"Outside" experts just don't seem to be important...

So my blog got a fair amount of attention last week because I blogged An Event Apart and then Zeldman linked it on his website, which brought a lot of visitors I wouldn't normally have.  And the analytics were fascinating.  But they were also sad for me because they ended up confirming what I've thought for a while - that higher education web professionals are so closed off to ideas that don't come from inside their niche world, that they've lost all grasp on the notion that there is a great big wide world out there of web design where they could be looking for inspiration from.  

Exhibit A: Time spent reading An Event Apart blogs - this was really interesting stuff.  People who hit my blog from higher ed networks spent SIGNIFICANTLY less time reading the AEA posts than people coming from non-higher ed networks.  You could almost sort the thing by time spent on site and have it be completely segmented between non-higher ed and higher ed.  To me, this said that people just don't care what goes on at this conference and that baffles me!  This was an event with some of the biggest names in the game and my higher ed readers basically said "ehhhh....not important".  WHAT?!  And watch - in a few weeks when EduWeb happens, they'll be a plethora of blogs about the event and how great it was, though I'll bet money the reality is that it'll be no different than it has been for the last two bloody years (except in a different location) and that few or no original ideas will come out of it.  

  

Exhibit B: "That what we have edustyle for!" - I was talking to another blogger about my theory and of web design inspiration, he commented that that was what we had edustyle for!  My jaw literally dropped, as my point had been missed entirely.  Edustyle is fine for what it is - it's not a site I visit at all but if you're looking for examples of what other colleges are doing, I guess it gets the job done.  But it is ironic that any honest higher ed web person will tell you that the industry is YEARS behind the corporate world and then in the same breathe say they look to only higher ed websites for inspiration.  

I feel like I outgrew higher ed web stuff circa late 2005, which is when I first started attending professional development events outside of the industry to draw inspiration from.  To me, it seemed natural - higher ed was just giving me the same thing over and over again where as things like SXSW gave me new ideas and perspectives.  I still went to the higher ed stuff because my job required me to, but it wasn't out of any sense of excitement for what I would learn.  Is it the lack of formal education in web design that leads to problems like this?  I find that especially with the younger crowd, people have never bothered to learn the basics of design and standards so they have little regard for their importance.  I never thought I would become so parent-like..."those young whipper snappers just don't know what they're doing"....yet here I am.  

Mark Greenfield likes to argue that higher ed websites are becoming irrelevant and I would agree in the sense that I think higher ed websites aren't taken seriously because most of them are just bad.  Your users aren't comparing you to every other college website they visit.  They are comparing you to EVERY website they visit and when you don't have a respect for basic design standards, you're going to have a hard time competing with sites designed by big time experts, like those who spoke at AEA.  

But clearly they are irrelevant because they didn't speak at EduWeb.  Pity.   

Selecting an Email Service Provider

I just got a call from a young woman at a small university in South Dakota that is thinking about going with FireEngineRed (FER), a higher education email service provider that I have used for years and love. She had just started out the process and was given my name because I recently went through an extensive ESP-search process for Dartmouth and have a ton of research about dozens of ESPs, both higher-ed specific and general providers. Like most of us when we start out, the woman was feeling a bit overwhelmed with all the options and didn't really know where to start. I've done previous posts (like this one on email basics) that are applicable to this topic to try to help beginners out (yes, Kyle James...in these posts I'm actually trying to teach ;-) but I don't think I've ever addressed the topic of picking an email service provider.

So here's how it goes at most places: You get a postcard in the mail one day from this company that sends email. You think "wow...email! what a good idea!" You call said company for a demo. You think "wow, this looks awesome" and sign on the dotted line because you really have nothing to compare it too in terms of awesomeness. Now your problem may be solved, or it may not be....but either way, you're committed to this company for a year.

I implore you to avoid this at all costs. I've been there and have regrettably done it and I ended up being with a company who's product isn't as good as it could be....and where I got in regular monthly fights with their tech guy. That made me feel loved as a client, I tell you. So I looked elsewhere and was lucky to stumble on FER. But it wasn't until I started at Dartmouth (where I quickly learned they were sending emails internally.....ICK!) that I actually had to go through a search process. Here are the steps I recommend:

1) Demo as many providers as you can stomach.

Ok, yeah. Demos suck. They take up time you don't have and you have to deal with sales people who with call you again and again and again. But they are necessary to see what the product has to offer. Two things here:

• Don't be afraid to demo non-higher ed providers: Higher ed has specific needs that a lot of B2Cs or B2Bs just don't have, but don't count out providers that service other industries off-hand. There are some great ones out there. 
  
• Get demo accounts: Get them to set up a demo account for you so you can go in and play with it on your own time, without a salesperson being in your ear. Some may fight you on this, but they will do it. You have to be a hardass with vendors some times but always remember that you are the customer and its their job to win you over to get your business. 

2) Use those demos as an opportunity to make a list of the features you are looking for.

Besides seeing specific products, demos also allow you to get a real sense of what is out there. Start to make a list of the features you see that you really like, or the ones that you don't like so much. This will help you out tremendously later in the process.

Here was our list:

List Control

• No restriction on mailing lists
  
• Provider handles unsubscribes
  
• Provider runs imported lists against unsubscribes to prevent mailing to opt-outs

Message Creation

• Message customization
  
• Users can save messages in draft form
  
• Provider gives flexibility of creation/uploading templates
  
• Editing capabilities in WYSIWYG and HTML source
  
• Sent campaigns are archived and can be copied and reused
  
• Ability to suppress branding in Footer of message

Quality Control

• Provider checks outgoing message for spam triggers
  
• Users can schedule messages to be sent in advance
  
• Ability to internally and externally test the message
  
• Provider checks for broken links

Reporting

• Users can monitor messages as they move through the queue from draft to sent
  
• Ability to compare metrics from different campaigns within the tool
  
• Users can track and export the following statistics: 
• Deliverability
  
• Hard and Soft Bounces
  
• Exportable Bounce Logs
  
• Unsubscribe Rates
  
• Unique/Total Open Rates
  
• Unique/Total Click Rates
  
• Forwards

Deliverability

• Provider accepts responsibility for maintaining relationships with ISPs and providing assistance on any deliverability related issues.

