layout inspirations

After the content management system displayed today







and I make sure that

are safe.
I realized that it is the simple things that hardly touch your mind while

is happening all around you. Everybody seems to complain about

and feels like

\













all day long.
Today a meeting was cancelled without my knowledge thus allowing me to spend some more time on technical details. Feedburner was bought by Google recently and is now included in its application portfolio allowing you to instantaneously create a Feed from every website. Wordl is still alive and has updated its user interface since I used it the last time over a year ago. SBE's Case Competition is since today also up to date and the person from the Department of Organisation and Strategy in charge of the Facebook page for their upcoming event has not send any message yet. Besides the daily ups and downs it seems to be time to tell you something. When you put links in articles, press releases or event informations than the likelihood to be highly rated is higher.

A remark made a month ago that a blog on blogger dot come is automatically higher rated than one entertained on wordpress f.e. cannot be confirmed by me. And by the way, there is a problem with the photostock system that I cannot solve alone. Who knows where I can get the images used on the brochures throughout SBE?

Training #2 impressions

Befuddled by the observations from the two meetings I had to participate after today's training session I learned a new word. It intends to mean a person who is not "computer literate". You know that the European Commission made computer literacy a priority and puts it in the same row as "reading, writing and maths". The Commission considers media literacy (which is just another term for a converging technology meme) as an important factor for active citizenship in today's information society. The word I learnd sounded like "Digibet" and is mash up of digital and illiterate.

I don't know how I could drift of the subject of today's training but here I am. More news about the Classification structure of the Media Repository and the Social Media Strategy will be up next week.

What I did today

Today I visited some more people and talked with them about their work. The experience is close to uniform. It takes a lot of time to update even the most banal information. Most work is done in Frontpage in which some of them received training under the old web master. What surprises me is that all websites are up to date and the woman (predominantly) doing it are very well organized. A good indicator is their work space. Another good idea for making boring text more exciting is putting a random video after the first paragraph.

Maastricht University School of Business and Economics - SBE - Bachelor's Meeting from UMSBE on Vimeo.

Today I updated the Mockup and went over some of the technicalities like what terms to use for the media repository, sizes of banners and branding blocks and the navigational structure. I also updated one of the main sections on the SBE frontpage in a desperate attempt to make something visible. Branding Blocks are the new Ice cream. Everybody wants one and I have only three to give away. Besides the usual email war and the zero sum games that people play I have to write a communication strategy for the school. This will take another post so I will skip this.

Following up on last weeks training the first meetings start next weeks. I also try to find some way to get more people into the use/misuse of social media for marketing purposes. I started out with collecting some links to our delicious account. So everybody interested in How to use social media is welcome to have a look here.

I talked today about repetitive strain injury and what to do if someone suffers from it. It is damn serious and need immediate actions. If you went to your doctor and he diagnosed it there are some options within the school of business and economics that you might want to try. Visit Richard Thal/ACOhelp who can help you further.

Event website launch

The Department of Organization and Strategy hosts an event on the 17 - 20 of November 2010. I was approached to put "something" online. Academic conferences are not sexy and the best example is the main conference website for the event entitled "THE ENTREPRENEURIAL PROCESS IN A CHANGING ECONOMY".

To promote the conference the Department used a database of around 4000 emails. Over a third bounced back to the sender when trying to invite the people who's email addresses where inactive or wrong, the person responsible commented in the meeting. Since things are complicated I want to make a quick round up of what I did.

First I created a mini website that contains an overview, the program, details about the avenue and how to get there and a link to the registration form. The department uses Formstack for the registration process. It's for free if you don't have more the 50 registrations.

The second thing I did was to create a facebook page under the SBE profile. One person in the department is going to take care of this page, posting updates and keep invite people. The page will also be promoted using Facebook Ads. How easy it is to implement a fabulous "LIKE BUTTON" into the event page cannot be underestimated. It's really easy and a desperate attempt to integrate some interactive feature to an otherwise static webpage.

The third promotional activity is to publish a news item or press release. A fourth option is to get glimps of the conference into the TalkinBusiness magazine.

The hardest part was to get the content right. Since the program is not fix except the main points and no visual elements are available it is hard to build a website. But the result looks ok. The graphic on top of the main page takes the style guide literally.

I also had an interesting meeting with two nice woman from METEOR. METEOR consists of six different research programs and was intended overcome the old "silo" thinking by an interdisciplinary approach. They assist almost 200 PhD students and update the website regularly. To publish seminars they use an Access database. The data is displayed using an iframe on the Seminar page. Conferences are updated by editing pages directly. When asking about their experience they reply "updating takes a lot of time and is not easy" and "lots of work needed to be done before you can actually publish something."

Impressions from the first training in GX

The first of several trainings is over and a lot was learned. People who will lay hands on the website did so under the supervision of three experts and myself. And as it turned out the result was very good indeed. Coffee and chocolate where only partly responsible for the relaxed mood during the three hours of hard core programming. It became clear I that it is not so easy as backing a vlaai but that it is not a miracle either. By the end of the training everybody enjoyed to be part of a team that will do a great job. And by the way, aren't we gorgeous?

For now I instructed everybody to register on two services we will use to work together on our website. I also put a short Resources Page together where all necessary information will be collected. Next week I will meet with everybody to discuss the gathering of the content for each department. This will be a lot of fun and the main task for the coming month for the community managers. I also had the change to give a short presentation that should explain why I am here and what my plan is. I put it up here for those of you who did not participate so that you don't miss out on anything.

The technical training #2 fix

The dates for the second training are now fix. See the page to your right (Information/Registration Training) for more information about time and location. All participants will receive later today a confirmation.

First Training is Set

The first training will take place next week and the second one with 99% chance one week later - same time same station.

This week I spend most of my time talking with people about their expectations about their department websites. The rest of my time was filled with GX. I created the basic website structure as discussed below for every department. I also created the Profile Page Templates. Now the basic structure is in place for everybody and the migration of parts of the content can begin.
Yesterday I had time to work on my guide for the web community managers. Here is the first draft. It is basically a starting guide for the people in the departments on how to go about this adventure.
Well, have a nice weekend!

Training Update

Since more and more people want a attend the technical training I need to plan a second one. Unfortunately this means for some people that their training will NOT take place 14th of October. What counts is the time of registration. This means that for the following people the training will take place at the announced day:

Fleur Keune-Roemers
Hannes Datta
Yolanda Paulissen
Cecile Luijten
Adela Buttolo
Nicole Hulsman
Claudia van Oppen


For everybody else who registered I will announce a new date and location for the training the next days.

I am still waiting for some more input regarding the web site structure? Any new ideas?

Resolved issues regarding the training

More people than expected signed up last minute and the student assistant who does the booking is not in the house. But the library also has facilities we can utilize for our purposes. This got just confirmed and so the training will be in Room 0.204 at the MU library.

Today I created the basic page structure for every department. And once webicians went through the training they find a clean structure waiting to be filled with their content. I recently discussed with a professor issues of program visibility and ways to improve the websites google ranking. As a side note she recalled that "nobody had thought in the 80s that we will communicate exclusively via email one day". This remark echoed today when talking about metaversen and augmented reality. All of these 'technologies' became possible around the same time as email did. But while email was the killer application on the internet (and not the WWW) SL (second life) and AR paused for two decades. A good overview of the history When the "cyberspace" of the 80s gave way to the "Information Super Highway" and the "Web" of the 90s, the new millennium retrieved SL and AR as a "ritual environment" email was still the most used online service. Some things come and go others stay and in between there are doors.

The Alumni Event is over and here is the video that was edited not by the student editor: