The Webmasters’ Desk

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?

Why do I need a blog? Aren’t they just a tool for armchair politicos and people who want to post pictures of their cat?

While there are plenty of those sorts of blogs, there are plenty of reasons to blog in the corporate world. Heck, you’re reading one right now! In Why business blogs are important, you can read all about the reasons to blog.

Some of the reasons include knowledge transfer among employees (best practices and the like), to develop stronger customer relationships (with, oh I don’t know, alumni and prospective students), and to attract the best employees (hey, these folks are experts, I want to work for them!).

It’s a good read. Another good read is The Artful Manager, a blog by the Bolz Center’s own Andrew Taylor. If you were wondering, “what kind of blog should I have?” then you should read Andrew’s blog and see a master at work.

In What users hate most about Web sites , Sandra Rossi outlines some all-too common Web usability mistakes. To sum them up:

1. Invasive advertising: luckily, we don’t need to worry about this. However, making anything on your site invasive is a bad idea.
2. Re-inventing the wheel: people do not want to have to learn how to use a site before they can browse it. Fancy experimental navigation is for your own personal playground site, not for a corporate site.
3. ‘Leap of faith’ links: that means disclosing information on content and file size. There’s nothing I personally hate more than clicking a link that launches a pdf when I was expecting a web page. The Acrobat plugin takes forever. Always tell people if they’re not going to get a web page
4. Attention-deficit Web sites: “Users have a special hatred of flashing icons and banners, because they draw the eye away from what is important and hinder their progress,” Cunnington said. Blinking, flashing, buzzing and scrolling text is annoying.
5. War and Peace length: “A common mistake in Web design is to just [convert] a brochure to the Web. But the Web is its own medium, and communication has to change to reach users. Users are known to read 25 percent slower on the screen than on paper, read fewer words and don’t like long pages which require scrolling down,” she said. ‘Nuff said

So there you have it. The top 5 of “Web No-Nos,” print them out and glue them next to your monitor or tatoo them on your forearm if you’re really hard-core.

Caphyon Advanced Web Ranking is a fantastic tool to monitor your keyword campaigns. You can enter all your key phrases, select the search engines you want to monitor (Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, MSN, etc) and the URLs of your competition to see how you stack up. All that for only $150. Read more at Digital Web Magazine.

Thanks for coming. The Webmaster’s desk is a forum for School of Business faculty, staff and students who use the Web, particularly if you maintain any Web pages of your own. I intend to post about issues related to Web design, usability, coding, software…the whole ball of wax. However, if you have a topic or issue you would like to discuss, just send me an email and we can work to get your message on the blog.

For those of you who haven’t spent much time on a blog, allow me to give you the nickel tour. Articles are catagorized by topic and date in the right column. You can add a comment by clicking the “comments” link under the article title. This comments feature is one of the unique features of a blog, so I implore you: ask a question or leave a comment. Just a note: comments are moderated to keep “comment spam” and other unsavory things off the site.

Be sure to email me if you would like to be added the email notification list. I’ll send out notifications when I add a new post.

Thanks again for reading, be sure to check back regularly!

In Netflix - Keeps It Reel, BusinessWeek online takes a look at the usability of the Netflix site as compared to Blockbuster (the company Netflix socked in the mouth). Both site designs (Netflix, Blockbuster) have similar designs at first glance. But after a longer look, you can begin to see the points that BusinessWeek is making.

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The MT-Encluosures plugin searches each post for a link to media files and writes them into the RSS 2.0 feed.

In English, if you link to an audio file in your post, you create a podcast. Here’s a test that links to an mp3 file of Mike Knetter speaking on Bloomberg Radio in 2004.