Interesting Gettysburg College sites

I thought it would be fun to focus the blog this month on the great work that our web liaisons at Gettysburg College are doing on their individual websites. Here is a list of some sites and the web liaison responsible please feel free to check them out and steal some of their good ideas.

Schmucker Art Gallery Molly Hutton
Really nice use of photography on this site

Center for Career Development Chris Fahey and Kathleen Regentin
They have identified their key audiences and created use to use menus to get those audiences the information they need.

Off Campus Studies Adrienne Clarke and Jan Pasco
Check out the photo gallery

Experiential Education John Regentin
They have done a great job with a banner image. All offices and academic departments have the option to add this feature.

Health Sciences Cindy Wright
Take a look at how the senior rotates when you come back to their home page at the bottom right hand column.

Math Lynnell Mathews and Leslie Johnson
I really liked their Mathematics on the web section

Web 2.0

So you may be wondering what is all this talk about web 2.0. Here is a great youTube video that breaks it down. I first saw it at the CASE conference in New York but it was posted an the highered web dev blog as well.

Get out and communicate

You may be interested in an article that I wrote for the magazine Campus Technology. The article is a top 10 for how to get out and communicate. It was written to benefit others taking charge of web communications at their institutions, I share my Top 10 keys to success in the article.

click here for the article

What is a CMS?

The letters stand for Content Management System. The CMS allows us to create, publish, and share content (written, photography, video) throughout the website. The CMS also provides the ability to easily create new pages, navigation, and sub navigation on the fly.

Shared content is one of the most recognizable characteristics of a CMS. One piece of content, the admissions requirements for example, can be shared on many different pages but updated in only one spot. The same can be done with global variables. By using global variables we can set tuition at one number and use code to have it show up any where on the site.

The CMS also allows us to publish content that is stored in one of our data systems (peoplesoft, advance, R25) out to the public website. Staff lists, courses, and events are all examples of this functionality. Our ability to integrate data already stored in a campus data system and re-purpose it on the web has been recognized by the software industry as a Codie Award Finalist.

RSS Feeds

Have you have been surfing around on some web pages or receive some e-newsletters and have seen all this talk about RSS Feeds but have no idea what they are or what they accomplish? RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. RSS is a way to receive constant updates from news sites, online catalogs and blogs without the tedious process of visiting individual sites, wading through outdated content and managing annoying pop-up ads. In its simplest terms a RSS Feed is a way to deliver pieces of content to someone’s computer. Content gets delivered bypassing email blocks and spam filters directly to a user’s desktop via an aggregate reader.

You will have to download an aggregate reader from any number of sites (a Google search returned over one million results). Once an aggregate is downloaded a user can start to receive RSS feeds. Colleges and Universities are using these feeds for any number of outcomes. When new content is posted to the website the feed automatically updates the subscribers to the feed.

The advantages to RSS Feeds are that you are bypassing email blocks and spam filters and delivering content directly to a user’s computer. So the next time you are on a site with an orange RSS feed button download the feed to your aggregate reader and enjoy!

First Attempt

Hello to the web world at Gettysburg College and beyond. This is my first attempt at a blog for web issues at the College. Please feel free to make comments. If you are interested in posting on this blog please feel free to email Paul Redfern at predfern@gettysburg.edu.