The Webmasters’ Desk

I haven’t posted in awhile, and in the spirit of today’s link, I’m just going to post on something.

Here’s a interesting 37signals article on building and maintaining momentum on your Web site (amongst other things). Sometimes, when you don’t know what to do, work on the things that are easy to fix. Clean up the dusty corners of your site. Go ahead and fix that weird line break. Find out why that photo looks a tad wonky.

Now, whether or not you think that this approach is what helped clean up New York City is a whole other discussion. Bottom line, make it look like someone cares.

So sayeth Nielsen Media in a recent study.

Some quick numbers from the article:

• only 15.8 percent of iPod users ever played any video content on their iPod or iTunes
• only 1 percent of the content items played on an iPod or iTunes was video content

Unfortunately, the article doesn’t talk much about the demographics of the 400 iPod users they sampled. It would be interesting to run a similar study of college student iPod use where lecture videos were available via iTunes.

From great comments and questions comes great fodder for blog posts.

The first question comes from yesterday’s post on search engines. Chris asks:

But webmaster, your stats seem to indicate that 99.7% of our traffic comes from a search engine. Aren’t there some visitors that just come here because they know about us already? Or, what about someone like me that has a page in the www.bus.wisc.edu domain set as their homepage, so I visit like a bajillion (also a math thing) times per day? Is this an example of the skewed statistics that [insert partisan talk show host] keeps warning me about?

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I get a lot of questions about search engine optimization (SEO), and with good reason. A recent competitive analysis found that over 50% of prospective students conducted an internet search during the course of their evaluation of different MBA programs. Not only that, but this method of research was the largest percentage of any other communications channel. Let me repeat this by yelling on the internet: THE LARGEST PERCENTAGE OF ANY OTHER COMMUNICATIONS CHANNEL.

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That’s it. That’s how fast your page needs to load before someone gives up and moves on.

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Did you know the School of Business has an intranet? If you answered “yes,” do you ever use it? If not, why? I’d like to know what goals we should have for an intranet, what kind of features we need in an intranet and how you would use them.

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A big question that I often get is “how much traffic does my site get?”

That’s an excellent question, and we actually have an answer. The School of Business has an excellent statistics package that monitors the traffic to web pages on www.bus.wisc.edu.

But here’s the hitch, it needs to know which pages to track.

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What’s this all about?

I’d like your help in taking www.bus.wisc.edu to the next level. As you probably know, we have a loosely organized, semi-autonomous army of content authors here at the School of Business. If you’re reading this, you’re probably one of them.

Why are you bothering me?

Given our distributed authorship, I need your help. I need your input. I need your involvement, your brains, your questions! I know you’re busy, we all are. It’s my hope that we can use this blog as a forum to communicate, discuss and document how we approach the sites and content on www.bus.wisc.edu, share our best-practices, our problems and, most importantly, our solutions. As a stakeholder in the School of Business Web presence, you’ll receive notifications of new postings and you can read and comment them at your leisure (this should be read: “no extra meetings” )

So what do you want from me?

For starters, I’d like to know what’s on your mind. What problems are you having? What features do you covet? What aspects of the Web, web design, search engines, etc would you like to know more about? Also, if you’re interested in posting in this space please let me know. The more, the merrier!

Allow me to offer up some possible post topics:

1. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
2. Usability
3. Writing for the Web
4. Web standards
5. The School of Business Style Guide
6. Blogs and blogging
7. Podcasting
8. Macromedia Contribute
9. Search Engine Optimization
10. Internet vs Intranet
11. Web statistics
12. Industry trends
13. Favorite sites

Those are just some suggests. What are Web topics will help YOU make your site better?