Avalee Harlton, Service Coordinator & Web Content Designer/Editor at York University, is one of the 12 presenters of the 3rd Higher Ed Content Conference.
In this 3-question interview, Avalee shares a surprising outcome from content work, the biggest hurdle for content quality and a higher ed content dream.
1) What’s the most surprising outcome – in your work with content – you experienced in the past 12 months?
It never ceases to surprise me when random pages become super-popular on our site – especially when it’s ones that are pretty obscure!
Sometimes it’s because of social media; sometimes it’s because of current events; and sometimes it’s because of a combination of unique content and organic search. From this, we’ve learned to keep tabs on our content via our analytics tools so that when a page we’re not expecting to get popular does, we can spot it and react appropriately.
2) What’s the biggest hurdle for content quality at work? How do you deal with it?
I’m sure we’re not alone on this one — there’s never enough time or resources!
Currently we have a distributed content creation model in-place across campus where individual units are creating the content for their web areas. We also try to remind groups to limit the amount of content to that which they can expect to manage reasonably.
3) If you were given everything you need, what’s the first piece of content you’ll create for your school?
I’d do a full site audit to find and weed old content that’s out-of-date or no longer maintained.
So often audits get pushed aside for other projects (like new videos or new homepage graphics), because they don’t sound very sexy and inevitably lead to change. It takes *a lot* of time, and a lot of co-operation & vision to change websites the size found at most higher ed institutions!
Making the effort is absolutely worth it though — your visitors will definitely notice how much easier it is to find what they need.