Miscellaneous

• Unfettered control to timing, content and number of campaigns
  
• Ability to conduct A/B tests
  
• Dynamic content
  
• Unlimited individual accounts
  
• Ability to set up automated reports of hard bounces to accommodate current internal processes.
  
• Triggered Emails
  
• Preview screenshots of email in major clients
  
• Survey capabilities
  
• RSS/Blogging capabilities
  
• Vendor Offers API

3) Make a grid to compare all the vendors side-by-side.

Ok, so you've got your list. Now plug it into some sort of grid to compare your vendors side-by-side. Every vendor will have different features and policies so some of these that may seem like no-brainers come into play.

Also, another good thing to include on this is the pricing structure of the vendor and your cost for your first and subsequent years if you went with them. Get quotes based on how many emails you think you will be sending monthly/yearly. The way most places do it is that you get charged a monthly/yearly fee for a certain amount of messages. If you go over that number, you pay an additional fee, per message. If you come in under that number, you lose the emails you paid for. Many vendors also have start up costs and additional a la carte features that you can buy. I'm always weary of those, but you need to do what works for you. This is one of the things that really put FER over the top for Dartmouth - you pay per email, no more no less. You never lose emails and you can always get refunds for whatever reason.

4) Weight your list. What are the "deal-breakers" and what are the "nice-to-haves"?

Weighting your list of features is also helpful in determining which provider is right for you. Here is a screenshot from our grid:



3s were the deal-breakers. 2s were things we really wanted, but might be able to live without. 1s were things that were nice-to-have but were not going to play into the final decision if they didn't. Assign your own values based on what your institution is looking for, add them up and you should have your finalists, who will probably all be within a few points of each other.

5) Check references.

Ok, this seems like a no brainer but when I went to do this, it was much harder than I thought! First, one of the providers actually refused to give me references, reasoning that it wasn't necessary to do a reference check until we committed to going to with them. That was a pretty quick way to get their name taken off the list lol. Secondly, when I did reference checks for another top contender, I actually found out that their clients didn't really like them that much and were thinking about switching! Talk about enlightening :-)

6) Get buy-in.

Internal buy-in to a few process is important. I work in an advancement services shop, so I have multiple clients within development that have been affected by the switch to FER. Making sure they were on-board was key to having a smooth transition.

7) Always re-evaluate.

Just because you select a vendor does mean the process stops. Always do a re-evaluation at the end of each year to make sure they are still the best provider for your institution.

Now, even after going through this process with Dartmouth with almost two dozen vendors, we still choose FER. Even though I had a previous relationship with them, it didn't weigh into it - by the numbers, they were just the right ones for what we were looking for. BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN THEY WOULD BE RIGHT FOR EVERYONE. Each place has its own needs and what works for me may or may not work for you. That's why its important to really consider the needs of your audience and your institution.

Key Takeaways: 

1. If you're not overwhelmed by this process, you aren't taking it seriously enough. 
   
2. There is no one right answer when it comes to an email provider. Making sure you understand the needs of your institution in relation to what the provider offers is the most important thing. 
   
3. Get it all on paper. Once you do, the choice becomes relatively easy. 
   
4. It's ok to be a hardass with vendors. Really, some are just asking for it.

Reflections on An Event Apart

Overall, it was a great event. I'm always skeptical about new conferences because I've been to so many of them in the past that have just been a waste of time and money, but this one wasn't either. It's worth the price and then some. All of the speakers were excellent and well-prepared. I remember going to SXSW a few years ago and would overhear speakers joking about only preparing for a half-hour, which really turned me off to the event entirely. AEA is what I wish SXSW would strive to be like.

Here are some of my random thoughts and reflections on it from last night/this morning:

There is rarely one right way to do things. I think a lot of the speakers hit on this - they may prefer method A, but there are also methods B, C and D that are perfectly valid. I think this is where a lot of presenters at higher ed specific gigs make themselves come across as really arrogant to people who know better (which, unfortunately, is rarely the audience they are presenting to). They put things out there and describing the one way to get them done. Their way. And only their way. I find a lot of higher ed people incessantly need this justification that they are right (which they rarely get because of the reality of the culture of the industry). But this doesn't help people when you're presenting to them. If I wanted to go to a conference to hear about their way, I could save some money and just read their blog.

Usability tests are vitally important. I was really surprised at many of the things Jared Spool said. I think sometimes we get our heads so far into this that we forget how normal people use the web. It's like when people ask me about product recommendations..."is such and such a product easy to use for a beginner?" I always have to be careful because *I* may find it easy, but I've been doing this for 11 years so my perspective is drastically different. Same goes for our users. What is intuitive to use is not necessarily for them, so we really need to put the extra effort in and test our sites instead of making assumptions.

What am I? I'm really struggling with this - higher ed often expects their employees to be everything, which means I can really specialize in anything. My title is "web producer" but that doesn't really mean anything. I'm part designer, part developer, part marketer. It's an odd combination. Most people only do one of those things, or are some hybrid of two of the three. It's damn hard to try to be stellar at all three and I'm not sure its entirely possible, which scares the hell out of me because I hate failing at something with a passion.

