Device-iveness Webinar Recording Now Available!

Two weeks ago Doug Gapinski delivered an informative and engaging webinar titled “Device-iveness: Delivering a High Fidelity Experience on Desktop Browsers, Tablets, and Phones.” And today I’m excited to share the recording with you.

Who should view the webinar:

• People who are considering a web relaunch and want to know more about site delivery on devices
  
• People who have a live site and are thinking of a mobile solution

The webinar will address:

• a look at the current state of custom mobile sites and responsive design in higher education
  
• an exploration of examples in both higher education and the commercial sector
  
• data: facts and figures connected to mobile and responsive examples
  
• resources for anyone considering a web relaunch or mobile site

I promise in the future our recorded webinars will be available within 48 hours and thank you for your patience as we sorted out a few tech issues in order to make this recording available.

Do you have a follow-up question for Doug? Tweet him or leave a comment below.

Posted by Mallory Wood
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Facebook Timeline Cheat Sheet

If you are in charge of your institution’s Facebook Page, get ready. Facebook will automatically push Timeline to all pages on March 30. Your institution has a wonderful opportunity to tell its story in a more visual and dynamic way. Change can be a good thing!

Download the Facebook Timeline Cheat Sheet to take full advantage of the new features Timeline offers, see size measurements for various images, and learn tips and tricks.

And when you “go live” with your updated Page, tell us! Leave a link in the comments and let us know your favorite new feature.

Posted by Mallory Wood
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Keeping it in the (Font) Family

Fast forward to the future. Not quite so far as the hover boards and flying cars promised to us by the Hollywood elite, but to the year 2012. People like fonts. From Coca-Cola to Harry Potter, fonts bring a sense of identity and brand to the text we read. Back in the day, fonts caused a number of issues for developers trying to recreate the visions of designers. Now every developer has the capability, nay, the duty, to make each website look as it was envisioned.

There are a number of solutions available, each sporting a variety of obstacles and benefits:

Image Based Text

Image based text looks exactly like the designer intended. Yes, exactly. Unfortunately, however, it’s image based. So unless your friendly neighborhood designer has both the power and responsibility to create and update images every time you need a text change, this choice isn’t practical. 

Maybe, you happen to be that resident expert (Note: you might be this expert if you’ve ever declared, “That was ‘Shopped,’ I can tell by looking at the pixels.”), it is still a pain and you are bound to need an update when you’re working at a computer that doesn’t have the fonts you need installed. The chances of this happening to you are generally inversely proportional to how quickly the change needs to be put in place.

If you have the skills described above, you must also be able to create an image map for links, be willing to ignore possible ADA issues, be satisfied with slow rendering, and other bad practices too numerous to list. I hesitated about putting this “solution” into my post, but I’ve heard that there are trolls on the Internet looking for fodder. Who knew?

Note: text can also be replaced on the back-end using a number of techniques such as ImageMagick. This, however, is time consuming to create and resource intensive to produce.

sIFR

This solution isn’t too bad if you’re simply replacing small amounts of text. Oh yeah, you also have to require that the website visitor is using Flash. Don’t worry, I’m sure iPhones and iPads won’t catch on any time soon.

@font-face (FontSquirrel)

This technique simply never made it big and it should have. For many years, each browser had limited support for designated file types. The code should have been simple, but it never garnered the support of basic file types it needed across popular browsers. If you are willing to do the following for a single font reference then @font-face might be right for you. (If you like this approach, I would also assume you are getting paid by line of code/hours worked, not performance).

Cufon

Enter cufon. Cufon works great as long as you’re willing to work with a free font, break copyright laws, have someone do font conversions, add secondary script references each time a new font is required, download updates to the supporting library each time a change is made, and know which subset you require from each individual font. Really, it’s not that bad—my optimist side speaking)—but not that good—my pessimist side speaking—either. 

Typekit

Typekit offers over 700 beautiful fonts (as of this post), is easy to setup, and is easy to maintain. The drawback is that you’re now working with a pay-per-view system. Typekit’s tiered structure is certainly reasonable, but it’s one more contract to get approved and one more invoice to pay. You are also locked into requiring a font purchase for any use outside of the domains under contract (local mockups, etc).

Google Web Fonts

Think TypeKit, but free. The font sets are different and not quite as extensive (466 as of this post). The implementation process is the most straightforward of the solutions. Once your selections are made, you are given a reference to an external stylesheet. From that point forward, the fonts can simply be used within your own CSS as though they were native to all computers.

