It seems like one after another sickness is starting to spread through the Web department. Yet with multiple people out we have still managed to launch three sites this week (watch for the write up’s shortly) and keep projects moving. The links this week have a theme of “tools”, helpful items for the day to day. Enjoy the links.

• Do You Have Digital Natives at Your Organization?
• 10 Free Server & Network Monitoring Tools that Kick Ass
• Client Side Code Highlighting Made Easy
• Google releases Closure, the tools behind the JS geniuses
• Free Browsers for Visual Impairment
• Fast by Default and Web Performances
• The Quentin Tarantino Guide to Creating Killer Content
• Cyclo.ps Makes Searching for Stock Images Simple [Image Search]
• How to Get Your Ideas Across to Clients
• Raising the Dead: Bringing Failed Projects Back to Life
• INSIGHT: A great way to figure out the weak spots

I thought I would share some insight into how visitors are getting to wayne.edu. Below is some detail of the incoming traffic to the homepage and child pages from users who are off campus in the past month. Ideally these are people who get a first time glimpse of Wayne State as an institution.

Traffic sources from October 4 – November 3, 2009

487,781 visits via 1,623 sources and mediums

Even taking away all on campus traffic I am surprised to see over 50% is still coming directly.

Sources in Detail

Besides for direct traffic search engines are by far our next largest traffic source. It has been said by many people before and this continues to back it up, Google is your new homepage.

Search Engines

Google tops this list probably because we use it for all our internal site searches. This is off campus traffic but it does not necessarily mean the user started at google.com. We use Google Custom Search on wayne.edu which will show up as traffic from Google. One thing I am still surprised about is how high aol still ranks, although it is no where near the top three it is still above quite a few big names. I checked out Baidu, and it looks to be a Chinese search engine started in 2000.

Keywords

It is interesting to see the keyword list, I am going to assume the top five are from people who started at google.com since (I hope) they would not be searching for us on our homepage, but you never know. This is interesting because we do track the searches on wayne.edu and typically they are for something more specific list a program, professor or department. It does look like “bookstore” would be from wayne.edu since typing it into Google directly yields national bookstores, we rank no where in the top 10 pages.

Sites in Detail

As far as non-search traffic it is interesting to see a few things. Most people are referred to the homepage from one of our existing sites. Only two results, search.comcast, which technically should be under the “search engine” category and studentvoice.com. The thing about student voice is the traffic is probably non intentional, since it is a survey service by default once a survey is complete you are either forwarded to wayne.edu automatically or it is the only link on the page. We should probably try to get that changed to more of a “student portal” to try to get someone conversions from the current students taking surveys.

Countries

This comes at no surprise, we are a US university in Detroit. US traffic dominates and we are 10 minutes from Canada. We also have a large international student body, students from 70 countries.

Take Aways

Besides for direct traffic, search is still king when driving people to wayne.edu. It is unfortunate we cannot examine this direct traffic further, it would be great to know out of the 50% how many people have wayne.edu as their homepage. It would also be nice to see if they are actually typing in the URL or have it in a bookmark or bookmark bar.

User habits have always intrigued me and we make a continued effort to examine these habits as they relate to the web. Although we can only post so much publicly I will continue to try to post as many insights as possible to better help you examine your users.

GoooOOo Girl! Go go GO GIRL!! So you can probably tell we’re really excited to share this latest addition with you. GO-GIRL which stands for Gaining Options-Girls Investigating Real Life, is an engaging program for middle school girls to help increase their confidence in their academic endeavors. With such energetic target audience, we couldn’t help tap in our playful side during the redesign.

Some of the criteria given to us before the redesign were the use of their colors (purple, fuchsia, and teal), their logo, and with specific request – the use of their yellow stars as much as possible. With such vivid colors, bold logo and embellishment, our main concerns were overcrowding and clashing styles. So how do you design for middle school girls with much flair while still keeping the university’s web standards? Very carefully use their elements and only use them where it counts. Take a look around. We’d love to hear your feedback.