Sometimes I need a good kick in the ass to get my head back into standards compliance. When I started at Dartmouth, there were standards issues with the properties that I'd be working on. It was one of those things that I kept perpetuating, using the "I'll fix it later" excuse rather than tackling because - let's be honest - it can be overwhelming to come into something and immediately have to fix what's broken. So you avoid the problem entirely. Stuff like this motivates me to tackle the problem now rather than continue to perpetuate it.

When you're doing a presentation, it's really important to manage the expectations of your audience. All the presentations I saw over the past few days were great, but some speakers managed my expectations better than others by the title they gave their talk. For example, Jeffrey Veen's talk was great. So was Christopher Fahey's. But these were two examples of speakers getting very conceptual and "40,000 foot view" but not really speaking to what I, as an audience member, thought they were going to speak to. So I didn't enjoy these talks as much as I did the others. It wasn't because it was bad information - it's because my expectations weren't managed. I have to keep this in mind as I'm creating presentations for the stuff I'm speaking at in the fall/winter.

These guys all crib Tufte like there's no tomorrow. That's not a bad thing, mind you. I'm just really glad my boss introduced me to him before the conference so I knew where a lot of these concepts were coming from.

The lack of formal education in web design has created a ton of problems. I had never really considered this before, but it's very true. It's difficult at best to find good information when you're just starting out and the industry isn't taken as seriously as it could be because of it.

If Vermont Housing Data can build a kick ass site, then damnit you can too!

An Event Apart: Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps

We have tools of participation - we can control what happens on the screen

Scale of data - our access to data has skyrocketed.

In the coming years, we're going to have to help people interact with all the data available to them.

There is a line between presenting information and decorating.

Take abstract data and make it meaningful, actionable - design tools for people so they can access their own data.

Put people in control of the things that are important to them.

Its important to really clarify the needs of your users.

veen.com/data-design.pdf

Personal note: One of the key lessons I'm taking away from this presentation is that the title of a presentation matters. I did not expect a half hour history lesson in a presentation titled "Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps". History isn't bad and can be really relevant but the speaker hasn't done a very good job of managing my expectations.

An Event Apart: Designing the User Experience Curve

All experience is not equal - the stuff at the start and at the end is the most important. If you have a limited budget, focus really hard on the beginning and the end.

Maslow for the web:

1st level) Functional (useful)
2nd level) Reliable
3rd level) Usable
4th level) Convenient
5th level) Pleasurable
6th level) Meaningful

Elements of experience

• anticipation
  
• duration
  
• intensity
  
• sensation
  
• differentiation
  
• significance

First Impressions Count

• Hotels get this. Think of walking into a hotel with a doorman or how much money they spent on the design of the lobby.
  
• Please judge by looks - they are important. 
  
• Apple makes you fall in love with the product before you even turn it on.
  
• We need to make sure the designs we show our users have a great first impression. Too often, we design websites for expert users. Example - Basecamp's training videos.

Once you have the use in, pay attention to the service you're giving them.

• Usability tests to see if the process is smooth. 
  
• Apple stores are organized by task, not by department - make four times the money as best buy.

Personalization and customization

• Its like going to the bar where they remember your drink.
  
• Customizing your game characters.

Attention to detail

• The way a car door shuts gives queues as to its quality
  
• How trash cans are designed at Disney
  
• Treadless sending an email when a shirt you have in your cart is about to go out of stock.
  
• Easter eggs

Feedback

• Masters of feedback are gambling machine makers because they suck you in and reinforce positive behavior.
  
• Feedback stops you from wasting your time. 
  
• Write clever error messages that help people alone their way.

Make it fun

• People love collecting points, which leads to leaderboard (which should be used with discretion)
  
• People enjoy exploring and collecting

Create the perfect environment

• People pay for the experience of Starbucks, not for the coffee.
  

An Event Apart: Standards in the Enterprise

Not web standards - coding, naming, design, interaction patterns, usability guidelines, accessibility requirements.

Standards are important for consistency and uniformity.

• standarizes how people work
  
• faster production cycles
  
• keep pace with emerging trends
  
• protects user experience.

Typical problems w/standards

• management isn't demonstrating commitment
  
• lack of training/communication
  
• documentation lags behind project work
  
• standards aren't maintained.

Successful standards:

• timely updates
  
• communicating about them
  
• reinforcement
  
• assign someone to be in charge

Creation

• start with fundamentals
  
• investigate the live site and work in progress
  
• think ahead
  
• review regularly
  
• monitor projects for efforts that require standardization

What makes a good standard?

• justification
  
• examples
  
• cross-discipline buy-in

Training

• making training mandatory
  
• offer it regularly 
  
• communicate regularly
  
• make information available in a convenient way 

Get creative:

• set up an intranet and allow comments
  
• hide easter eggs in the standards and run contests to find them
  
• be visible

Project Approval and Review

• make adherence to standards part of the project requirements
  
• formal reviews to look for standards-related issues
  
• new work gets fed back into the standards creation phase.

Tips:
1) Get organized. Find like-minded people.
2) Execute.
3) Diplomacy. Speak the same language as higher-ups.
4) Help. Be a support system.

An Event Apart: Principles of Unobtrusive JavaScript

It's not a technique - it's a philosophy for using JavaScript in its context: for usable accessible and standards-compliant pages.

1) Separation of structure, presentation and behavior.
2) Script doesn't assume anything

Separation:
-No inline event handlers for the same reason that you shouldn't use inline styles.

Advantages - ease of maintenance. The CSS files and the JavaScript layers can be edited simultaneously.

Reconnecting:

• with id: document.getElementById(); (should always ask if its available first)
  
• and class: getElementsByClassName(); - does not work in IE and only in the latest versions of all other browsers. If you want to use it by class, you also have to use a library function.

