PST1: HighEdWeb: Who We Are IV

PRESENTER: Steven Lewis, SUNY Brockport

Based on a survey of conference attendees, what can we determine about ourselves? Compared to our peers, does our college pay us well, given our experience, responsibilities, education, institution type, student population, site size, and other factors? What type of technologies do we generally use? How does our staffing differ from other institutions? How has this picture changed over the last three years?

PST2: Florida Challenges: Florida Solutions

PRESENTER: Diane McCain, State University System of Florida

What's a BOG? The Florida Board of Governors was created in 2002, by constitutional amendment. The establishment of a new board followed the devolution of a long-standing board of regents, the reorganization of the state's education system to a seamless K-20 system, and a second reorganization brought about by the will of the voters for a coordinated system for higher education.

PST3: Your DOCTYPE Is Showing: Where Do We Stand in the Battle for Web Standards? (Part II)

PRESENTER: Lori Packer, University of Rochester

This poster session will carry on from a study conducted for last year's HighEdWebDev conference, looking at university homepages and Fortune 500 company homepages to see where we stand when it comes to adopting and adhering to Web standards. Have things improved? Has there been backsliding? And why should we care about Web standards anyway?

PST4: Sustaining a Web Redesign One Year and Beyond…

PRESENTERS: Paul Redfern, Gettysburg College
Amy Aasen, Concordia College
Tim O’Keeffe, Colgate University

Your institution has redesigned the website and implemented a new Content Management System. Hopefully your entire campus was energized around the process and the community is pleased with the result. Now how do you sustain the momentum from that redesign effort? What is the best way to keep offices and departments engaged in the process of updating pages? How do you re-use and leverage content in different areas of the site? What factors should be considered in terms of workflow for you and for your office? Find out the answers to these questions and more from three institutions (Colgate, Concordia, and Gettysburg) that have recently redesigned their websites.

PST5: Self Attendance: A Moderate Answer to the Absence-Tracking Nightmare

PRESENTER: Jean-Jacques Medastin, Clayton State University

To help my colleagues keep up with taking roll without the burden of doing it themselves, I have developed a very simple ASP application that allows students to take their own attendance. That information is retrievable at any given time by the faculty especially during no-show reporting. The application is easy to use and does not require any Web skills. In this session, I will demo and make available this application.

PST6: Usability Testing 101

PRESENTERS: Renee L. Cerullo, University at Buffalo
Christine Kowalski, University at Buffalo

Usability studies are one of the keys to making a website successful. These studies will give you an insight into how your users really use your site. It’s not usually how you intended them to use it. This presentation will cover the who, why, when and how of usability studies, starting with why you should perform usability studies and what data you should expect from them. Who will be performing the study, who will the study be performed on, and when should usability studies be performed? The main part of the presentation will cover how to perform a usability study. There are many different ways to perform a study. Learn the dos and don’ts of performing a usability study, observing a participant, and the types of questions to ask. We will cover the technology and the different techniques that can be used. Learn how to complete a usability study on a “shoestring” budget. Usability studies can be done even with a staff of one, without spending any money.

PST7: Target 10,000 Interactive Site & Donor Map Mash Up

PRESENTER: Matthew Winkel, The College of New Jersey

The College New Jersey is in the middle of a giving campaign to reach 10,000 donations. The Target 10,000 interactive website is playing a major role in creating awareness for the campaign. The site features announcements for events and contests, audio clips, virtual postcards, a Blackberry guest book, and other assorted bells and whistles. The latest addition is a mashup that plots donations on a Google map. We hope that our alumni will be encouraged by the widespread support for our institution. So far the Mashup is getting rave reviews from TCNJ’s community and recently received a CASE International Gold accolade award.

PST8: Making the Transition from Print to Electronic Publications

PRESENTER: Paul Dempsey, Dickinson College

Whether the motivation is to cut costs or protect the environment, publications are often moving from a traditional print medium to exclusively electronic format. This session will discuss strategies for using the Web and email to engage various audiences (students, faculty/staff, alumni) in order to tell a school's story and convey information. Examples will include a monthly email newsletter for alumni, a Web and weekly email listing of campus announcements, and events, and a biweekly "newspaper" of campus stories that was converted from print to electronic format last year. Topics will include use of email to drive traffic to the website and techniques for measuring response.

PST9: We BlueTube. Do You Tube?

PRESENTERS: Doug Ruschman, Xavier University
Kevin Lavelle, Xavier University
Kevin G. Bischof, Xavier University

At Xavier University, our Student Web Team created BlueTube, a contest in which current Xavier students created short (no more than two minute) films about what makes Xavier so great. These videos were uploaded to a YouTube-like website and admitted prospective students voted on which they liked the best. Based on those votes, current students won some great prizes and the prospective students had the chance to see what makes Xavier special. Stop by and find out more.

