This session is put together by Ty Glasgow, CEO and President of BigBad Inc. Twitter was down during this session so I decided to share it through a blog.
To start the session Ty laid out a quick outline of his session in terms of where websites in high education are heading.
- Social media
- Mobile
- User defined Information Architecture
- Content Management Systems
- Alumni Web Solutions
- Governance
First generation websites in higher education were built upon institutional design. Aimed at the audience in their organization, but not aimed at people outside their organization. The aim at new students and recruits did not happen until the second generation of websites. The third generation of websites are starting to emerge using outcomes:
- All universities have business outcomes they are driving toward in various departments and they all affect each other
- Now bringing together all the outcome goals into your website starts to really add power to your messages
- ex. Biology department is working on a cutting edge technology, now you can bring together the prospective student interested in it, the current student studying it, the faculty member teaching, and the alumni working with it in the field. This is drives high levels of engagement!
Third generation websites will have an environment with clear task lines to perform tasks in an integrated manner. No more silo approach (public site, intranet, alumni portal). This gives the ability to highlight what really differentiates your college (your core) from other colleges.
Myths?
- 3 clicks away from information - False, you should feel that your on the right track of information.
- All internal audience content should be password protected in a portal - False, this kills the creditability of your public website.
- You must have a tag line - False, you can hurt yourself as much as it can help… but it is not needed
- Entertain prospective students - False, it’s an important decision and students will approach it as such
What not to wear!
This is not a differentiate especially if you number 132!- Stand-alone Undergrad Admission Sites
- Reinvent Facebook or MySpace
Ty ended the session with a lightning round. He asked the audience for volunteers to give a URL and provided a three minute help session to each. I won’t share the URL’s, but the advice and comments were very insightful.
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