Assumption: JavaScript is always available

• Primitive cell phones don't support it
  
• Speech browsers support may be spotty
  
• Company networks may filter out script tags

Assumption: Everyone uses a mouse

• make dropdown menus keyboard accessible - focus paired with mouseover and blur paired with mouseout. supported by all browsers. 
  
• click events also fire when the user activates an element by the keyboard.

Personal note: I have to wonder what percent of users don't use a mouse....i'm not saying don't design for them, but like half of this presentation has been spent on this concept. isn't it like designing for people who use completely deprecated browsers? the percentage is so small, we ignore it by course. This seems to be one of those things were web people are getting all excited about planning for every contingency while not really giving thought to practicality.

An Event Apart: Comps and Code: Couples' Therapy

Discovery - finding out what the client needs
Design - turning wireframes into comps
Development - turns out the templates
Deployment - translates templates on the back end

It's important to admit our mistakes because it allows our process to improve.

Discuss the key points of the design before the coding starts to get a sense of the priorities. Make sure the developer is invested in the work.

Who is the client, really? Treating your co-workers as clients can be a helpful exercise when you're handing off your work to them. You want to have a complete understanding of the work.

If there is anything important about your design, make sure your developer knows where to find it. You spend time making it good for the client but making it work for the developer isn't at the front of your mind.

As a developer, make sure the designers get to see your work to make sure you've met their needs.

The new W3C site is pretty....we got a preview :-)

Don't fear prototyping - if it will help the client visualize it, jump on it.

Make sure your process isn't interfering.

(This presentation was a lot of examples, so not many notes to be had)

An Event Apart: Debug/Reboot

Day two....and begin!

One way to do debugging is to bring in a user stylesheet, For example, the following will highlight empty elements:

div: empty, span: empty,
li: empty, p: empty,
td: empty, th: empty {
padding: 0.5 em;
background: yellow;
}

Find any element that has a style attribute and any element that has an empty class or id and highlight it:

*[style], font, center {
outline: 5px solid red;
}
*[class=""], *[id=""] {outline: 5px dotted red;
}

Find images with no or empty alt/title

img[alt=""] {
border: 3px dotted red;
}
img: not ([alt]) {
border: 5px solid red;
}
img [title=""] {
outline: 3px dotted fuchsia;
}
img: not([title]) {
outline: 5px solid fuchsia;
}

Outlines are just like borders, but they don't participate in the layout - don't force things to move around.

Any table that doesn't have a summary, give me an outline:

table: not([summary]) {
outline: 5px solid red;
}
table {summary="" {
outline: 3px dotted red;
}
th {border: 2px solid red;
}
td[scope="col"], th[scope="row"] {
border: none;
}

Scope associates the content of a th with the cells in its column or row.

Find any "a" that has an href but doesn't have a title.

a[href]: not ([title]) {
border: 5px solid red;
}
a[title=""] {
outline: 3px dotted red;
}
a[href="#"] {
background: lime;
}
a[href=""] {
background: fuchsia;
}

You have to modify this to get it to work in IE.

Trying to catch things you might have missed that validators aren't going to help with:

html {
background: cyan;
} you'll see if you set a background color

table {
border: 5px solid red;
} find me layout tables in site i inherited so i can get rid of them

div div div div div {
outline: 1px dotted #CCC;
} warn me when i have excessively nested divs

form: not ([action]),
form: not ([method]) {
outline: 5px solid lime;
} I want to know about forms that don't have an action or method

blockquote {
color: #Foo;
font-weight: bold;
}

blockquote > * {
color: #000;
font-weight: normal;
} warn me if my blockquote has just text in it and no element


Resetting: set elements to a common baseline.

(Ok, I'm not retyping all the reset stuff....if you need it, then get your butt to one of these events ;-) )

An Event Apart: Day one thoughts and day two schedule

It's 5am. I always get up at 5am to go running in the morning. Stupid hotel gym doesn't open until 5:30. Bah.

So day one of An Event Apart was really good. Jared Spool just stole the show with his presentation on navigation. I felt a bit bad for Scott Fegette because by the time he got up and did his Dreamweaver thing, most people just wanted the day to be over so they could go get free beer. All the morning presentations were quality, with the lowpoint for me being in the afternoon with Doug Bowman and Chris Fahey. It wasn't that these guys didn't have good information, but they just seemed to be all over the place and I thought they could have wrapped the web into their talks a bit better.

Day Two looks promising. I'll do the same thing I did yesterday, with this being like the master table of contents and then each presentation having its own post.

• Debug/Reboot (Eric Meyer) »
  
• Comps and Code: Couples' Therapy (Ethan Marcotte) »
  
• Principles of Unobtrusive JavaScript (Peter-Paul Koch) »
  
• Standards in the Enterprise (Kimberly Blessing) »
  
• Designing the User Experience Curve (Andy Budd) »
  
• Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps (Jeffrey Veen) »
  
• A Critique Apart (Jeffrey Zeldman) (I'm not going to blog this because you kind of have to be here)
  

An Event Apart Responsible Web Design

Responsible Web Design:

• Staying current with standards and best practices
  
• Consistent display and behavior across browsers
  
• Custting-edge technology used ina degradable manner
  
• Constantly revisiting individual and group work flows.

The Purist's View:

• XHTML - Content/Data Layer
  
• CSS - Design Layer
  
• JavaScript - Behavior Layer

XHTML - Content Layer:

• Good semantics - solid foundation
  
• POSH - plain old semantic HTML
  
• No presentation or behavioral markup
  
• No bed adn breakfast markup (paragraph or break tages inserted to add extra white space)
  
• Always validate

Thinking Semantically

• difficult for people who "grew up" with everything together
  
• selectors used to precisely target content
  
• name elements for purpose, not for appearance 
  
• layout-specific markup can't always be avoided (example - div tag)

http://microformats.org - simple open data formats that identify types of information built on existing standards.

