In this 4-question interview, Cody tells us about the best website advice ever, the most challenging part of the job of a higher ed web pro, a great web tool and shares a top 3 of favorite higher ed websites.
1) What is the best advice you’ve ever been given about higher ed websites?
“You have to enjoy what you do.”
The CIO of Purdue gave a talk during a Blackboard conference some years ago and was asked about the disruption of online learning and the pace of technology adoption as it relates to higher education. His points very quickly brought the conversation to focus on the talented people who thrive in higher ed tech. This was the early days of the Iphone and the responsive web was just an idea, but for years I have used his advice to remain engaged.
The technology will only continue to become more complex. I love WordPress, but it’s super complex to make it simple for the people who contribute to the pages that make up the gsu.edu website.
In this industry you’ll never have enough resources, always be asked to adopt early by some and stop changing so fast by others.
You’ll have to work with people – who rightly so are critical to your work – for whom the Web isn’t a day job. You’ll hear a bunch of contradictory opinions, too. But, you have to enjoy what you do! You should enjoy the opportunity to get so much reach into so many different web specialities. You have the chance to become a unicorn and know you’re making a difference for the Greater Good by connecting people with education opportunities!
2) How do you cope with the most challenging part of your job?
A very simple web experience can contain dozens of inter-connected technologies to deliver content to a mobile phone. At any of these points a failure can be catastrophic. Maybe it’s the hosting, the CMS application, a database, DNS, or it’s the content that contains large files, the stylesheets that have an error or the call to action that is linking to a third-party system to complete the transaction – which it’s down.
It’s almost impossible to be accountable for all of it. Yet, when something breaks, you are the one getting the call.
That’s what I find challenging in my job.
Operating in a federated environment like a university requires a digital web leader to be consistently engaged in 3 areas everyday:
- Advance knowledge of system outages (know and start responding before users call)
- The ability to set expectations and clearly communicate the steps to remedy the failure
- Analyze the situation after it is stable and implement mitigation first and a plan for corrective action second
To get this done efficiently while still balancing work and life, I have used a small group of monitoring tools that afford me to set rules and send notifications to stakeholders across the university. This helps ensure the right parties are involved and are ready for my call. I believe that this technology is crucial and before changes or additions to our ecosystem are considered the team checks on the functions ability to support this approach. I build for failure detection and make sure that I can correct issues from my cell phone.
3) What is your favorite tool?
It’s great to have hosting and good people to help maintain our technical environment, but they don’t manage our application. New Relic provides server insights to non-server admins. We get a clear picture of the server health, the most time consuming WordPress plugins and readable error logs, which allow us to take actions to correct issues.
While expensive ($500 per month or more) the first time we resolved a problem in minutes instead of hours after an update had been made, it was worth every penny.
4) What are your top 3 favorite higher ed websites?
- Hamilton College
Great use of basic information to connect with their brand. It’s hard to make it clear who you are and what you want someone to think about you. The effort put in here is awesome.
- Georgia State University Programs
My favorite feature we launched last summer was a WooCommerce implementation that contains all of our programs. So many cool things came from this project. We learned a lot about the offerings and we’re driving a lot of traffic into admissions, because it answers the first question: “what do you have?”
- Johns Hopkins University
Still one of my favorites. They are clear about their research brand. The art and copy are always consistent and the navigation is clearly made to get the paths that generate the most revenue up front for people to clearly see.
A conference focusing on higher ed WEBSITES?
The 2018 Higher Ed WEBSITES Conference (now available on-demand!) is a must for higher ed web professionals and teams looking for inspiration, ideas and best practices to kick off their summer projects.
Read below what a few of your higher ed colleagues who attended the 1st edition of the Higher Ed WEBSITES Conference say about the experience.