Wayne State University

AIM HIGHER

Web Communications Blog

We build user centered Web sites from the ground up.

Archive for November, 2009

[Friday Links] The Thanksgiving Edition

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

It was a short week with a lot of work getting done. This weeks list of links mix accessibility, best practices and some tools to further your success on the web and the web as a platform. Enjoy.

Web Project Bingo
12 Accessibility Pitfalls to Avoid | Design Shack
Government websites should meet basic usability [...]

[Friday Links] The Chili Cook-Off Edition

Friday, November 20th, 2009

Today is our department’s annual chili cook-off. Not too much to talk about this week other that Chrome OS, TinyChat and a few other fun things. Hope you had a great week and got a lot accomplished. Enjoy the links of the week.

5 Effective Calls to Action That Will Get Your Visitors Clicking
Google [...]

Upcoming changes to how the development server is accessed

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

We are going to make some changes soon to the way the development server is accessed that will effect all sites in the new Web environment.
The Problem
Every site in the environment has two URL’s, one for production and one for development. Right now the development URL’s are publicly accessible.This is great for testing sites off [...]

[Friday Links] The World Usability Day Edition

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

This week was all about usability. Thursday November 12th, 2009 was World Usability Day. I was lucky enough to attend the yearly MSU event which featured great speakers, presentations and people. A link to my wrap up can be found at the end of the list below. The links this week seem to follow the [...]

Aim Higher Commercials – Round 2

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

The next round of Aim Higher commercials started yesterday. The goal of the new commercials is to expand on the existing look, feel and add more depth to the Wayne State University message. There are six commercials in total, Class Pride, Ironic, Odds Are, Real Learning, Welcome and Decisions.
Although the commercials don’t have a direct [...]

Site Launch: Undergraduate Admissions

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

One year after the project kickoff the new Undergraduate Admissions Web site launches. Of course, we had a little fun the in process. I outlined a few key changes at the bottom of this post but wanted to go through some important changes in detail.
The old site lacked the “experience” factor. Not the hand-holding through [...]

[Friday Links] The Quarantine Edition

Friday, November 6th, 2009

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 [...]

[Report] How visitors get to wayne.edu

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

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 [...]

Site Launch: Go-Girls

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

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 [...]

Testing HTML emails efficiently as possible

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

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 [...]