CSS - Presentation Layer

• Bad form: rules placed inline
  
• Not as bad form: styles in the document head
  
• Best form: styles in external files

Name for a style's INTENT, not it's VISUAL REPRESENTATION

Separate CSS rules by category: positional/layout rules; topographic rules; browser hacks

JavaScript - Behavior layer
Behavioral markup is now unnecessary - you can achieve true separation
Not so good form: functions placed inline
Best form: JS in external files, linked in by selectors
Progressive enhancement: increase page functionality as browser permits
Build solid baseline experience first, enhance it second.

An Event Apart: The Scent of a Web Page - Five Types of Navigation Pages

(apologies for crappy photos....I blame it on the red velvet cake ;-) )

Scent - what users follow as they go through the website.

Five types of pages that users encounter:

1) Target Content page

• The place users find what they're looking for
  
• All other pages are dedicated to delivering the user tot eh target
  
• Navigation pushes users
  
• Scent pulls users

*users DO NOT come to browse your site - they have a purpose!*

2) Gallery page

• Aggregates multiple content pages
  
• Individual content depends upon scent to attract the user
  
• Basically a list of links
• When you have a gallery page, you have to worry about scent
• Trigger words are key - they trigger the user into acting
• Careful layouts enhance scent
• The best links are long - 7-12 words in length
• The best gallery pages lead directly to correct content
• Link order is important - alphabetical is effectively random order
• Longer pages work better - users don't care if you have a lot of things. What does matter is when they can't make choices because there are too many factors

3) Department pages

• Used when galleries get too large
  
• Separates galleries into logical groups
  
• Basically are links to links and users expect that.
  
• Allows galleries to provide more detail per item
• Gallery links are descriptive to prevent pogosticking
• Categories need to be logical and meaningful - users need to quickly eliminate uninteresting categories.

4) Stores

• Used when you need to break out the departments (ie women's, men's, children's, shoes, jewelry, for the home, etc...)

5) Home Page

• The page the user lands at. 
  
• Can be any type of page
  
• Single purpose is to either present user with content on the page or to get the user to the page that has the content. 
  
• The least important page on your website - the most important is the content page. No one cares about your home page - they only care about finding their stuff. 

Paths are not equal:
Users click on...

• categories 86.8% of the time
  
• search 6.8% of the time
  
• home (from the home page) 2.6% of the time
  
• featured content 1.3% of the time.

There are three types of user behaviors that predict navigation failure:
1) Use of the back button

• 58% of the time, users do not find what they're using for.
  
• When there was one instance of back button, user succeed 18% of the time
  
• When there were two instances of back button, user succeed 2% of the time
  
• The back button is the button of doom.

2) Pogo sticking - when the user jumps up and down through the hierarchy

• The big brother of the back button
  
• When users don't pogo stick, they succeed 55% of the time
  
• When users do pogo stick, they succeed 11% of the time.
  
• The more someone pogo sticks, the less likely they are to purchase/complete goal.

3) Use of Search

• When a user comes to a page, they scan for trigger word. If they find it, they click on it. If they don't, they then go to search and type their trigger word into search.
  
• On most sites, if a user tries to look for content without search, they find it 53% of the time
  
• With search, they only find it 30% of the time.
  
• Amazon is an exception to this rule because people search for uniquely identified content. For not media products (ie cameras), it doesn't work as well because people aren't typing in specific product name.

More research at www.uie.com

An Event Apart: When Style is the Idea

What does your mother think of when you use the word style?
1) clothing design
2) interior design

We face additional technology challenges - they have to work AND they have to be usable.

Style can be perceived as being about experimentation instead of permanence. You may be ignoring things that are proven to work.

What is Style?

• Style can be part of personal identity but it can also be an identifier of a group.
  
• "A style is the consequence of recurrent habits, restraints, or rules invented or inherited, written or overheard, intuitive or preconceived." -Paul Rand. 
  

Why is style a dirty word?

• superficial, incomplete
  
• diverts from functionality
  
• impermanent
  
• exclusionary/elitist
  
• anxiety of influence - designers want to invent something new

Why style is good:

• encourages innovation
  
• normalizes practices
  
• inspiring
  
• has emotional impact
  
• style sells
  
• style happens anyway, so you might as well do it.

Web designers don't necessarily have the same vocabulary to describe things as fashion designers, but we're getting there.

The New Culture of Style:
Obsoletism - by making something that has a style to it, it will become obsolete.

Steve Jobs: "I'm selling fashion accessories as much as I'm selling technology"

Emotional Design:

• positive 'affect' is a functional benefit
  
• attractive things work better
  

Design isn't a miracle - it's how designers think. It's imaging what doesn't exist.

Don't follow trends - locate genuine stylistic movements.

Look for things to avoid as much as things you want to emulate.

Always explore new interaction paradigms, no matter how trendy they seem.

Voraciously consume aesthetic varieties.

Don't be afraid to have style in mind from the beginning.

Read posts about other day 1 presentations »

An Event Apart: Design to Scale

A large part of scale has to do with context

• the feature
  
• the surroundings

Inevitable growth:

• whenever you put a site or a product out there, it has the potential to gain a growing following
  
• we need to expect and plan for future growth

Examples of companies that have scaled through replication:

• McDonalds
  
• Starbucks
  
• Ikea

"Delight the eye without distracting the mind"

• Your final result can't just be pretty - it still has to serve a purpose.

The hidden interface:

• Simplicity is powerful - the best designs only include features that people need to accomplish their goals. 
  
• "Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations" -Paul Rand

iPhone - it's design makes it easily replicable across the world.

Engage beginners and attract experts.

• The designs appear to be simple on the surface but should include powerful features beneath the surface. 
  
• If you attract power users, their expertise will drawn in other users as well. 

