Easy Image Editing for the Rest of Us

There are a lot of very talented designers here at mStoner, and how shall I put this… I’m not one of them.

I don’t have photoshop installed. I work daily on a PC instead of a Macintosh (even though I can hear my colleagues snickering behind my back when I pull the brick that is my Dell laptop out of my bag.) Still, occasionally I have a need to work with images for the web or for presentations.

Enter one of my new favorite web tools, FotoFlexer.

FotoFlexer allows me to upload a photo, crop, resize, add some text or graphics, and save back to my hard drive. Free, quick and no software to install. Its one of the best examples of the new wave of net-based software that is eliminating the need for installed applications.

Does FotoFlexer eliminate the need for Photoshop? Absolutely not – it’s missing a ton of features. A professional designer could never get their work done.

But for the casual user, you can use it from wherever as long as you have a net connection, and it integrates with the likes of Facebook, Flickr and Picasa so you can automatically manipulate images you have stored there. A great site to have in your bookmarks.

Posted by Rob Cima
Additional Posts (7)
Categories:

Discuss this article (0)

Another Social Network? Maybe.

Article on Mashable about Campus Buddy, "an academic-based social network linking students to classmates and others on campus."

Personally, I’m still struggling with the whether schools should be creating their own social networks. Facebook already has the critical mass, and includes apps that will let you update your schedule. As a user of a few different networks, my instant reaction is, "do we really need another social network?" But this article got me thinking.

It may make sense to create you own network if it:

1. Adds enough extra value to make it compelling for students to participate. The interesting thing about Campus Buddy is that it provides official grade distributions broken down by professor, course, department and campus. And according to their site, they’ve already analyzed grades from hundreds of universities. You’re not getting that on Facebook (except of course, you are if you’re using CB).
2. Can be integrated in some way with the networks students are already using. Another interesting feature is that you use your FB login to access it. There’s also a FB app that allows you to use Campus Buddy in Facebook.
3. Can be integrated into the fabric of everything else you’re doing on the web. There are department pages that show the courses, professors and students in a department. Part of the challenge with maintaining a college site is that while we know that prospective students look at department pages as part of their decision making process, those pages often don’t reflect what’s actually happening in the department. With something like this, a prospective student could potentially be given selective access to courses, professor ratings, average grade distributions, and students who are in the department. There are probably also ways to tie into the course management system.

Anybody have some experience with CB or something similar? Drop me a line, I’d love to hear how its working.

Posted by Rob Cima
Additional Posts (7)
Categories:

Discuss this article (0)

Stop doing stuff

Now’s a great time to stop doing some of those things you’ve been wanting to get rid of but didn’t think you could! What are you going to stop doing so you can truly focus on the most important things this year?

A couple of examples:

• Still churning out everything in print? Move it to the web. Or move at least part of it to the web. You’ve been wanting to anyway. If you need an excuse for the folks who have a problem with change, blame it on your new sleeker budget. Or say, "We just want to make sure we’re getting the best return on the University’s money."
• Still maintain email for alumni? Stop doing it. They’re all on Gmail and only use your service to forward their mail.
• Still trying to support IE 6? IE 8 was just released. And IE 6 was released in 2001. It’s time. Rewrite your policy to say "we only support the current browser and one previous version." (This idea alone will save you at least a hundred hours a year of dealing with browser goofiness.)

Often, getting things done is as much about what you’re not doing as what you’re doing. Unload some of your baggage and it gets easier to get where you’re going.

What else can you think of to get rid of?

Posted by Rob Cima
Additional Posts (7)
Categories:

Discuss this article (1)

Aggregating Tweets

Ran across an interesting new site – Exectweets (http://exectweets.com). The tagline is "Find and Follow Top Business Execs on Twitter."

You can browse by industry, see most popular, and recommend executive tweeters. There doesn’t appear to be a ton of execs linked today, but the site is still in beta.

Something similar might be interesting for Higher Ed. Anybody think there’s a critical mass of Twitters in our industry to make something like this fly?

Posted by Rob Cima
Additional Posts (7)
Categories:

Discuss this article (2)

Web Budget Getting the Big Squeeze?

StartFragment->

Almost everyone is concerned about their web budgets for next year, and some are already facing cutbacks. And you can rest assured that you won’t be asked to do less this year just because things are tighter. Those requests for new sites, new services, redesigns and new technology to be implemented will still be coming fast and furious.

When you’re faced with this situation you have two choices. You can either get efficient and find some way to do more with less resources, or you can get strategic and keep or even expand your budget.

What do I mean by "getting strategic"?

One of the things I’ve noticed in 18 years of working either at or with colleges and universities is that money has a way of appearing when you’re working on something that a)is tied clearly to the goals of the institution, and b)is getting results.  

Now is a great time to take a step back, pull that 5 year institutional strategic plan (that you’re 3 years into and nobody has looked at) off the shelf, blow the dust off it, and ask yourself three questions.

