Zoe Barker, Web Administrator at DePaul University, is one of the 12 presenters of the 3rd Higher Ed Content Conference.
In this 3-question interview, Zoe 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?
We didn’t receive much flack after our big information architecture move where we merged two previously separate subsites. We expected some sort of uproar, since we usually get pushback after a site migration, even if hardly anything changed. And, here we were completely restructuring a huge portion of content, but almost everyone was on-board.
It changed our perspective on governance. We found that with enough communication and reasoning, people are open to changes and willing to work with us. We were almost scared to talk about governance before, but making this change really opened up a lot of discussion – and it wasn’t scary at all.
Even a well-planned project can yield unexpected results, but with this one I think we had positive outcomes when we opened the topics of who owns what content and what should go where, because we prepared and communicated enough with everybody involved.
2) What’s the biggest hurdle for content quality at work? How do you deal with it?
One of the biggest hurdles for us is the internal-mindset of the site editors in the colleges and offices. They tend to create content from an internal perspective — sometimes using jargon that people outside of our university wouldn’t understand. They have a hard time seeing things from the view of a prospective student or someone who has never been in higher ed.
We deal with it by knowledge-sharing. We’re conducting workshops for the editors where we explain how to avoid acronyms and what to call pages and subsites so that they’re easy to find for an outside visitor. Using terms that are more general and using sensical labeling are two big things we’re promoting right now to get the editors to see outside themselves.
Having departments and schools that are siloed is a big issue in general.
If a department or school/college isn’t looking outside of their area on their website it creates duplicate content problems. Again, knowledge-sharing is our greatest tool to deal with these issues.
3) If you were given everything you need, what’s the first piece of content you’ll create for your school?
In my role, I don’t do as much content creation as I do management, editing and consultation. My main focus is on IA and UX. However, we had the opportunity to revamp the Financial Aid section of the soon-to-be new depaul.edu responsive site. Since financial aid is a complex topic, it can be overwhelming to see so much information in one place.
We had the opportunity to restructure it to make it much simpler and create landing pages that guide the user to information specific to them. That kind of project I think is something we could do more of given the time and resources.
For the college sites I think rather than creating content, they really need to cut down their content. There’s a lot of bulk on their sites, so if I had the time and resources I’d like to do full audits to eliminate bulky, unnecessary and duplicative content in those sites.
4) What role does video play in your content strategy?
We are just starting to develop more video content for our sites, but since we’re structured to mainly oversee the main university site and let the colleges develop individual strategies in line with our larger strategy, we don’t oversee video on their sites.
We have a team at our institution that handles video production, and we have a video specialist on our team who coordinates and shoots video for the Student Life section of our site.
With our upcoming launch of the new main DePaul website, video will play a much larger role. There is also a video working group on campus that oversees video production across university units. For now, we accommodate videos from a functionality standpoint to support use of video in our sites.