Free your mind:

• Scale requires flexibility

Tomorrow, the World:

• Eventually, there will be a time to take your product to the next level.
  
• Web audience is ultimately a global audience
  
• We need to recognize that the US is not the center of the web.
  

Consider the factors of scale without getting tripped up. Have a little bit of allowance for room for expansion while also designing for the audience you have now.

Read posts about other day 1 presentations »

Web Application Hierarchy

How we use the web:
The eye jumps around being areas of visual information. Do I care about this or not?

Design Considerations:

1. The organization of stuff: the structure of your information. 
   
2. Interaction: How your application behaves in response to user actions.
   
3. Presentation: How your application appears to your audience. Communicates the interaction layer. 

Presentation layer outlines relationships between content, makes organizational systems clear, helps build consistency, guides users through actions, conveying personality, having emotional impact, communicating brand message.

Visual Organization: using relations to communicate features, functions, etc...

Personality: visceral design

Quickly Communicate:

• What is this? Usefulness
  
• How do I use it? Usability
  
• Why should I care? Desirability. 

How we make sense of what we see

• recognizine similarities and differences
  
• this allows us to group information and give it meaning

Relationships

• between indviduals elements
  
• to the whole story

Several principles tell us how (why) we group visual information

• proximity
  
• similarities
  
• continuance
  
• closure 

Forming relationships

• creating relationships requires an understanindg of what mekes things different
  
• introducing variations in one or more of the categories (color, texture, shape, direction, size) creates visual contrast also created through positioning

Use visual relationships to...

• add more or less visual weight to objects
  
• difference is created by contrast between objects
  
• we care about things having more or less weight because we can use it to focus people's attention in the presentation layer

Distribution of visual weight...

• visually dominant images get notice most
  
• focal point, center of interest

visual communication is part
visual organization and part personality
visual hierarchy is a deliberate prioritization of
visual weight enabled by the manipulation of
visual relations to create
meaning for users.

What do we do with a visual hierarchy?

Communicating a central message - what is it and why is it different than everything else?

Prioritization becomes even more important when you consider how people access content. We tend to think within our own confines but people are accessing it through much broader means.


Read posts about other day 1 presentations »

An Event Apart: Good Design Ain't Easy

Storytelling by design - every time you design something, you're trying to tell a story to get people to do the thing you want them to do.

How does design tell a story?

• We look to visuals to tell a story, a narrative. From the time we're young, we look for narratives in visuals.
  
• Graphic resonance - visuals reinforce the story.

Designer=Narrator
Example -



Modern day examples
-Wired does a really good job at setting the mood for the story they are telling through layouts, typography, etc... in the PRINT version. When it moves online, the mood gets lost.
-We've distilled our stories down to content on websites.

Design can't NOT communicate. Everything you put on a page communicates something.

What are we doing wrong? Why aren't our designs at the same level as classic print work?

• We look through web design through the lens of print design and the two just really don't compare. The common principles aren't common anymore because the mediums are so different.
  

The Nature of the Medium
1) The metaphorical page

• We've always made marks on stuff, whether or not they were actual, physical pages.
  
• "There is an urgent need for communication based on precision and clarity." (quote from 1964 - these aren't new problems).
  
• Constraints of the page: A physical object has the constraints of a length/viewpoint. With a web page, that's tougher to grasp. They can extend out in all directions.
  
• All-in-one ideal: you need to be able to get to all the contents at one time, opposed to everything being on a different page in a physical book.

2) Ubiquity & WYSIWYG

• In not point in the production process does the product change in a print piece. On the web, we can affect the way it functions and looks at any time. It's not a set medium.

3) Collections of pages

• With a book, you can see how long it is (10pgs, 200pgs, etc...) there's attainability and grasp of depth. You don't get that from a website.

4) Layout

• Possibly the biggest constraint.
  
• Golden ratio: 1:1.618 - by basing our work on ratios like this, we can design for sameness and cohesion.
  
• Rule of thirds: if we align parts of our image along these lines, it creates interest.
  
• You digest information differently online than you do when you're reading a book. We can look at anyway we want to, whereas most people read a book the same way. Ratio and Rule of Thirds don't apply because they rely on predictable dimensions.

Kick ass examples:

• No One Belongs Here More Than You »
  
• Fray »
  
• A Brief Message »
  
• The Principles of Beautiful Web Design »
  
• We Tell Stories »
  

Design for the web has been driven by technology rather than message but the form of design should be driven by the story.

Read posts about other day 1 presentations »

An Event Apart: The Lessons of CSS Frameworks

Frameworks:

• 960
  
• Blueprint
  
• Content with style
  
• Elements
  
• That Standards Guy
  
• Tripoli
  
• WYMstyle
  
• YAML
  
• YUI
  

Which CSS Framework is right for you? None.

• Frameworks aren't bad or evil, but if you're going to use a framework, it should be yours.
  
• Take inspiration from existing frameworks.

• Most frameworks use resets, fonts and colors, but leave forms alone. Almost all do layouts (having different kinds of layouts). Not a whole lot for print styling. Surprisingly few hacks. 

Body Sizes

• Font size: They all cluster around 12-13px, either absolute or by percentage.
  
• Default font family is a sans-serif font. 
  
• Line-height is less uniform - anywhere from 1 - 1.6. 

Heading Sizes

• Most use ems or percentages. 960 and Elements uses pixels.
  
• HTML 4 is the only one that has headings go below 1. h5 and h6 can actually be smaller than the paragraph text it sits next too. No one else thought that was a good idea.
  
• Blueprint and Elements start really big and get smaller.
  
• Everyone else starts around 1.6-2 for h1 and goes down to 1 for h6. 
  