Google Web Fonts also allows you to download any fonts you select as a ZIP of TTF files for use on your local computer. This is great for the design phase and allows you to use the font as a brand across almost any document type. There are also no logins, no ties to domains, no checks on page views, etc. And, did I mention, it’s free?

The best choice?

There are a number other techniques out there such as Fontdeck, Fontslive, FontSpring, Kernest, TypeFace.js, TypeFront, Typotheque, Web Fonts (fonts.com), Webtype, WebIn and more. Like the highlighted selections above, each has a unique set of benefits and drawbacks.

So, how do you get the couture look without driving the developer mad and sacrificing user experience? Start with Google Web Fonts. Due to the ever growing font selection, ease of implementation, cost (free), ability to download fonts locally, and support from one of the largest companies, I would place Google Web Fonts at the front of the pack. If Google doesn’t have what you’re looking for, visit Typekit. Cufon trails a distant third but may be an option for non-copyrighted fonts that Google does not currently support.

What font solution does your institution use and why?

Posted by Kevin Zink
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Three conference presentations worthy of your time.

Last October three team members from mStoner landed in Austin, Texas for the 2011 HighEdWeb conference. If you missed the conference or didn’t make it to our sessions, you are in luck. Below you will find links to our slidedecks and podcasts. The recordings are courtesy of the wonderful HighEdWeb team.

“Creative Services, Anyone?”
presented by Senior Strategist Susan T. Evans in the Marketing, Management, and Professional Development Track

This session covered what it takes to set up a unit on your campus that operates like a successful in-house creative agency. Susan shared her experience establishing and building a creative services team at the College of William & Mary.

Listen to the podcast
View the slides

“Beyond Blogging: Create an Integrated Online Student Ambassador Program”
presented by Marketing Manager Mallory Wood in the Social Media Track.

This presentation focused on how to expand, integrate and manage your institution’s student bloggers’ presence across multiple social networking platforms.

Listen to the podcast
View the slides

“On Your Mark, Get Set, Mobile”
co-presented by Tiffany Broadbent of the College of William & Mary and mStoner Creative Director Doug Gapinski in the Content Track.

This session was a primer for thinking about an institutional mobile site and covered the types of information you should offer in mobile format, the decision to create a mobile app or a mobile website, trends and guidelines for styling and coding, and examples of mobile content from colleges and universities.

Listen to the podcast
View the slides

Susan, Doug, or I will be happy to answer your questions after you review any of the presentations. Please leave a comment and we will respond soon!

Posted by Mallory Wood
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Lessons Learned from a Launch Party

Congratulations to our client North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University on the launch of their new site! We’re proud of how we helped them create a web presence that is inspiring, easy-to-use, and supports their strategic plan. Their newly minted site has been live for only two weeks, but early feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and traffic to the site has increased. Nicole Pride, our main point of contact and the project leader on the NCA&T side, is a superstar.

For the rest of our readers, I wanted to relay some lessons I learned at the NCA&T launch party. Whaaaat? Just hear me out. A month before the new site went live, we were invited to the launch party luncheon. The first thing that struck me about the invitation was that not many of our clients bother to host a official launch party at all. Because of this, we would be attending the event without expectations.

The big day arrived. My colleague Greg Zguta and I met in Raleigh and headed to Greensboro. The party was a catered event hosted in a nice, formal space on campus. Slowly people began to arrive. Eventually the room had filled up with more than 150 faculty and staff members who had written, edited, and migrated content to the new site. Below are a few things I observed during the event.

The party was a great way to thank content contributors.
A&T reworked and deployed over 1,800 pages in under a year in a new CMS, making it one of the most ambitious web relaunches we’ve ever seen. To pull it off, the A&T project team had to move very quickly on training and hold contributors to strict deadlines. By throwing a special party just after launch, the project team was able to publicly thank faculty and staff and celebrate what they had accomplished. They also awarded gift bags to five people in the room who had gone above and beyond the call of duty to get the site live on schedule.

The party was a chance for institutional leaders to show how much they value the site (and the work needed to maintain it).
Chancellor Harold Martin, Vice Chancellor Barbara Ellis, and other key leaders on the A&T side spoke at the launch party. This was a way of sending an important message to a room full of faculty and staff: leadership takes the new website seriously, and they value the work content contributors are doing to sustain the new site.

The party was a call-to-arms for additional work.
Like nearly all institutional sites with a page count in the thousands, there are still areas of the NCA&T site that need new content after launch. The project team used the last few minutes of the luncheon to talk through the work that still needs to be done to finish up certain areas.

I walked away from the luncheon convinced that every college, university, and school deploying a site with multiple content contributors should throw a party after launch.

