The brandingblock problem and its solution

From the early days one problem came up regularly. brandingblocks that where put in as pagesections where messed up. Like this one:

The problem with the brandingblocks on different pages is that they don’t have the correct layout. The correct layout is: “UM inzet linkerkolom (zonder titel)”, see below.

You can select the proper layout for the (branding block) page section as follows:
 File > Properties > design


I have adjusted the brandingblock that is used on the page:
http://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/web/Faculties/SBE/TargetGroup/Professionals.htm

You can assign the correct layout to the other brandingblocks (SBE_PGE) by passing the settings on to the page sections on the same level. (Only for the Brandingblocks!!!The other page sections have a design of their own)

(A BIG thanks to Milly!!!)

Contact Form: nowonline

The SBE contact form is now online here. It's a bit more elaborate than the usual forms. This is why I used FormSite for its realization. Its pretty cool and allows for more flexibility than Wufoo. But its not so user handy than the latter and not so easy to style as one might want to. But for the rest it is great!
A year ago I was asked to put everywhere on the website email+phone for prospective students to ask questions. With the result that the admission department had to deal with a massive load of emails that contained questions which where not related to admissions in particular put covered basically everything. This caused some upset and in combination with the budgetary situation of the moment my task was to implement this solution.

The form distributes its content depending on the categories to different email recipients. In this way it hopes to reduce the influx of non-relevant emails to the admission office. Thus freeing them up to focus more on their job. It is basically a distribution solution that does not lower the workload, only distributes it up-front. It makes it easier for prospective students to ask questions by lowering the threshold to do so. Once send off, the question is processed in the same way then before. They arrive as emails in the inbox of a person who answers them by sending an email to the sender.

The problem with this solution is: 1. It does not allow to track a user request f.e. any ticketing system does. If a user send a request using this form, nobody can check if his request ever gets answered. 2. It does not lower the workload because the answers are send individually per email as before.
A solution used other service industries is a customer support system. Virtually every company has such a system implemented on their website. It includes a simple forum that allows users and the team of the sales support workers to communicate on a many to many platform. Questions posted in the Forum are answered and moderated so as to allow others with similar or same questions to look them up as conveniently as a google search. A webform that allows the company to track the requests and responses so as to monitor customer relationships. This is already implemented at ACO or ICTS where a simple email ticketing system provides such functionality. And of course customer relationship management is not solely a matter of email and webforms. Why not responding to requests via twitter, or facebook?....
 
And I did many other things as well today. But this was the highlight! ... Well, and I posted on facebook after my long abstinence.

Week 14 summery

Obama set his bet for the presidential election campaign 2012 and for those who believe the myth, the facts don't matter anyway. So lets enjoy the greatest show on earth while your eyes are getting ruined from your attempt to fcous-in on the small back-lighted LCD screens of your tiny plastic phones. Heiner send me a video that would make it in the top 20 of "university viral video adds":

Got more money and a request to implement something similar to this . Any comments? The deadline for this project is so soon that I seriously think to not do it. But what is the alternative?
The request to KBB - the guys who should investigate my workplace - was issued exactly one week ago with no result nor feedback. And this although I went to Richard Thal in person and he contacted them so that things speed up!
ROA meeting was delayed but own Illustrator, Photoshop and other software packages that not even ACO provides. The meeting with the Master student who will investigate the effects on social media campaings on customer loyalty and "return on investment" took place in the sun. It could not get more social than this!

week - 08 - A summary

Pages are beeing replaced by streams. Words by pictures and videos. And information is becoming a cliché, slowly but gradulay. Welcome to the post-information age! A few words on whats hip and happening at the first UM Facebook group meeting yesterday. Around 40 people, most of them female and under 30 took part in what became my personal "meeting of the week". Thoughtful organizers and plates full of delicious cakes and snacks as well as drinks made everybody feel more "social" than during most meetings.

The first attempts to tap into the fabric of conversations of prospective students in order to engage with them on a more personal level where successful.The lessons learned where: # regular posts keep people's eyeballs busy # images and videos trumph text # the carrot that keeps the donkey going stays the same: prices and questionairs. An outstanding example is Maarten's facebook page of the faculty of law. The static HTML page includes an video with a message from the dean, quick links to the master and bachelor programs and students weblogs.

