Wayne State University

AIM HIGHER

Web Communications Blog

We build user centered Web sites from the ground up.

Archive for the 'thoughts' Category

State of the Wayne State Web site

Monday, October 26th, 2009

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 [...]

Class of 2014 Facebook Group

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

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 [...]

Testing Tender Support for Web site updates

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

If you interact with our department through the wcs[at]wayne.edu email address for requesting services or update your Web site you will notice a change in the responses over the next month.
We are testing a service called Tender Support to handle keeping track of updates and issues.

A single point of contact
It was important to us to [...]

Campus communicators meetup

Friday, August 28th, 2009

This week we had our first campus communicator meetup. In the past it was a once per year half day event with presentations and mandatory attendance. This year we scaled it down to a 1-2 hour discussion on timely topics with a smaller group.
About 20 communicators from across campus attended the meetup. We had salad, [...]

2008 – Year in Review

Saturday, December 27th, 2008

After launching the Web Communications Blog at the beginning of this year with the intent to bring awareness not only our department but also to help the campus community at large with support and initiatives to advance the web. Over the past year we have accomplished a lot and I just wanted to give a [...]

Tweaking the homepage for usability’s sake

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

You probably have not noticed but we made a slight change to the flash panel on wayne.edu. In the top drawer we place success stories from around campus. But before you get to the stories it was designed to display a branding image.

Why this made sense then
It made sense when we first launched because it [...]

Blog Action Day: Poverty

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

Today is a day to blog about poverty, to bring awareness to others, to inspire others to make a difference. Detroit is no stranger to poverty, it is all around us. I wanted to detail what our department has been doing to work simply and locally to help charity programs in and around Detroit.
In the [...]

Are you a web worker? Dont miss this years survey

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

If you are a web worker and haven’t seen it yet, please take ten minutes to complete the 2008 A List Apart survey so we can build a snapshot of our industry.

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addthis_title = ‘Are+you+a+web+worker%3F+Dont+miss+this+years+survey’;
addthis_pub = ‘nickdenardis’;

Traffic Quantity vs. Quality

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

Last week was spring break here at Wayne State. We had a significant drop in visitors to the main wayne.edu site. Below is the graph in green the previous week while in blue the spring break week. This seemed normal at first glance since less students were on campus to login at the library where [...]

Time to celebrate! IE8 will default to standards mode.

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

In a surprise move yesterday Microsoft announced it has changed its position on the default rendering engine of IE8 from IE7 rendering to the bleeding edge standards mode. This is a HUGE win for web developers across the world, the average user and everyone with a disability.
Making the standards mode “standard” means the web will [...]