• Average is: h1, 2.33; h2, 1.8; h3, 1.45; h4, 1.25; h5, 1.11; h6, 1.05

Naming Conventions
Group 1: 960, Blueprint, YUI/That Standards Guy

• have tons and tons of descriptive classes. pick whatever you want to layout and then add a class to it as appropriate. 
  

Group 2: Content with Style, WYMstyle, YAML

• have universal names (header, main, footer, content, etc...)

Layout Invocation

• 960/Blueprint/That Standards Guy/YUI: some type of ID or class
  
• Content With Style/Tripoli/WYMstyle: point to a directory with a stylesheet that has the layout you want. 
  


• With the first approach, you are loading every possible layout. With the second, you are only loading the one you want.

Style Inclusion Patterns

• Elements/That Standards Guy: Every page, you just point to a stylesheet and it imports whatever it needs.
  
• Everyone else: You link to whatever you need. 
  
• Frameworks skew towards the latter because of caching in IE. If you use the first, you end up downloading all the importing stylesheets again because it doesn't cache them. 

What the Hack?

• Hacks tell us what CSS is missing.
  
• clear-fixing; pseudo-padding
  
• Most hacks are for IE (shocker)

Some Cool Bits

• Elements: external linking - identifies external and internal links, pdf downloads, mailtos, etc...
  
• 960/Blueprint/YAML: compressed files - strip out all comments and whitespace to make file smaller. 
  
• Blueprint/WYMstyle, YAML: debugging.
  
• YAML: draft files.
  
• 960: sketch files.

Goal should be to create your own framework! They are good places to start but the advantage to having your own is that its tuned to what you do.


Read posts about other day 1 presentations »

An Event Apart: Understanding Web Design

First off, kudos to the people who put this event together for understanding that people will bring laptops and they will be much happier conference goers if they have a place to charge them!

So Abe Lincoln use to joke about his height and the height of his wife during his campaign - he was really tall and she was really short. They would stand on the back of a train together when he was giving his speeches and when they left, he would end with "and that's the long and the short of it". Not so different from Meyer and Zeldman ;-)




Ok, on to the presentation:

• What do web designers need the most? Empathy. The ability to put yourself in another person's shoes.

Insufficiency of empathy = Real.com.

• There are two competing wishes driving the website and the business. One part of the company is totally dedicated to giving away a free product. The other part of the company is dedicated to making money by selling the upgraded player. The users are the victims of their internal marketing war. 
  
• Links don't have to be blue and underlined, but there does need to be consistency between what is clickable and what isn't. Real has trouble with this on their site. 

Insufficiency of empathy = ConsumerSearch.

• An alternative to Consumer Reports. All the good stuff is deep inside the website where no one will ever look. The irony of the site is that its dedicated to making your life better but its completely non-user friendly.
  
• They never bothered to figure out how to make the page sexy. They also failed to anticipate how users discover a website. Their website is very confusing to navigate for new users. 

Education

• Being a web designer is tough because there are very few in-house training programs and almost no educational programs. You have to be very motivated to keep learning. 
  
• Good information is hard to find. The main source of information is from companies who make products. 
  
• "Teaching Excel is not the same as teaching business." Learning software is not the same as learning web design. Generally educational programs teach you software and not strategy. 

A List Apart Survey:

• Only half the people said that their education was relevant to working on the web.
  
• The more money you make, the less your education matters. 
  
• The older you are, the more money you make (if you're 50, you didn't study web design in college)
  
• If you're a webmaster, your education is less relevant. If you're a graphic designer, your education is more relevant.

Web design is the Rodney Dangerfield of professions. No respect.

• The perception of what we do is ironic and disturbing. 
  
• Over the past 30 years, the agent of change in the world has been the Internet and we do that stuff.
  
• Part of the problem is that there is no standardization of titles. They vary by organization and type of organization.
  
• Universities have a more traditional (old school) view of what we do than startups do. Webmasters vs. Creative directors. They do the exact same thing but one organization about tradition and one is progressive.

Who owns the website?

• You own your blog or your personal site. 
  
• Even if you work on a site in house, you don't own it. 
  
• Usually, there is no web division. Either IT or Marketing is in charged.
  
• Creative people are at work but are being beaten down. The result is an inferior product. 
  
• Web designers don't get paid very well. It's not a get rich quick. 

Who Speaks for Web Design?

• Judges for awards are usually being who have achieved a certain level in their firm, but are not necessarily people who build the things they are judging. 
  
• Competition awards certain kind of work and perpetuates certain kinds of work. The work is not necessarily about users.

"If you say Web 2.0 revolution, I'm done" :::huge round of applause:::

We have to overcome the "guitar solo" approach to design - how much stuff can we fit into one design?

• It's about the character of the content, not of the designer.
  
• Use "empathetic web design" versus "user center web design"
  

Read posts about other day 1 presentations »

An Event Apart, Day One

I plan to be blogging all day from An Event Apart in Boston. Check back to this post for a master list of all the day one presentation posts (each session will also have its own post as well...this is moreso just a table of contents). Here is the line up for today:

• Understanding Web Design (Jeffrey Zeldman) » 
  
• The Lessons of CSS Frameworks (Eric Meyer) »
  
• Good Design Ain't Easy (Jason Santa Maria) »
  
• Web Application Hierarchy (Luke Wroblewski) »
  
• Design to Scale (Doug Bowman) »
  
• When Style is the Idea (Christopher Fahey) »
• The Scent of a Web Page: Five Types of Navigation Pages (Jared Spool) »
  
• Responsible Web Design (Scott Fegette) »

In the meantime, here are some pictures I took in Boston when I arrived yesterday:

The ROI of Blogging

This is a really great post about assessing the ROI of your blogging efforts: 

I am a stickler for marketing and sales results. Everything we do should be measured, including our social media and social networking efforts. If what we do doesn't return ROI, we should stop doing it. Of course, to measure ROI, it must first be defined. I define ROI by asking the following questions...