Also this week I was sitting together with people from KAAS and discussed solutions for their website as well as the "Creative Writing Course" by Lucia.

What's the buzz?
The Equis accreditation comitee visited the School whos international as well as national reputation is quiet impressive. My contribution was to dress up a bit our twitter and youtube channel. Facebook is part of the deal and beeing taken care of by Veerle and Heiner. I also launched the first department website: Economics and received already one email that included a request for change. The events and activities section was also renewed featuring now all seminars, conferences and the SBE calendar.
For PhD students and all who are interested I stumbled upon two links: #1 is the electronic disseration database which offers fresh RSS feeds of published theses here #2 and an illustrated guide to a PhD here.
Since Economics is our Business it is worth sharing this one

New Economy, New Wealth on Prezi

Prezi is a non-linear presentation tool used by everybody these days who feel limited by the way powerpoint has fooled us into believing that sequentiality is the holy grail of "the future of education". This is not to say that Prezi is uncool, but it makes every clear headed observer of the malstroem suspicious over its "newness". Dreaming of the Malstroem, Infonomics published a new video to explain to the world what it is! Kinematic Typography at its best and the video has already 90 views (3 days old). Here it is exclusively for you:



Last but not least there is the "revolution 2.0" in the former Magreb and Arab countries televised live on Aljazeera. For those who are not interested in social media might not notice this versioning of the word "Revolution". And for those who hate dictators and brutal regimes the words of Sergei Markof, a senior legislator from the ruling United Russia Party, might provide the necessary realism to put the Revolution 2.0 into the wider historical reality. In an article of yesterdays Wall Street Journal he spoke of the mainstream opinion held by the ruling class of Russia. "We in Russia have seen revolutions, and they often start out like the February one and end like the one in October".

Writing for the Web - Course Material

This time No time Just an update:

- Language, Dates and other Guidelines(UK)
- Spelling and Writing Guidelines (NL)
- Style Guide for editors at UM

First Department Website ready to launch

In the next weeks one after another department will launch their sites. At our first meeting with AE1 of the department of Economics we discussed their new website here.
Some links need to be in place but all the necessary content according to Score 303 is migrated and ok to show off. Changes are:
- Additional Links from >RESEARCH to Publications and Seminars
- under >PUBLICATIONS the years in the content field go
- METEORIT seminars? what about them?
- Banner for the department window

Besides that there are many other things to do. Two of the bigger projects are a website selfservice center and a SBE community.

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."

Training Material and Registration

Since more and more people want to participate in the training I hope to provide you here with some additional information. A document that describes the upcoming training activities is available here. If more people want to sign up here is the form.

Interview with Geert Hofstede and some followups of last week

Yesterday I recorded an interview with Geert Hofstede, an icon at Maastricht University. The interview was quiet good and will be uploaded here soon and presented at the upcoming alumni event. Some questions from last week are still open and I try to discuss them brief in this post.

First of all, on the right hand navigation at the bottom I added a list of links concerning the wish of some departments to get more information about social media. They will not answer all questions but should suffice at the moment. For the future I hope we find someone who can give an in house training in the use of social media. To freshen up the post here is a video on what to think about before using Twitter in your marketing strategy.



the Another question ask was how to integrate polls, forms and other interactive elements into the website. Contact Forms can be realized in GX. Polls like the one you see on top of the right hand navigation do not. Another way to create forms is by using a free service offered by Google. Microsoft's rival introduced Google Documents quiet a while ago and updates it regularly. It is for free and the only thing you need to do is to register. A more recent update includes a service called google forms. It allows you to create forms that one can embed into the website using the PARAGRAPH element. (I will explain this in one of the videos in the future). The input from users are stored in an google excel file. It is also a good solution to conduct online surveys. But since GX allows for this function as well there is no real need for it. For an example see the form made by postgraduate education here.

For polls GX offers a solution that I dont see implemented anywhere yet. But it is there. Another solution for polls are services like polldady. If you want to know more about your Twitter follower you might want to use Twtpoll. And since the more choice you have the more freedom you get here is a list with polling services you can use and most of them are for free.

The topic of weblogs came up for the IRO office. What they want is to give incoming students the possibility to blog about their experience. Solutions for this vary between the poles of being able to control the message and embracing the chaos. Hosting a wordpress multiple user account on our own facilities or using a hosted version are on the table. Asking the students if they already write a blog another one. After a good night of sleep I think that the solution that justifies the costs and results is the following: We open a free wordpress account and create for every student a user profile. Somebody in the IRO office gets editor rights and manages the blog. In this way we can maintain control over the look and feel of the blog and content while keeping the administrative workload at a minimum. Blogger dot com does not allow for multible users and other blogging platforms don't offer the intuitive User Interface wordpress has.

Department Website Structure

Since the first people show up tomorrow to discuss changes on the department site I think its a good idea to reveal the structure I came up with. My basic premise is "keep it simple". Since the deadline is tight and I have no clue what departments really want I hope to get some input here from you.



1. The initial plan to give every department the same layout (assigned design in GX) that schools (former faculties) and maastrichtuniversity.nl (former universitymaastricht.nl) got dismissed because of technical problems. But this does not matter for now. What I consider a well done department side is Oxford University - Department of Biochemistry. The front page should show off what there is to show. It should be inviting and to the point. If it was updated on a regular basisabout the department's activities it would serve as a good example on how I see our site. So far I propose this mockup as a starting point.

Lets get it done

Forward through the rear-view mirror. "I think to much like our generation" was the comment of a PhD student during a casual chat. I took it as an offence and listened to what he had to say. The department is unhappy with its current website presence. Than they are not alone, I replied. It is not only what you see on their website but also what you don't see. The problem is that students take very long to write their thesis. And no system keeps track of this process. Another problem concerns the publications published by members of the department. Since publications are the sort of product that results from the intellectual endeavour academics are engaged in they have an interest in presenting them. The curious thing is that nobody can tell me where they publish them in the first place.
The current department website has 200 clicks per day according to their webmaster. My analytics tells me something else. Its about 60 clicks per day and most of them come from internal IPs. After a fruitful discussion about relative vague concepts we agreed to meet with the other web editors in the School and engage in a dialogue about the Operation Switch Over.
Talking yesterday to the Network administrator I am really impressed by the facilities of the School. 64TB storage NAS, virtual servers and a department that has everything under control. Thats a positive message. But thats the only one at the moment.

Youth Media and Next generation Classroom

One recent initiative that offers some insights into the major theme of this years opening of the academic year is the Youth media and next generation Classroom seminar series. A full conference coverage where international top educators, innovators and media experts meet in October 2009 here in Maastricht to discuss how they create the future for universities.
The Department of Education Research and Development should be interested in what Prof. Anne Balsamo from the University of South California has to report on her experience with new media and new literacies.

Overview of the website

The current website is the target of criticism from all corners. I am not inclined to give a value judgement but I think that it represents to a visible degree the universities organisational structure. To back up this claim I went over every page and compiled the list that you see here:


Download PDF here
(note that the website is a work in progress or fluid)

Whether this was intentional or not I don't know. But it turns out that the most relevant information (by this I mean programme details, certificates, research results,...) is at the back of the website. It takes me eight clicks to get the programme's deadlines f.e. as it took me about half an hour to scan in some documents in the first week. This said, I see the same thing in other schools at MU.

Plugins you need

Some tools make your life easier, others only more convenient. For my work I found three tools that combine both characteristics - Firefox (Browser) - Firebug (Add-On) and Open in IE 1.3 (Add-on) and make my life in the caveyard much easier. Firebug lets you see what GX is actually doing and is not for no reason advertised as the "most powerful tool for webdevelopment". Open IE gives you a way to render any website you surf to in firefox to be rendered as if you use Internet Explorer. It proves very powerful in that it allows you to make use of the faster Firefox browser while still see what most people experience in with their IE