Bret Peters
Vice President
Fig Leaf Software
As more campus business is done on the web, online trends and innovation are of increasing importance. A talented web practitioner shares some of his insight and some of today's better practices.
What is your business and whom do you serve?
We are web designers for universities, government agencies, associations and businesses. We also train our clients' personnel in their use of products and tools by Adobe, Google, Websense and CommonSpot. We help our clients use the latest technology to solve real-world business problems. Our higher education clients include Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University Law School, Tulane University, George Mason University and Greensboro College.
What factors are stimulating a move by colleges to use out-sourced talent for web-related activities?
Admissions recruiting continues to be increasingly competitive, which continually raises the bar for successful web sites. Prospective students expect and appreciate web sites that are at least as tech-savvy as they are. In addition to satisfying a wide range of information expectations, when today's prospect is visiting a college web site, he or she also wants to connect with the school's students. And that's also the case with alumni.
Are those colleges outsourcing all tasks? All web pages?
No. They're leveraging their in-house talent, and then using outside talent for other areas--or for special projects.
How might outside talent help a college develop and implement a bright idea?
Vanderbilt wanted to incorporate rich video across much of their web site--news, athletics, politics, science and medicine, for example. Together we helped them create VUCast. We are now enjoying watching them engage alumni with a new tool they can use and reuse and make available to all audiences.
How might outside talent help a college deal with a problem before it becomes a much bigger problem?
If a college web site's architecture requires techies and only techies to manage its content, that always leads to problems as content and applications grow. So we helped Carnegie Mellon implement browser-based content management easily used by non-techie content owners and content publishers from anywhere in the world.
Give an example how a seemingly everyday item can spiff up a school's website.
A calendar can work wonders. Calendars are familiar to all people. And a well-harnessed calendar can organize and convey a lot of information well. Enable the viewing audience to easily add events, and its asset value to the campus community increases enormously.
What is 'gated content,' and is it in wide usage in higher education?
Gated content is restricted to a certain group of users. It may be confidential. Or it may be premium-priced. Or both. It is not yet a widely-used technique in higher education. However, higher education can learn much about gated content from other industries, especially on a give-to-get basis. For example, the American Association of Museums achieved an 8 percent membership boost in one year of gated content mastery.
What are the tools of your trade?
With universities we put Adobe Acrobat ConnectPro to heavy use, especially for elearning and virtual classroom applications. We use DreamWeaver, PhotoShop and ColdFusion a lot. Many of our university clients use the Google Search appliance as well as GoogleApps.
How do you attract and retain talent?
Among our 35 employees, 22 of them have been here five years or more. It's a real challenge finding top talent, so we are eager to retain people. We employ two University of Maryland interns each year, and they get to work on real projects of substance.
What secret about web site optimization shouldn't be a secret?
Google publishes a free best practices document for search engine optimization. Some of its tips are very easily acomplished. For example, change your title bar (the often-overlooked very top line) to include terms that are relevant to the content on the page--terms that are likely to be searched for.