View the site at: http://gogirls.wayne.edu/

Recently, I talked about the pros and cons of sending HTML vs Text emails to your clients in this article “Filling your inboxes with visual appealing HTML emails”. Since HTML Emails are becoming increasingly more popular to send here at Wayne State, we are trying to come up with a system that makes this painstakingly clumsy process as streamlined as possible.

Third party testing

If you have one main template and don’t have to create new ones often, a pay email testing service might be for you. For a small fee you can use one of these services to send your HTML code to and then it will produce screenshots of how the email looks in the most popular email clients. In addition, some of these services will also test how your email will react with spam filters.

Pay for testing resources

• Mailchimp – Inbox Inspector
• Campaign Monitor Testing Service
• Litmus – The advanced testing tool for web professionals

Testing in house

If you don’t have the resources or funding to go with one of the automated services, you can go the “old fashioned way” and set up a series of test email accounts on all the popular email clients. To begin with, set up accounts on Hotmail, Yahoo, Google, AOL and of course, Outlook 2000, 2003, 2007 and Outlook Express. Don’t forget to test Apple Mail 2 and 3 and to test on the iPhone as well. This will get you tested in over 80% of all the popular email clients, according to Campaign Monitor as of June 2009, in their article Email client popularity.

Don’t forget to test email in popular mobile environments as well, iPhone for example is now more popular than gmail in viewing email. Once you establish some main HTML email templates the testing will get easier. When designing email templates, keep it simple. Trying too much, is one of the biggest mistakes designers do when creating HTML emails.

Here are some more good resources for getting a professional and cross-platform HTML email below. Remember to test, test, test!

Free HTML testing resources

• 2007 Office System Tool: Outlook HTML and CSS Validator
• Premailer: preflight for HTML e-mail
• Contactology – Check Your Email’s Spam Score & Deliverability

Other resources and HTML email information

• Stupid HTML Email Design Mistakes
• How to test HTML emails
• HTML Emails – Taming the Beast
• Email Standards Project

Happy Halloween! It’s been another great week with tons of progress as we rush to get sites out by the end of the year. Looks like the community has been hard at work too, check out the links of the week below.

• INSIGHT: A great way to figure out the weak spots
• The “Can’t Have It” Gap
• Design patterns and examples for colour blindness
• 10 UX Blogs You Should Be Reading | UX Booth
• 7 Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School
• Why men should give women flowers
• Creating a Timeless User Experience
• The need for clear data licenses
• Brand = User Experience: The Interface of a Cheeseburger
• Jay Rogers – I challenge you to make cool cars
• htmLawed: PHP Code to Purify and Filter HTML | W3Avenue
• what 15 freshmen taught me about social media.
• Carsonified » 10 Tips on Writing Hero-worthy Error Messages

Something big is happening to the university Events Calendar.

A little bit ago Rob Vrabel mentioned we were working on the events calendar and I would like to confirm that we are and we have some great things in store.

We will be running down all the new features in detail closer to launch but here are just a few things to look forward to:

• Completely new interface
• Better listing and search for events by interests and audiences
• Upcoming Deadlines and Reminders are broken out from main calendar
• Images now supported for event promotion
• Image and video gallery available for every event
• RSVP’s to be created and managed by anyone
• Ability to show interest or say you are attending an event even if there is no RSVP
• Calendars will be better organized in the left menu
• Featured event promotion
• Addresses for location of off campus event
• Subscribe by RSS to a category or audience
• Email subscription for upcoming featured events each week

You can view the current calendar at: http://events.wayne.edu/

Last week I gave a presentation to our small group of communicators, it shows the past, present and future goals for the wayne.edu Web site architecture. I didn’t have time to officially mind map the entire process so I just drew it up on the white board and took photos so bear with me.

The Past

Five years ago when I started in the Web Communications department the web environment was completely decentralized and every site was on their own server with their own content managers, designers and developers. An end user would be bouncing from site to site with no visual or information consistency. It made a lot of sense from a department standpoint because they could control their own environment.

The Present

Over the past five years we have begun to centralize the thousands of sites into a central server environment and identity manual. So far we have 350+ sites in a central look with completely new navigation which focuses on the end user. This is great that each site works well and from a first time visitor they know they are at Wayne State University.