Posted by Doug Gapinski
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Ampersandbox Makes the News

We here at mStoner are quite pleased that the Ampersandbox, the viewbook and website project we recently helped the College of William & Mary develop, was mentioned in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education and a recent blog post in the Washington Post.

And we find it telling that the Chronicle’s recent article on viewbooks refers to them as “courtship materials,” because that’s really what they are — a college or university’s best attempt at romancing a prospective student, at beginning a relationship that will last a lifetime. Ideally.

But I think the biggest problem with these courtship materials is not their cost or their web-induced obsolescence but the fact that most of them aren’t terribly romantic. They’re often treated, in Richard Hesel’s words, as “wristwatches,” that is, symbols more concerned with tradition and prestige, when they should be treated as love letters. They should delight as well as inform. And especially since a website is much better suited than a print piece to storing and updating factual information, delight assumes even greater importance.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with two of the institutions mentioned in the Chronicle article. Back when we still worked at Lipman Hearne, Voltaire Miran and I helped Knox College develop a new website and enrollment publications as a unified set of communications, all based on the same positioning, messaging and design. Last summer, we worked with The College of William & Mary to develop Ampersandbox.

Both projects were successful, as were similar projects we’ve done at mStoner. And for two reasons. One is that they were planned in a way that lets each medium work to maximum effect. A website can be as big as you need it to be, and, if you have a decent content management system, can be endlessly and immediately updated. That makes it much more suited to lists of courses or faculty and other important but changeable information. With the web carrying the heavy information load, the viewbook can finally cut itself loose from its beginnings as an illustrated catalog and spend more of its increasingly expensive page count romancing a prospect, using culture and people to differentiate an institution from its competitors. In the case of William & Mary’s Ampersandbox, each card became a freestanding message delivered in the college’s indelible voice. Love letters, as it were. And the corresponding website allowed alumni and current and prospective students to deliver their own love letters back to the college.

Which brings me to the other reason the Knox and William & Mary projects were successful: both institutions were willing to use both print and web to express themselves in an authentic and compelling way, and were willing to live with the likelihood that that expression might not appeal to every prospective student. In other words, by using their culture as a differentiator, both institutions were able to cut through the clutter and reach more students that were the right fit.

Which is not to disagree with the Chronicle’s observation that colleges and universities need to make smart decisions as they balance their investments in print, web and even their campus tours. It’s more to emphasize the point that no matter what medium you choose, you must have something to say, and you must say it persuasively and authentically.

Posted by Mark Sheehy
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EDUniverse Launches!

Someday you will find me caught beneath the landslide in a champagne supernova in the sky.

But until then, you’ll find me and the other members of the mStoner team on our newest site: EDUniverse.

About a year ago, we started a project that had a very specific goal in mind: create the best knowledge hub for brand, web, tech, and marketing professionals in higher and secondary education. Today, we brought the site live.

Probably the coolest feature of the site is how easy it is to import RSS feeds from other places you’re posting content, including blogs and Slideshare.

Thanks to our superstar alpha contributors and beta invitees, we’ve got a wealth of content already, and ~200 profiles on the site! We hope you’ll join us in the nebula.

Congratulations to the entire mStoner team.

Posted by Doug Gapinski
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“Murray State Anthem”: As a Team Triumphs, a Rap Video Goes Viral

The story of the Murray State University basketball team’s march to a 2012 championship season is still being written: right now, the Racers are ranked #12 in the NCAA. But there’s no doubt that the university’s “Murray State Anthem” has already triumphed. The rap video, produced to build support for the team and exposure for the university, has already gone viral and is poised for even more views if the Racers continue to win games.

Murray State, located in Murray, KY, is a four-year public university that enrolls nearly 11,000 students. Its well-known for its basketball program, cited by ESPN as one of the top 30 basketball programs in modern history. The Racers have made 14 NCAA Tournament appearances, most recently in 2010, when Murray State defeated Vanderbilt and won its second NCAA tournament game.

Last fall, Dana Howard, who manages social media for the university, said, “We heard students talking about a rap song written about the basketball team by two students who rap as Trubz ‘N’ Matlock. When we realized that they didn’t have a professional video version of the song, we quickly asked them if they wanted us to help them produce one.” Howard was hoping that the video would support the team’s success and raise awareness about Murray State. Little did she know what was to come.

Murray State Digital Media Services too about two weeks to shoot, edit, and produce the video. In addition to Trubz ‘N’ Matlock, it features students, the Murray State mascot, the cheerleaders/dance team—and, of course, the basketball team.

