We had a blast at this year’s NACAC Conference in Baltimore. Stein sported a new look at the booth as well as some new faces.
New booth design
Here I am getting into the spirit with our NY representative, Carolina.
Sales team at NACAC
And a special congratulations to the winner of a new iPod touch, Mariah Lane from Binghamton University!
The green buzz is out there, and it’s not going away. Twenty plus years ago we saw a huge surge in the market for recycled papers. Almost as quickly as it began, it dissipated, because at the time, the paper industry wasn’t prepared. You had to pay a premium for an inferior product. But fear not, the market has spoken, and the paper industry has responded. Here are some tips to help you take steps toward greener pastures.
1. Request certified paper sources — The two most prevalent forestry certification organizations in the U.S. are the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI). The purpose of these two organizations is to make sure the harvesting of trees and management of forests is done in environmentally and socially responsible ways. Requesting that materials be printed on paper originating from certified sources ensures that you are contributing to positive sustainability practices.
Requesting that materials be printed on paper originating from certified sources ensures that you are contributing to positive sustainability practices.
Each organization has a chain-of-custody (CoC) certification that tracks the raw materials from the certified lands, to the paper manufacturer, to the paper merchant, and finally to the printer — all of which must have CoC certification. By maintaining this chain, we are able to place an FSC or SFI logo on your print materials. So, not only are you making an environmentally responsible choice, you’re also letting your constituents know it.
2. Check the recycled content — It’s important to note that not all FSC-certified or SFI-certified papers are recycled. Within each certification type, there are papers ranging anywhere from virgin paper (no recycled content) to 100% post-consumer waste (PCW) recycled content. Many coated papers (such as gloss, dull, or matte) are 10% PCW; some paper stocks contain as much as 30% PCW (very few coated papers carry a recycled content above 30%). There are quite a few uncoated papers available with 100% PCW recycled content. Be sure to specify if you want to print your marketing materials on recycled paper in addition to using FSC- or SFI-certified papers.
3. Compare costs — Not all recycled paper is more expensive than non-recycled paper. Recycled papers are getting more and more competitive with their virgin counterparts. One hundred percent PCW papers can be as much as 10% higher in cost. On the other hand, some of the 10-30% PCW papers are comparable in price with non-recycled equivalents.
4. Look for quality – Recycled paper quality has improved greatly over the last decade. It’s a common misconception that recycled papers are discolored, rough, or flecked with colored fragments, but this is no longer the case. Both the appearance and printability of recycled papers are now on par with most virgin papers. In fact, it’s hard — if not impossible in some cases — to tell the difference when comparing paper swatches or print samples.
There are also a few paper mills making even greener strides by manufacturing papers using hydroelectric-generated power or wind power. Mohawk Paper has an environmental calculator to help you quantify the environmental impact of going green on your next printing project.
More on certification: To FSC or SFI? That is the question.
A little on-the-street interview action from Google is a nice reminder of why it’s important not to make assumptions about what your users and customers know or don’t know.
One point I often make in discussing web site design with clients is that your site’s navigation is also part of your brand. On the web “the brand is the experience and the experience is the brand.”*
People trust a site that appears clearly organized.
Recently a potential client in discussing a web site redesign expressed how their content management vendor’s implementation of navigation with multiple levels of fly-out menus caused problems for older alumni (who can’t drive a mouse as well as they used too — this issue it not limited to older individuals, by the way). The vendor is probably no doubt proud of the technical aspects of its menus — it uses them frequently in its online portfolio examples — but this is an example where the technical solution is not the best human solution, and it leaves a bad impression with certain users.
James Kalbach writes in Designing Web Navigation that while the “cost of finding information is high, the cost of not finding information is perhaps higher.”** A site’s navigation plays a role in expressing a brand, it:
Communicates … priorities and values through categories, the order of options, and the tone of the labels. Well-structured navigation also contributes to the overall credibility…. People seem to trust a site that appears clearly organized with an easy-to-use navigational structure.
How you help or hinder your site visitor’s completion of his or her goals and whether you respect or waste a user’s time, feeds the stream of impressions about your institution. In the example above, the message is: We don’t care so much about our older alumni. If your navigation is “cool,” but unusable by persons with disabilities, you are sending a pretty definite message about your institution, and its brand, into the world.
We’re all aware that our brand extends beyond the visual aspects of it. We’re frequently much better at implementing the visual parts — the logo, the stationery package, the publications, the appearance of the website — than we are the physical and experience aspects. But our brand’s story is also informed by physical interactions and by experiences, whether we actively try to mange those aspects or not. An unhelpful employee can damage the impression of your brand for a campus visitor. A campus tour and the appearance of your physical plant can affirm or change your brand impression in the mind of a prospect or a parent. And nothing can telegraph an organization’s thinking about its consumers or audiences quicker than its web site.
In web projects there’s often pressure to get to something visual very quickly, but web design is as much, if not more, about enabling an experience as it is about including the logo and new pictures of the quad. Your site’s navigation, and the information architecture and the back-end technical systems supporting it, are the foundation of the online experience. Design decisions should always consider accessibility, responsiveness, and polite degradability (for assistive technology devices and older browsers) with the goal to leave site visitors with a delightful, as opposed to frustrating, experience. Navigation design should not be left to the IT intern or the default settings of your content management system.
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* Dayal, S., Landesberg, H. and Zeisser, M., “Building Digital Brands,” The McKinsey Quarterly, May 2000: 42-51.
** Kalbach, James, Designing Web Navigation (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2007) 22.
Writing and designing for today’s web is about writing and designing for humans and robots.