1. In what ways has the web site been helping us achieve these goals?

2. What have our results been so far?

3. What are three things we could do with the web site this year that would significantly move the strategic plan forward?

For example, if one of the goals is to improve recruiting execution by cultivating feeder high schools and feeder community colleges, to what extent are students from those target schools visiting your web site? How many of them are signing up for a campus visit? How many of them are applying online? Are those numbers going up or down over time? And for next year, what actions are you going to take to specifically influence those numbers?

Based on the answers to those questions, you can be prepared to present a business case that says in a nutshell, "Here are the results we’ve been achieving with our website. But I believe that if we do these 3 things in the coming year, we can achieve x,y and z. All that will require is for me to have an extra $200,000 this year. We’ll be measuring our results regularly, and providing reports on our progress throughout the year."

Now, will you necessarily get everything you’re asking for by using a more strategic approach? Maybe not. But you’ll be in a great negotiating position. And in the end you don’t have to have a perfect argument for your budget, you just need a better one than everyone else who’s asking for a piece of the same pie.

Posted by Rob Cima
Additional Posts (7)
Categories: Strategy

Discuss this article (0)

Integrating the web with… trash cans?

I had the opportunity to tour the Nike campus in Portland this week and hear several of their executives talk about their initiatives around sustainability. Nike is far, far ahead in this area and the company is investing heavily to create designs that can be recycled (turning used shoes back into new shoes) or downcycled (turning the waste into new products, like Nike Training Ground.)

During the tour, something interesting happened. Above a recycling can was a sticker for Green Seal, and a URL for more information. My group was a fairly tech savvy one – probably 70% of us were carrying iPhones (which is interesting in itself). Since the discussion and tour were related to recycling, out came an iPhone and the URL was pulled up.

There’s nothing particularly special about this. People use their mobiles every day to view web pages. But it struck me in this case because here was an example of someone interacting with the web in real time in response to their physical surroundings.

Here at mStoner we spend a lot of time helping our clients integrate the web with their print materials, such as viewbooks. Maybe we should be helping them integrate the web with their physical buildings too?

Posted by Rob Cima
Additional Posts (7)
Categories:

Discuss this article (1)

How to Fix Search on Your Site

In the midst of creating great web user interfaces, it’s sometimes easy to overlook the second-most used user interface on your site: the search box.

Here’s list of 10 things you can do to make search work better:

1. Review your search logs. 
   What is it that people are searching for? Keep track of the top 50 search phrases on your site.
2. Check the format of your search results.
   Are you getting "clean" results? In plain English? Is it easy to read the title and description of each page in the listing? Or is there junk like navigation text in there? Nothing looks worse than the description of your page reading "About Us", "Admissions", "News and Events", and so on. Update the formatting of your results accordingly.
3. Make sure you have great content for your top search phrases.
   The best way to make sure you’re providing great search results is to have great content about the terms that visitors are searching for. Create at least one "perfect" page that a visitor who searched for a specific term would want to see.
4. Make use of "best bets" functionality.
   Many search engines have the ability to force certain content to the top of the search results by keyword. Create a best bet for each of your top search terms and point it at the perfect content you’ve created.
5. Review your metadata.
   Google and the major search engines may no longer pay attention to metadata, but you can use it to tune your internal search engine. Make sure all your pages have descriptive titles, meta keywords that make sense. and good meta descriptions.
6. Train your content authors.
   Put together a 2-pager on "how to make sure your content shows up properly on our search engine", and include it with the materials you give to all web authors on campus.
7. Check your indexes.
   Usually its been a while since you’ve checked what exactly your search engine is indexing. Have you brought up a new sub-site with a different URL? It may not be included in your index. Take a quick inventory of all your sites and make sure that the right ones are being spidered.
8. Axe the "advanced search."
   If there’s one thing that Google should have taught us by now its that simpler is better when it comes to search. You should have a single search box. No making the visitor pick the "collection" they want to search from. No and/or searches. And absolutely no option to "Search the Internet." Come on, if your visitor wants to search the Internet they will go to Google.com, not your site.
9. Tune your search tool.
   Check the settings on your search software. Configure duplicate checking to make sure you don’t show the same document more than once. Implement "no-index" tags to eliminate navigation and footers/copyrights from your search results.
10. Make it somebody’s job to maintain the quality of the search over time.
    Part of the problem is that at most institutions, it isn’t clear who is responsible for the quality of the search results. Someone in IT installs the search engine, sets it to spider the site, and nobody thinks about it again. Give someone the job of regularly checking those top searches (they will change over time, and you’ll see seasonal changes too), and making sure that you’re generating good results for those terms.
    

Once you’ve done all those, you might think about spending a couple of bucks on new search software. Which one should you buy? For what its worth, I would say 70% of our clients have selected Google Mini.

Posted by Rob Cima
Additional Posts (7)
Categories: Technology and software

Discuss this article (0)