvements. The schedule needs to be posted for arrival at the beginning of the fall semester, October recess, Thanksgiving recess, winter break, the arrival at the beginning of spring semester, spring recess, and the end of the academic year. That looks like something strong enough for some useful features. Now that we’ve looked a little further it seems strong enough to plan how to feed the schedule dynamically to many locations, and possibly set up ways the people who use the information can share it with each other.

As I was thinking about this after I left the office I saw this as something important to get down so I can remind myself and share how I think through web content. It often causes scope creep, which is something I’ve been working on, and happy to say I’ve improved on greatly (especially in the last year.) As I properly plan, and share the load, things happen much more smoothly. In the past I’ve concentrated so much on the infrastructure to support such ideas that the ideas themselves haven’t taken off.

For the shuttle schedule we’ll start slow – we’ll post the winter break schedule and the office can send an email pointing to it. But I can’t stop my brain from thinking an RSS feed of the schedule to share across sites, like Vassar Info, will be a good thing to add.

• Current IA: 11/2009
• Current design: 4/2004

Establish a web governance structure

• The 21st century: we’ll get there — eventually
• Org charts: was this really necessary?

• Cabinet Level
  • Web Management Committee
  • Web Content Committee
    • Web Design Team

• Academic politics: their visciousness is only matched by the insignificance of the stakes
• Engagement: Not as interesting as watching “Cops”

Create a competent and sufficient team

• Web nerds:
  • having a team of web nerds alone wasn’t going to cut it
• Web team: you wish

Define the project

• Your problem: No, it’s not a blown RT-237 Vacuum tube. Trust me on this.
  • The problem with the site that it was old
• Scope Creep: We started out to redesign our homepage. and, well…
• Bright ideas: too many of them gives me a headache
  • Got stuck in a loop of brainstorming. Needed to say “enough, let’s move on and get going with the project”
• The journey: Of a thousand miles often ends in a mud hole
  • No deadlines, definition will cause your project to get bogged down
• Our budget: Arnold terminated it
  • Caused us to focus on what we can do in the time we have

Do the research

Can’t fix a problem if you don’t know what’s broken

This phase was less useful that he thought it would be

• Google Analytics: telling you wahat you already knew since 200x
• Data Visualization: because sometimes pictures are all people can understand
  • crazyegg; the single most important image
• User surveys: it helps when they understand the questions
  • What do you like most about our website? That you have it. OK, fair point.
• Learning from other people’s mistakes: actually, we already knew…
• Research: people will believe anything you say if they think you’ve done the research
  • if you do the research it’ll help pave the way to get through the politics
• Our budget: now he’s hacking away at it with a sword!
  • The budget was the biggest constraint. Additional cuts made it impossible to do all the research they wanted to do.
• Focus groups: sometimes the body language tells you all you need to know
• Stakeholders: there’s a lot of them and they’re mostly angry. But, hey, at least they’re wearing our campus colors.
  • The pages they were creating had to be a central clearing house of information and serve as a gateway to get people of all perspectives to the information they seek
• Our budget: Aw geez! Now he’s got a big gun!

Content

• Content: UR doin it wrong (construction sign)
• Information Architecture: yeah, anybody can do this
• Wireframe: if I have to look at another one of these I’m going on a killing spree
• Your content: some assembly required
• Our content: it’s being driven by the PR department
  • students and prospective students hate marketing; they can sniff that out and they hate it
• Our budget: Now he’s invited all of his friends!
  • Really had to cut down a lot of the content we hoped to have
• Your WCMS: it won’t do your job for you
  • someone has to write that content — someone needs to create it
• Web design: just because you wear a suit doesn’t mean you’re qualified to critique a web design
  • The research helped them get through the approval quickly
• Frameworks: I think we should have done this first learn from this mistake
• Our budget: tired of hearing about it yet?
  • It’s made us focus on what is do-able

Takeaways

• Get buy-in and high-level ownership
• Make sure you have the right people on your team
• Clearly define the project and it’s scope
• Do the research
• Get input, feedback, and buy-in
• Have a content strategy and a plan for your content

Background

All of us run our shops differently. All use students differently. Sampling obviously small, but can give you ideas

• Started as a discussion on Twitter about the lack of available information about how students are being used in web work
• Two similar schools could have very different work environments
• Survey data was collected from 130+ students and employers at the start of 2009 to see where there’s common ground and where people are innovating

One thing that is constant

• Students are our most valuable resource

We are student factories — not using students is to not use a valuable resource.

They are

• Cheap
• Abundant
• Resourceful
• Innovative
• and most importantly…

They can see things in a way that we can’t

Even in the short time he’s been working in higher ed, he can’t look at something he designed — students can look at it with student eyes and give feedback from a perspective we just don’t have.

So, what did you want to know?

• Recruiting Sources
• Responsibilities
• Info About students
• How much credit can we take? How much can we lean on them?

Recruiting

[Naval Service of Canada has great images.]