The premiere

“Murray State Anthem” premiered at a home game right before the team came out on the floor and the crowd, young and old, stood and danced. Then, Howard pushed out the url for the YouTube version via Twitter and Facebook during half-time.

She reports, “In less than 24 hours, we had 10,000 hits on the video and in 10 days, more than 80,000; 1500 mentions of the official name “Murray State Anthem” on Twitter; 400 shares on Facebook. And in the next week the song had been embedded and talked about on many national blogs, including Yahoo Sports, CBS Sports, SBNation, NBC Sports, and USAToday. And countless sports bloggers have tweeted about it.”

Indeed, when I Googled “Murray State Anthem,” mention of the video on USA Today’s Campus Rivalry blog was the second result. Blogger Nicole Auerbach remarked, “Yes, the Racers are good at basketball. The whole undefeated and ranked in the Top 10 thing is great, but not as awesome as this video.”

Howard adds, “On the blogs, the video has been compared with those from other universities, but more importantly, in one contest, it was mentioned along with the Giants SuperBowl Anthem. Since this happened during the week of the SuperBowl, I believe it put us in some of the top web searches at that time. And CBS picked it up and will use the anthem video on their weekly shows in the weeks leading to the NCAA tourney.”

Some of the people involved with “Murray State Anthem” show off the hashtag shirts that have become quite the item on the university’s campus.

Swag

About those t-shirts. Murray State created t-shirts to thank everyone involved with the video. Howard said. “The front of the t-shirt includes our sub-branding (We Are Racers) in a new format, WAR, which we’ll use through the remainder of the year. On the back of the shirts, we printed some of the hashtags that MSU alumni, students, and staff used in tweets during this year’s basketball season.”

She noted, “In a way, the t-shirts provide a timeline of this historical season for us, including the song #MurrayStateAnthem, which is now a unique milestone in the season all its own. University staff and the rappers from the video wore the hashtag t-shirts to the game the night of the “Murray State Anthem” video debut. The campus bookstore decided to print them—and now, they’re a top-seller. And of course, Howard said, “We also used the shirts as prizes for 50 lucky people who shared the video on Facebook or Twitter.”

Hashtags used on the t-shirts are showing up in other university materials, such as these banners. One banner represents the season, the other banner a definition (in hashtags) of what Murray State stands for or how people recognize it.

Lessons Learned

So what lessons did Murray State learn from this experience?

Howard observes that the video provides insights into the culture, creativity, and spirit on campus in a way that a win for its basketball team won’t. “There are elements that come together in the video—the student rappers along with the other participants, not to mention the production values.” And there’s timing and luck, too: “We decided we had to plan and push this out at the peak of the national buzz. It was perfect: immediately after we released the video, we became the only undefeated team in the nation. That created the perfect stage for the song, the video and the marketing that complemented it.”

So to me, the formula looks like this: opportunity + creativity + hard work + timing + luck = success. Maybe the Racers themselves will take a similar path in the remaining weeks of the NCAA.

Note: Many thanks to Dana Howard, who brought “Murray State Anthem” to my attention.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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EDUniverse Launch Party!

And you’re invited.

EDUniverse is a site for you. For education professionals who are looking to make their life easier, spend less time searching the web, and who want to discover relevant industry-related content. This party isn’t just a celebration of a site launching. It’s a celebration of the people who work in education, from student affairs to alumni and development to marketing professionals and everyone in between, who are helping shape the future of this industry.

We hope you will join us. This party and EDUniverse will only be successful if you attend.

When: Friday, February 24, 5:30 – 7:30 PM
Where: SCVNGR Headquarters, 175 Second Street, Cambridge, MA 02142

Please RSVP by February 15 via our Evite invitation.

Since the announcement of EDUniverse our team has been working hard to get the site ready for beta users. Interested in getting early access? Sign up at EDUniverse.org.

Questions? Email Mallory Wood, Marketing Manager. Or leave a comment!

Posted by Mallory Wood
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mStoner’s top picks for 2011

For my last blog post of the year I have enlisted the help of the mStoner team to bring you mStoner’s top picks for 2011. In this post you will find the sites, tools, and designs we fell in love with this year. Picks include everything from iPad apps to our favorite uses of social media in higher education.