Content must not only pique the interest and meet the needs of a site’s human visitors, but it must be equally nutritious to the Pac Man appetites of the search engines of Google, Yahoo, and others. Every search engine has an application — crawler, spider, or bot — that finds and follows the links of your site, sending back a list to a database, which is then analyzed by the search engine’s proprietary algorithm to rank your pages and serve up a search engine results page (or SERP, in the lingo). Optimizing your site for search requires having content, structure, and technology that help both the crawler move over the site and the search engine rank the results.
Search optimization is a mix of science and magic and a continually moving target. Even the search engine optimization (SEO) experts don’t agree on all techniques. And an .edu site is going to have different priorities for SEO than a business site that exists for e-commerce. But since many SEO techniques are easy and actually encourage good organization and content practices, adopting them as part of your site development and maintenance guidelines is not a waste of time, particularly in an era of belt-tightening for traditional marketing budgets. Here are seven tips gleaned from the realm of SEO to get you started:
1. Use descriptive page titles — We’re talking the TITLE tag here, and it’s one of the first things that both humans and robots encounter. Make sure your pages have descriptive titles with keywords. Simply repeating the name of your institution on every page is not sufficient. Each page should have a unique page title, with keywords (but not stuffed with keywords) relevant to the page content, front loaded with the words that matter most. Aim for no more than 66 characters and use title case.
2. Put effort into the most valuable meta tags — The meta description tag deserves your attention, not necessarily for its influence over rankings, but because its content can be what search engines display on SERPs. You want to control that display, not leave it up to the crawler’s best guess. It should be around 160 characters and be unique to each page. The meta keyword tag has been so abused with spamming that it has low to zero influence on search engines. If you use it, it should be different on every page. Simply repeating the same words in the keywords tag on every page of your site may look more spammy than legitimate to a search engine.
3. Use heading tags – Headlines are looked at with more importance by crawlers than body text. The H1, H2, and so on tags are a way to indicate headlines and their relative importance to search engines. In the dark ages before CSS, we were saddled with fixed heading sizes that were often too big or too small or otherwise ugly in the layout, so we sometimes used other tags (or even images, gasp) to style headlines. Now with CSS we can visually style H tags any way we like, and they can be used to add robot-readable structure to a web page. Heads should be both descriptive and have relevant keywords when possible.
4. Write one topic per page – This is a tip followed by most pro content developers. Not only does it help your human readers, but the algorithms that search engine crawlers use work best on one topic at at time. Keeping focused in your writing also makes it easier to come up with keywords and meta descriptions for a page. Since you’re sticking to one topic per page, you can also keep it short and get to to the point quickly, right? Headlines, subheads, and concise paragraphs are good SEO writing, and consistency among those helps search engine crawlers (and humans) understand your content.
5. Don’t be lazy with your links — The anchor text of a link gives descriptive information about the content of the link’s destination page and can influence search engine rankings. Lazily written “click here” links, for example, tell nothing about the destination page, but may get you a top ranking for “click here.” (Search “click here” in Google. Hello, Adobe.) Use keywords in the link text that are relevant to the destination page. And while you’re at it, pay attention to linking to the PDFs, videos, images, and similar assets that are all part of today’s sites. For example, a search engine cannot tell that’s the spring commencement video unless the link to it says “spring commencement video,” and it is placed next to text in the page about spring commencement. And, by the way, for similar reasons make sure all your images (including logos and images used as buttons) have appropriate text in their ALT tags.
6. Understand the search implications of technologies – This is a whole topic unto itself, but be aware of search implications of your technical choices. Flash for example, has improved in its ability to be indexed and to allow search engines to find the content and links embedded within Flash objects. But it’s unlikely that search engines will open themselves up to full compatibility with Flash, because that would also open the door to being gamed by an unethical optimizer. Current search engines don’t generally index Flash content on par with HTML. HTML pages will get ranked higher.
There are similar challenges with AJAX and JavaScript. Search engines can’t deal very well with the dynamic and “pageless” content that can be enabled by these technologies. The functional and stylish enhancements that JavaScript can bring to a site’s navigation can also block a search engine’s ability to build a model of the site’s link structure. Search engines can only see the initial page load. If AJAX is used to later alter that content, the new content won’t be seen by a search engine. There are techniques to deal with these issues that you may want to consider.
And finally, with the growing popularity of content management systems (CMS) in education, institutions are faced with a whole slew of additional considerations that affect search. For example, it’s not uncommon to “restart” a site within a CMS, generating a new URL structure for all the content. Search engines, however, have indexed your site using the previous URLs. You are effectively starting over at ground zero with search engines when you flip the CMS switch. Content management systems can also generate problematic URLs along with cloned and duplicated content, which also don’t make search engines happy. If you’re considering a CMS, questions to the vendor about how it supports search are in order.
7. Bring back the site map — And finally, have a good old site map page, a hierarchical list of all the links of the site. The popularity of providing site maps has waned, but they are good for SEO. For one thing, such an alternative link structure can help make up for issues being caused by JavaScript, AJAX, and other crawler blockers. Also including the site map’s links at /sitemap.xml and /sitemap.txt can help search engines understand your site’s structure.
Like all things web, developing for search optimization is a balance between human needs and the needs of technology. It can be challenging, but in many cases what works well for one — structure, conciseness, explanation, consistency — also benefits the other. Search optimized content can be a win win for human and robot.
On the heels of its recent privacy misstep, Facebook yesterday announced a new approach to site governance. It has published a set of proposed Facebook Principles intended to guide the future development of the service, and a Statement of Rights and Responsibilities that will define Facebook’s and user’s commitments to the site.
Perhaps more significantly, Facebook is asking for users to comment and vote on the documents, signaling a new openness to member participation in future policies. This may offer an opportunity to get other issues, such as group size limits, on the table.
More: Facebook news release