PST10: Solving the “Readers vs. Writers Dilemma” of the World Wide Web

PRESENTER: Nagendra Gulur, Texas Instruments

While the Web has been immensely successful in disseminating information in a most easy-to-access fashion, it is still cumbersome to create the content that is disseminated. Simply put, the Web has been a great medium for the “readers” – those who browse information, whereas, for the “writers” – those who put that information on the Web, the Web itself is not a convenient medium. This is what we refer to as the “Readers vs. Writers dilemma”. Intuitively, content is best created using various editing tools available on a desktop computer (for instance, Microsoft Office is a popular suite of such tools). Such tools allow the writer to organize, stylize, and fine-tune the content which itself can consist of a rich collection of text, pictures, diagrams & charts, and audio and/or video clippings. These editing tools are most convenient from a writer’s perspective. The Web does not offer equally capable editing tools. A pair of interesting questions arise from this observation above: 1. Can we reconcile this dilemma? And if so, how? 2. Once content is published on the Web, how is it modified and/or enhanced?

PST11: Readying Reason: Developing Carleton's Open Source Content Management System

PRESENTER: Nathan White, Carleton College

At HighEdWebDev 2006, Carleton College released the first public beta of the open-source Reason Content Management System (CMS), a PHP/MySQL-based CMS that empowers content creators and maintainers. Since that time, we've been introducing new features, including iCal-compatible calendars, built-in podcasting and RSS-feed capabilities, automated slideshows, database-backed forms, a powerful publications module for news and blogging, and much more. This session will demonstrate Reason's toolbox of features, explain what development challenges we've been tackling, and present a roadmap for the future. Carleton College continues to seek adopters and development partners at other colleges that need a more "reasonable" approach to Web content management. Come learn about Reason and see why a free CMS built by and for higher ed might be the right choice for you.

PST12: Typography and Web Design

PRESENTER: Jeannine Papelino, University of Rochester

No one ever thinks of typography as a form of Web design. But it is. Graphic designers view typography as the arrangement and appearance of text to produce content that is legible, aesthetically pleasing, and visually attractive to spark an interest in the content and message on the page. So why has no one talked about these same principles in Web design? It is important for programmers, editors, and Web designers to consider how the style and format of text supports readability. Careful consideration should be given to line length, spacing between lines, combinations of typefaces, type size and weights, color, and how to emphasize important words. In addition, proper grammar and punctuation as outlined in the Chicago Manual of Style (used by many writers and editors) will be reviewed for discussion. Good typography starts with an understanding of basic design and leads to user-friendly Web pages for your viewers.

PST13: Formatting Web Data for Printed Catalogs

PRESENTER: Susan Greene, Housatonic Community College

Does your Web data also appear in your printed catalog? Do you need to reformat all those ASP pages or prepare a report for your catalog designer to ensure that both the Web and the printed catalog have the same data? If you have ever had to format repetitive text for a print document you know how tedious it can be. Besides the fact that it is time consuming, all of the “handling” of the content can lead to errors or even deletions. The most efficient way to format text in a print layout application such as QuarkXpress is to use style sheets and then assign the styles to text. This is the same basic concept as CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) on the Web. Similar to CSS in a Web page, QuarkXpress text is marked-up with style sheet tags that are invisible to the designer in the document. These styles can be assigned in Quark by selecting text and choosing a style from the document’s style sheets. However, this can be very tedious and error prone. A better method is to import the content into Quark using a plain text file that has been “marked-up” with XpressTags that assign the style names and certain formatting styles. See how to create an Xpress Tag document from your ASP page that can be imported and formatted in no time! Unlike some third-party solutions that can cost hundreds of dollars, this method simply requires ASP pages, an online database, and some basic understanding of Xpress Tags. Save time, save money, and reduce errors!

PST14: User-Centered Development & Paper Prototyping From the Classroom to Real World

PRESENTER: Mary Carmen Garduño Campos, ITESM-CEM

The main factors that made software engineers unaware of usability concepts were: old-fashioned developing techniques where functionality was the main idea; old plain-text interfaces for end users; no contact with end users while developing systems, only with managers; and no real measurements of clients “feelings” about systems. The User-Centered Development approach makes it possible for software engineers to know and apply concepts based of human behavior, psychology, and personal preferences when developing information systems interfaces. Prototyping is a technique that allows us to meet with final user requirements, without implementing a single line of code. Paper prototyping is a low-cost but effective technique for making final users participate and express what the see and feel about Web pages. Although system functionality is still very important, nowadays the user interface and the usability of Web pages are as important as the functionality.