Without further ado…

Design

Moment Skis
We think this site is cool because of the way it uses horizontal and vertical scrolling to fill the landcape of the screen. It layers several carousels of different types of content including profiles, video, products, and slideshow based photography. The design uses texture and a muted color scheme to give it a mountainy-vintage feel. This is future forward design that’s breaking the boundaries of link by link categorized navigation and molds well to any mobile device. Now, where are my Rossignols?
– Anne Glista and Kevin Rieg, Interactive Designers

Ampersandbox
My favorite project of 2011 was the “Ampersandbox” undergraduate enrollment project we did for the College of William & Mary. They wanted a new viewbook with a dedicated web component that together would capture the personality of William & Mary and set it apart from its peers and competitors. We gave them a box of postcards that superimposed funky, evocative word pairs over photos we pulled from their Flickr feed. I liked it because it was a former client coming back to us for more work, which is always validating. I liked it because the William & Mary client trusted us and was bold enough to consider ideas that were designed to appeal to the right prospective students rather than the most prospective students. I liked it because the creative process was fun and very collaborative. And I liked it because it was successful. William & Mary’s admission counselors tell us the cards have been a hit at college fairs, and the web component, a site that allows visitors to create their own word pairs, photos and stories, has had lots of traffic.
-Mark Sheehy, Creative Director

Blogs and other online tools

The Project Management Hut
As a project manager, this site is very useful to me. I like that articles are contributed by many people, so you aren’t stuck with only one person’s point of view. In addition, the articles are based off of experience and not just what the “tech books” say.
– Beth Lee, Project Manager

Disqus
The slickest snippet for enhancing the social media aspects of your website for 2011 is not up for discussion. It is, in fact, Disqus. Disqus is a unique tool allowing a developer to place a small snippet in any page or template. This quick inclusion immediately allows for inline commenting. It has support for nested responses, a sweet “ajaxy” style, as well as a back end administration site which includes: reporting, user management, moderation, ranking, and much more.
– Kevin Zink and Jim Johnson, Senior Technology Consultants

Seth Godin’s Blog
This year I discovered the writings of Seth Godin. I am currently working through his books and his blog is one of my favorites. Godin’s posts might vary in topic and length but these daily updates never lack inspiration. His stories are relevant, his ideas are thought-provoking, and his encouragement to become a linchpin is motivating. I’m better at what I do because this blog challenges me to think in new ways, work harder, and take risks.
– Mallory Wood, Marketing Manager

Social media in higher education

University of Nottingham’s Election 2010 blog
My hands-down favorite is the University of Nottingham’s Election 2010 blog and social media initiative, which won a CASE Gold in 2011. This is an incredibly smart blend of social (using a blog, Twitter and YouTube) and traditional PR outreach to bloggers and traditional reporters and newscasters with the goal of sharing insights from the University of Nottingham’s political scientists about the 2010 election in the UK. The results are impressive: those experts were quoted in every item of national election coverage on Election Day 2010 and the effort resulted in exceeding all the objectives created for the campaign.
– Michael Stoner, Co-Founder and President

UT Austin’s Know
The best content hub that I’ve seen in 2011 is UT Austin’s Know. This site offers a substantial stream of content, including a way to submit your own. The site navigation is exceptional, the structure is driven by both topics and mediums, and the design supports the comfortable consumption of a wealth of information. The Know social media directory is extensive and likely represents the future for higher ed social media.
– Susan T. Evans, Senior Strategist

Apps for the iPad and iPhone

Dropbox
Is this the most original choice on this list? Not by a long shot! Is Dropbox the one app that has changed the way I work most? Absolutely. This year I had an onsite client visit where I was able to use the iPad to read my usability testing script, revise the site IA, review the project timeline, and make minor edits to a change order. Because of Dropbox I could easily access, edit, and change those documents. My iPad has turned into the swiss army knife of productivity toolsets. And that is largely thanks to Dropbox.
– Jeremiah Worth, Project Manager

Flipboard
The app I used on my iPad more than any other in the last year is Flipboard, the pocket-sized social magazine. It’s a place to discover new, curated content and it connects to many of the social networks I use every day. Flipboard connects with my Facebook account to keep me up to date on my friends and family. I use Twitter as a way to keep up with industry thought leaders, and I can view their tweets from the app. I can share content, save it to Instapaper for later, and keep up with my Google Reader. Even better? A new iPhone version was released this week!
– Rob Cima, Co-Founder and CFO

Books

Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs defined innovation for our generation. This book is fascinating.

Mobile First
A terrific case for inverting the traditional approach to designing websites as more people use their smartphones and tablets as alternatives to laptops and desktops.
– Voltaire Miran Santos, Co-Founder and CEO

Do you have a top pick for 2011 that you would like to share? Leave a comment.

On behalf of the entire team at mStoner, there is no time more fitting to say “thank you” for everything you do for the education community and to wish you a happy holiday season. See you in 2012!

Posted by Mallory Wood
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