• Student Career services
• Faculty and staff recommendations (47%)
• Private listings (20%) – monster.com, etc.
• Walk-ins (16%)
• Everything else (word of mouth, high school teachers, current students)
  • high school teaches are an awesome resource — gets in touch with all the high school teachers in the area to find out who is going to Pittsburg and who is familiar in the web

What students are doing in offices

• Web design tasks (HTML, CSS, Javascript)
• Content migrations (cut/paste monkeys)
• Data entry (those poor kids)
• Tech support (those poor staff members)
• Graphic design (…I got nothing)

What students are not doing

• Maintaining social networks (19%)
• Tutorial Development (17%)
• Database work/maintenance (16%)
• Blogging (11%)
• Keyboard cleaning jockey (11%)

Using students for tech support, but not documentation, which will save work later. Should be explored.

Student info

• Only 3% are over 24 years old (average 21.62)
• 25% of offices have primarily female students
• Common Majors: computer science, comm/graphic design, then English Business, and Marketing
• 69% say they slack off 1/4 of the time (don’t worry, none over half)

Some work stats

• Only 8.6% think they are used too much or not enough
• About 1/3 plan to stay 1-2 years (20% more than that)
• 20% have no intention of working in a web field after college
• About 1/3 were hired via recommendations, and 28% each from Career Services and walkings
• 17% have changed career plans (for better or worse) after working in a web office
• 97% feel they are learning skills that will help them after they graduate, regardless of their field

Reliance on students

How much can we put on their shoulders

It’s important to note the opportunity students present as we try to fill gaps left by FT positions web can’t fill. But naturally, managing students takes time on our part, so we must balance managing students with managing our own work. It’s not a zero cost operation (not counting money)

• 86% of offices use students. The majority use 4 or less.
• 45% of offices offer $1 over minimum wage
  …

$12,658 per year: the average amount budgeted for student workers in a web office.
(budgets ranging from nothing to $95,000)

Training

• Lynda.com (the ultimate babysitter // go learn photoshop, don’t use my picture)
• Opera Web Standards Curriculum http://opera.com/company/education/curriculum
• Cheat Sheets by Added Bytes (the cheat sheets are a great babysitter) http://addedbytes.com/cheat-sheets/
• Use real tasks as examples, let them do it, and walk them through the process (learn by doing)

Tracking

• Basecamp (if you can afford it)
• Collabtive (Open source PHP)
• Eventum (Open source PHP, powerful, UGLY)
• Wikis (go out and find what fits you best)

Some closing comments

[Comments will be available in slides — comments from survey data; a few paragraphs]

Presentation at:
http://doteduguru.com/heweb09mmp9

Early Beginnings

The mousetrap of interactive maps (create pic of mousetrap game)

The Issues at UWW

• Incorrect information
• Variety of different maps
  • Wasting paper
  • Rarely updated
• Outdated maps
• Never ending construction

The Approach

1. Collecting and organizing the data
2. Getting started
3. Putting it all together
4. Keeping it going

Collecting the gum drop buttons

[pic of Candy Land]

What is it Going to do?

• What data types will your map have?
• buildings, parking, dining, wireless access, accessibility…
• Find your Keymaster!
  • Who owns your data?
  • What format is it in?
  • Conversion time
  • How often is it updated?
• Ensure you get the freshest data
  • Partnerships
  • Hope and plead
  • Chocolate Cake, Cigarettes?

Actually has someone on campus that if he wants a new map he has to bring a chocolate cake.

It’s all in how you sort it out

Data model needs to suit your goals

• Define your base unit
  • Building
  • Office
  • Generic space
• Extend the base unit
  • add services
  • sub locations / depending on your base unit

Propeller Hat Moment: Getting the goods

• Geocoding and reverse geocoding
  • Google: via Mobile API
• …

Baby Steps

[pic of Sorry]

Think Big, Start Small

Tools of the trade

• Use what you know
• Pick a service that works how you work
  • The 800 lb Gorilla: Google Maps API
  • The contenders: Yahoo! Maps, MapQuest
  • Pay to Play: Bing Maps
  • BYOM: Bring your own map

Iterative to succeed

• Plan out a cycle
  • Timeline you can keep to
  • Features per cycle manageable
• Why it works
  • Increase quality
  • Avoids burnouts
  • Keep them coming back

KISS your interface not your Palm

• Keeping it clean
• Let your data present itself
• Search is your friend make him presentable
  • Tagging
  • Full text searches

Keeping it going

[pic of shoots and ladders]

Custom Maps

• Leverage your data
• Mashup your services
  • // I want to know where I can study and have wifi at the same time
• Examples
  • Overlays: parking maps, special events, construction zones
  • Data driven: accessibility, POI, mashup career data
  • Sky is the limit

One Map to rule them all

• Single point of data
• Eliminate outdated maps
• Be green, save a tree
• Easily control when maps are available

Contact

Joel Herron
@h3r2on