The Future

In the next five years our plan is to improve the users experience even more. Right now the sites are still very separate which means the user has to relearn the navigation each time they bounce to a new site. We have identified some key paths our primary audiences need to take to be successful, our goal is to make those paths usable.  This means creating some central repositories to pull information into the main Web site and to disburse to the department site.

Some other added benefits would be greater integration of information and up to date content. A key facts database that can dynamically be updated across the web and reminds when they need to be updated. A central degree and requirements list. Press releases and news will all be housed in the same spot to pull from and reference. And last but not least a central faculty profile system, opening it up to all faculty, not just the ones in it now. This will allow each of the departments be promote information broader and for users who are not failure with our university structure to find information easily.

Execution

This is just a plan and there are many steps that would need to happen before parts of this are actually implemented. On the other hand there are a few things we can start doing pretty soon and we will be getting those in the queue over the next few months.

This week I attended TEDxDetroit with 150 other idea people.This weeks list of links all follow the theme of helping out. They all give insight, tips or explain things we see every day but fail to acknowledge.

• what 15 freshmen taught me about social media.
• Carsonified » 10 Tips on Writing Hero-worthy Error Messages
• 7 Reasons Why Google Wave Is Going To Be Awesome
• Easy Databasing with SQLite | Build Internet!
• How to Sell More Ethically
• 4 Lies about social media
• Dirty Little Secret of Success
• How to Plan a Content Heavy Site | Build Internet!
• 10 Amazing jQuery Plugins To Improve Your Forms « TutsValley
• Death to Lorem Ipsum
• Create Sidebars of Equal Height with Faux Columns
• 16 of the Best Designed Sign Up Pages
• Carsonified » How to Understand Your Users with Personas
• How to Create Advocacy and Conversation (via @FrankInLalaland)
• Showing the weather with PHP and Google Weather API | KomunitasWeb
• The myth of the page fold: evidence from user testing | cxpartners

It has been a crazy week, getting back after a week off is tough but I am finally all caught up. This week a few interesting things have happened, more Wave invites went out, FacebookGate started again and we started the planning stages of the next big change to the Wayne State Web landscape. Below is just a glimpse of what has been going on across the Web in the last week, enjoy.

• The myth of the page fold: evidence from user testing | cxpartners
• Tools for Sketching User Experiences | UX Booth
• .eduGuru – 5 min survey: State of the university Web department
• .eduGuru – Protecting your College’s Intellectual Property on Facebook: Learning from the Class of 2014 Groups
• SquaredPeg – Butler University sues Anonymous Blogger
• 10 Puzzle Websites to Sharpen Your Programming Skills
• Do You *Really* Need a Redesign?
• Authenticity As Your Extreme Internet Strategy
• Case Study: Fewer Input Fields Increases Conversions
• How to Understand Your Users with Personas
• Performance Comparison of Major Web Browsers
• OnlineOCR Converts Your Scanned Documents to Editable Text [Text]
• Creating sustainable competitive advantage
• Improve your keyboard accessibility
• Extract HTML Structure From Page With Simple Script

It looks like “FacebookGate” is happening again this year. I suggest reading the two links in the last sentence to get some context about the issue at hand.

What is Happening

This year it looks like they already created a fake group for us along with a bunch of other school’s class of 2014 groups. This is an issue because the creator and other members of the fake group are not associated with Wayne State University. Although I was impressed they did take the time to include our fight song and other information.

The Problem

It is not that we don’t control the group but rather that the group is part of a larger plan by an outside organization to market to our students on false pretenses. Although the fake group does list “(official group)” in their title it actually is not.

The Solution

Since we have been increasing active on Facebook in the past few years and many departments are pushing to get their freshmen involved early we setup a short URL. This can be used on any electronic or print publications to direct new students to the real Class of 2014 Facebook group. Hopefully over time as students join and we post more the fake group will get ignored so there is less confusion for the students.

URL to the official group is http://wayne.edu/2014/

If you have any questions about the situation or our use of Facebook feel free to let me know.