12.07.10
Mobile Webinar Q&A
This post is a forum to field questions from today’s presentation of our mobile webinar, co-hosted by Susan Evans and Tiffany Broadbent of the Office of Creative Services at the College of William and Mary.
Click here to download the presentation (PDF), and feel free to post your questions or comments about the mobile webinar below. Responses will come from members of the mStoner team and members of the William and Mary team.
What are you using to collect your statistics? Google analytics?
Posted on December 7, 2010 by Rob Way
Are the statistics for wm.edu filter internal IP addresses?
Posted on December 7, 2010 by Riley Wills
Sharing a study of trends in mobile design released by Smashing Magazine (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/12/02/a-study-of-trends-in-mobile-design/)
Posted on December 7, 2010 by Riley Wills
For the mobile sites (such as W&M), did you consider a “responsive” main site design (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/) in addition to the dedicated mobile site? If so, what made you choose to go with the dedicated site for mobile devices?
Posted on December 7, 2010 by Jonathan Gabriel
Thank you for such a concise and informative presentation. The knowledge I gained here will go a long way in helping our college with its mobile presence.
Posted on December 7, 2010 by Bob Eisman
Have you had any experience or known of any other schools creating their mobile sites and typing them back into (or using) a WordPress instance for content?
http://www.wordpress.org
Thank you for a great presentation today guys!
Posted on December 7, 2010 by L. Danielle Baldwin
@Riley Wills: that is a great article, and I love Smashing Magazine as a resource in general. Thanks for sharing.
Posted on December 7, 2010 by Doug Gapinski
@Jonathan Gabriel: I am a big fan of the logic behind responsive design (and a huge fan of cssgrid.net). We are currently exploring responsive framework as an option. So far, we have found responsive frameworks have to be very light on graphics and style to transform effectively (particularly down to one column). It is a leading edge trend—and something to consider as a possibility. Thanks for sharing the link.
Posted on December 7, 2010 by Doug Gapinski
@Bob Eisman: thanks you very much for attending—if it helped you, then we accomplished our goal.
Posted on December 7, 2010 by Doug Gapinski
@L. Danielle Baldwin: I only know of a handful of schools using Wordpress. Bates and Algonquin College are the two I have come across most recently. I have not heard of using a wordpress instance or module to address mobile, but it’s a great idea. Is that what your institution is doing?
Posted on December 7, 2010 by Doug Gapinski
@Doug
We are researching ways to incorporate our instances of WordPress into any new mobile site/application that we create in the near future. I guess since you mentioned the CMS Opentext, I was just wondering if others have used the mobile theme for WordPress and/or an instance of WP to provide content for any mobile web applications.
Currently, we use WordPress for several sites. For example, the two sites below were created in WordPress:
http://campusweekly.uncg.edu
http://inspirechange.uncg.edu
Posted on December 7, 2010 by L. Danielle Baldwin
In the William & Mary mobile site, I saw that you linked to your school’s branded Foursquare page. What factored into ultimately choosing to use Foursquare over a competing site, say, Gowalla?
Posted on December 7, 2010 by Jonathan Gabriel
@Rob Way: Yes, we use Google Analytics for all our web stats, it’s a great tool.
@Riley Wills: We did not filter out W&M’s IP addresses from the stats, since our site isn’t geared toward just external audiences we wanted to see the full range of visitors. Although filtering with and without that internal traffic could provide even more insight into our various audiences and their interactions the site.
@Jonathan Gabriel: One of the primary factors that helped us decide was just checking the existing stats for our campus, either by directly searching on Foursquare or Gowalla or using a site like checkinmania.com or fourwhere.com to find nearby venues. We found more people were checking in and using Foursquare on our campus than were using Gowalla (or Facebook Places).
Foursquare offers a nice bit support upfront for colleges and universities (most recently launching foursquare.com/universities), Harvard and Stanford had been the groundbreakers here, and W&M was one of the first 12 schools to get a branded page (there are almost 40 now).
Foursquare’s approach, offering tips on locations as one of their main focuses, was something that we saw could be integrated easily with our historic campus, simulating a “campus tour” that could reach out to both prospective and current students, alumni, as well as tourists to our area coming from nearby Colonial Williamsburg (granted Gowalla has this same benefit).
The gaming aspects of Foursquare, earning badges (including the university-specific badges from Foursquare itself, http://blog.foursquare.com/2010/09/16/1133422391/) and battling for “mayorship” of a location, also throw an element of fun into the mix as well as marketing opportunities to offer specials for the mayors of venues (free coffee at the campus coffee shop, a discount at the bookstore, etc.).
@aaron We used the Mobile Web OSP code which has those features built in. Even if you are rolling your own solution I’d recommend taking advantage of the fact that the project is open source and look at that code for guidance on those bits rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. (For device detection the code is at https://github.com/dmolsen/MIT-Mobile-Web/blob/mobi-v2.0.0/web/page_builder/Page.php)
Posted on December 7, 2010 by Tiffany Broadbent
We are running into problems with page caching for performance reasons and trying to detect devices (with php). Do you have any thoughts on how to deal with that?
Posted on December 7, 2010 by aaron
Nice slides, thank you for sharing your presentation!
Posted on December 10, 2010 by Alicia
@Jonathan Gabriel: One of the primary factors that helped us decide was just checking the existing stats for our campus, either by directly searching on Foursquare or Gowalla or using a site like checkinmania.com or fourwhere.com to find nearby venues. We found more people were checking in and using Foursquare on our campus than were using Gowalla (or Facebook Places).
Foursquare offers a nice bit support upfront for colleges and universities (most recently launching foursquare.com/universities), Harvard and Stanford had been the groundbreakers here, and W&M was one of the first 12 schools to get a branded page (there are almost 40 now).
Foursquare’s approach, offering tips on locations as one of their main focuses, was something that we saw could be integrated easily with our historic campus, simulating a “campus tour” that could reach out to both prospective and current students, alumni, as well as tourists to our area coming from nearby Colonial Williamsburg (granted Gowalla has this same benefit).
The gaming aspects of Foursquare, earning badges (including the university-specific badges from Foursquare itself, http://blog.foursquare.com/2010/09/16/1133422391/) and battling for “mayorship” of a location, also throw an element of fun into the mix as well as marketing opportunities to offer specials for the mayors of venues (free coffee at the campus coffee shop, a discount at the bookstore, etc.).
Posted on December 10, 2010 by Doug Gapinski
Hey all– I added some of Tiffany’s responses to the thread above manually.
We’re having some kind of issue with our blog blocking comments from some addresses. If you can’t post here, please shoot me a heads up: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and I’ll let you know when the issue is resolved.
Posted on December 10, 2010 by Doug Gapinski