PST15: Best Practices for Websites

PRESENTER: Rob Dickerson, The Pennsylvania State University

This poster will cover essential best practices that Web professionals can apply to improve the quality of their website. Using these practices will reduce problems encountered by visitors to the site. Although this is not an exhaustive list of recommended best practices, it does include many that are often overlooked.

PST16: Site Content Gathering Techniques

PRESENTER: Jason Woodward, Cornell University

The Cornell University School of Hotel Administration recently completed a ground-up redesign of its primary website which included revisiting the content creation and gathering process. In this session we will discuss the software and social processes the school used to create and sustain a culture of interest in creation and maintenance of the school's website. These include an off-the-shelf content editing product, custom information gathering and reporting tools, and external expert guidance. The goal of this session is to present these ingredients in such a way that attendees can apply a selection of these techniques, along with others, to their own site and site section content gathering activities.

PST17: Pattern Matching: An Introduction to Regular Expressions

PRESENTER: Gabriel McGovern, Portland Community College

Regular expressions. Hard-core programmers know them as a powerful tool for manipulating strings of text. But, with support for regular expressions also built into most modern text editors, why should the code monkeys get to have all the fun? Learn how to use the power of pattern matching to speed up the development and maintenance of your content and source code. Even knowing the basic concepts will give you enough information to create time saving expressions. With these basics, I will show you how to utilize the find/replace feature of your favorite text editor to perform regular expression pattern matching. Turning to examples we can see the power in action. It is common practice to receive content in Microsoft Word documents. Often the text will be full of special Microsoft characters that remain even after you cut and paste the text into Dreamweaver. Use one expression to replace the “fancy quotes” with normal ones. Use another to replace the breaks with semantically correct paragraph tags. Did extra spaces work their way into your source? No problem – just get rid of them all in one more quick step. But wait – there is more! Change the formatting of all the dates and times on the page to be consistent with the rest of the site. Then dive in more and change bolds to strongs, italics to emphasized. Remove in-line styles. Clear the junk out of your table tags. With regular expressions you don’t just clean your code – you disinfect it.

PST18: The Virtual Development Office

PRESENTER: Bette AB Mammone, Gift of John

This poster session illustrates the needs of the virtual development officer and how the Web professional can enhance that role and the overall experience of the off site and on site development staff. Innovative methods to create a seamless operation without the barriers of location are also discussed.

PST19: Building a Course Management Solution That Fits the Faculty

PRESENTER: Peter Schmidt, Albert Einstein College of Medicine

At the Albert Einstein College of Medicine our problem has been how to manage and control a large collection of didactic materials involving over 40 courses, for 720 medical students, 1,200 faculty, several teaching and administrative offices, and the printing department with all of the above subservient to a dynamic, ever-changing calendar. Medical School faculty typically teach one or two lectures in one course once a year. They have no time to use any tool that has a learning curve and will only be used once a year. Courses do not follow a semester schedule, overlap from month-to-month, and have no regular pattern week-to-week. A faculty "course leader" manages from five to 60 faculty in delivering a course and the process is closer to publishing a book than teaching a typical single-instructor, one- semester course. We have developed a Course Management System (myAlbert) that uses Apache, MySQL, PHP, running on OS-X [Panther] and other open-source tools. Development efforts are directed to the needs of this type of faculty and ancillary staff. Staff in particular have had to manage courses with paper calendars and paper syllabi. myAlbert's functionality was derived from extensive interviews with faculty, students, and administrators, which developed into role playing and user stories.

PST20: Improving Web Usability: A New Card Sort

PRESENTER: Tim Shearouse, Augustana College

Pop the hood and kick the tires: This presentation will introduce a new open source project which aims to create a new card sorting tool built on theoretical groundings. Learn about the psychological background of card sorting, see how it can be applied to practical usability research, and, most importantly, get the first glimpse of the resulting software.

PST21: Fun and Games: Eliciting Participation in Collaborative Content Design

PRESENTER: Robyn Ness, The Ohio State University

The challenge of eliciting content is well-known to Web developers. This poster describes some of the ways our team has tried to encourage group participation in Web and content-development projects, including Documentapalooza (a focused team effort to review online documentation), the design-athon (a working session for collaborative visual and content design), and "a fun exercise" (a variation on the card sort). Outcomes and pros/cons will be discussed.

PST22: Comparative Web Analysis... It's Where to Start

PRESENTER: Shaun Callighan, Augustana Web Guild

Learn about a free form of preliminary research that you can do on a coffee-break (or is it a Dew break?). This research helps guide what to include in other research such as card sorts or surveys. It also provides you with substantiated data... so when the annoying committee member says, "everyone else has X on their site", you have the truth at hand.