Organic search is becoming less important than paid search. Consider the typical sales funnel: awareness > research > consideration > decision Search works best in the research phase, it’s not good at awareness SEO advantages No incremental cost to traffic People click on them more Once you reach ranking you don’t have to do much …
Category Archives: Content
Please Abandon Regularly Scheduled Email Newsletters
Most emails I get arrive on a regular schedule. Some monthly, some weekly, some daily. But I can only think of a handful that are mailed on an as needed basis. They send me mail when and if they have something of value to tell me. Otherwise, they get out of my way and help …
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Where Higher Ed Sites Need To Go
The single most important thing higher ed websites can do is change the fundamental organizing principle away from the org chart (content organized via department) and toward people. This means organizing content via degree programs which represents the fundamental connection point between student and school. User tests show that students have consistent informational needs when …
The Big Picture
I love Boston.com’s Big Picture and want to bring it to the University of Denver. We already get a stream of student supplied photos, but we hide them behind our password protected internal system. A true shame, but hey, new year’s resolutions…
Tension Between Marketing and Usability: Part 2
In my previous post about the push and pull between marketing a site and making it usable, I try to make the case that the DU site leans too heavily toward marketing when all available data suggests usability is more important. However, on second glance, I believe I need to clarify my stance and I’ll …
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Tension Between Marketing and Usability: Part 1
Nick Denardis of EDU Checkup critiqued the University of Denver’s redesign and gave it a 94%. Pretty good. He liked the strong visual impact of the homepage, that content was geared toward addressing student needs and that the underlying code was done with SEO and accessibility in mind. What Nick didn’t know, couldn’t know, was …
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Flickr for Photo Workflow
Many higher ed institutions use Flickr to share photos with their constituents. We launched DU’s Flickr site this summer. We also set up an “internal” Flickr account for our overworked photographer Wayne. It was meant to cut down on his daily grunt work and, I’m happy to report, it has. Here are some of the …
Use link titles as a check on your architecture decisions
Recently at work, there was a discussion about link titles, their utility, when to use them, when not to and so forth. Link titles are those attributes you insert into a link tag that helps set expectations for users of where a link will take them. Conceptually, they’re easy to understand and rationalize. The hard …
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There’s A Happy Medium Between Centralization & Decentralization
One of my main points of advice for higher ed websites is the idea that operationally, a decentralized management approach to the web does not work well. The opposite–centralization–does. But that doesn’t mean some aspects to a decentralized approach can’t or shouldn’t be employed. It just shouldn’t be the foundation for how to manage the global …
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The Speed of Twitter
I haven’t been a long time user of Twitter, but now that I have Twitterific forever occupying the lower right corner of my monitor, I’ve increasingly noticed how much quicker the twittersphere is at reporting breaking news than traditional news sources. A couple of interesting take-aways here: