Go back a little to leap further...

Well, this is embarrassing, after an 8 month project it looks like we're going to need another 11 days to sort out our new website! Having run into some rather serious hardware & DB issues I have decided to delay the launch of the website for a few days to allow us all to put those finishing touches in place.

So, to all you IWMW 11 attendees that I was speaking to keep your eyes peeled a little longer!

Don't worry, it'll be worth the wait... ;)

"One who fears failure limits his activities. Failure is only the opportunity to more intelligently begin again."
Henry Ford

IWMW Event 2011: Responding to change

The IWMW Institutional Web Management Workshop is being held at the University of Reading this year and i've finally managed to make it to one! It's currently day two and the Embedding Web 2.0 plenary has just finished. The event seems well attended and it's given me a great opportunity to finally meet some of the people I have only spoken to via Twitter!

The sessions yesterday were very good, I managed to get myself into the Parallel Session entitled 'Content silos and how to overcome them'. This was all based around how best to improve working across all faculties and departments. The key points that came out of it were that there needs to be better ways of sharing content so, clear tagging, good metadata, well structured site and workflows. Luckily we seem to be putting all of those in but it was interesting to hear feedback from other universities who aren't! Some of the people I spoke to yesterday had a huge number of sites, project sites and faculty content all in different CMS's and running different designs which sounds like a complete nightmare!

The key points from yesterdays sessions were broken into a number of heading but the two that stuck in my mind are:

Editorial

• You need to have strong editorial guidelines
• Bear in mind the audience, channel and media relevance
• Go in heavy on the metadata & tagging

Governance

• Clear ownership of content is needed
• Workflow rules should be in place
• Regular content audits are essential
• Carry out regular survey & user feedback sessions
• Taxonomy

A good starting point for breaking down the silo mentality apparently!

So, day two is well under way and it's almost time for the Online Privacy talk. If you wanted to get an idea of what is happening during the day you can follow the hashtag #iwmw11 or check out the website:

Institutional Web Management Workshop 2011:  Responding to Change

Presenting at Westminster Abbey was an experience!

So last week Squiz asked if I would be kind enough to present a preview of the new website and an overview of how we go to where we are today. A brilliant opportunity for me to highlight the very exciting functionality we have on the new homepage and a chance to show off the new design.

The venue itself was great and Imogen Levy (@teppie) from Westminster Abbey (@wabbey) was even nice enough to give the audience a tour of the Abbey afterwards.

The presentations from Imogen (Westminster Abbey) and Dan (City University) highlighted that we are all facing similar issues at the moment. How do we address the increase in mobile traffic, how do we highlight course information and how do we compete in an ever increasingly competitive market. Thankfully we all seem to have solved the majority of the issues and the ones we haven't we can 'borrow' from each other!

You can find a copy of my presentation below and it even has a sneak peek of the new design on the last slide!

View more presentations from Squiz

Socialnomics...

A quick posting to highlight the latest revision of the Socialnomics video from Erik Qualman. I posted the original version a few months back and have used it in presentations as a good intro to social newbies... Enjoy!