Do our marketing efforts:

Create great customer experiences as measured by the happiness levels of our customers?
Result in loyal clients?
Result in revenues and/or profits?
Result in leads and referrals?
Result in getting us noticed?

Read more »

Print Still Works (or arguments for web financial parity of naive at best)

I was reading Ron Bronson's blog yesterday and really just couldn't disagree with one of his positions more.

Presidential candidates are making unprecedented amounts of money on the internet and we still have schools publishing bulky print materials to the oldsters, because that’s the way they’ve raised money in the past, so why change it now?

You change it now, because you want to raise money from the oldsters of tomorrow. The alumni who will run this country and who will feel less connected, less engaged and more cynical about their college years with debt rising and feeling as their prospects are grimmer than they were when they first started as wide-eyed first year students.

Bronson's post was ironic because he made the huge leap from talking about authenticity in admissions marketing (which I completely agree with) to discussing the elimination of print materials in marketing the university to potential donors. Having worked in both worlds now, I can emphatically say that one has little to do with the other and what works in admissions may not necessarily work in development at the same school! Admissions should be more authentic than it is - you're selling a product and the buyer should know what they are getting into so that your retention doesn't suffer. On the other hand, fundraising can be more nostalgic. There are iconic images at any school that defy generational nuances.

Plus, the fact remains that statistics clearly show that print is still an extremely effective way of raising money. There was an article just this week in The Chronical of Philanthropy about this subject: Direct Mail Beats Predictions, Study Finds.

As with most things, the key is to find a happy medium: I make donations all the time that are initiated by print mail. Now, I may not write a check and mail it back to the organization that has asked me for money, but I will log onto their website and give if there is an easy way to do it on there. But the print piece is what convinces me 9 times out of 10. Should we not consider this a successful print piece just because I elected to respond by a different medium? At 27-years-old, I wonder if he would consider me an oldster because I responded to a print mailing?

This blog also brought up a broader point for me: I'm not insinuating that Bronson is advocating this because he doesn't in the text of the blog I'm referencing, but you hear all the time that the web should have parity with print in marketing materials because it is just as effective, if not moreso. Now, I think we can all agree that it is just as effective, but to say that it deserves financial parity with print is the most naive argument I've ever heard. The fact is that it costs more to produce quality print materials than it does to produce web work of the same quality. I can cover my email budget for the year for $15,000 but that may not even cover the cost of doing one print piece. As long as the web is supported in my organization and I have the resources I need to do my job effectively, I'm covered.

Bottom line: Print works. Web works. You can appeal to both old and young audiences without breaking a sweat. Change doesn't always involve choosing one thing over another - it often involves integrating the two, which will ultimately give you a better result than either one could on its own.

Key Takeaways:
1) It is not about print vs. web. It is about the two working together harmoniously to achieve a final result.
2) Print still works when it comes to fundraising.
3) Arguing for financial parity of the web and print within your organization is unrealistic. Rather, work on getting the web valued as a marketing tool within your organization.

Princeton's Admissions page: Ohhhhh, pretty

It's not often I'm struck by a higher ed web page of any sort, but Princeton's admissions page got me at hello. I found it as I was browsing the 2008 CASE award winners for Web Sites, where they rightfully got a mention. The main images changes each time you refresh, as do the faculty and student profiles in the lower left promos. All of the images are super striking and make me want to click around to learn more. See for yourself: http://www.princeton.edu/admission/

Just because other schools do something doesn't mean you should too

I was reading an interesting piece in Conversation Marketing today titled "If your competitor jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you?" It's about not resorting to shady tactics just because your competitor is. Now, I'm not saying that college resort to shady tactics for the sake of marketing :::cough:::fudgingadmissionsnumbers:::cough::: but the article brings up a good general point about marketing - just because another school is doing something doesn't mean it's the right strategy for your institution.

At my last job, their mantra seemed to be "well, let's see what everyone else is doing and then do that". It absolutely drove me crazy!!!! Just because another school is implementing a strategy that may or may not work for their audience does not mean you should follow suit as if it was the magic bullet of marketing. I would say that 90% of the marketing strategies I've come up with in the past four years have been completely organic. Many of them (particularly involving email marketing) have actually been almost by accident. For example, you're in the midst of building an email newsletter and start asking yourself why it can't be more segmented and customized to the specific needs of the audience. Before you know it, you have email campaigns with not one or two, but 25-30 different parts! It's not based on something someone else did - it's based on what you think will work for your SPECIFIC AUDIENCE. And that should always be the yard stick you go by. Never be afraid to experiment with new ideas and always have a focus on what the end user needs, wants and experiences with your final product.

One more point: The same goes for speakers at conferences or bloggers - just because they say it doesn't make it so (or it may be so in some instances but not necessarily for your institution). People who speak at conferences or blog are not gods. They are just people, many of whom are struggling along with the same issues you face every day. They don't have all the answers and if they say they do, they are lying. Now, that's not to say their ideas are worthless but please just take everything you hear with a grain of salt and don't be discouraged if you apply their ideas to your institution and it doesn't work. There is no magic bullet.

Key Takeaways:
1) Build your strategy based on the specific needs of your audience, rather that what other institutions are doing.
2) Speaking at a conference or writing a blog post does not make someone buddha.

Whiteboarding "Marketing" (and simultaneously solving all of life's problems)

Today I (along with the rest of the communications and web teams) have a meeting with the VP of Development at Dartmouth to discuss marketing and how to infuse it into the organization. In My Blogging Manifesto last week, I said that one of the reasons I blog is to prepare for meetings. I didn't let you in on it at the time, but the Clarifying Definitions of Buzzwords blog from last week was just that. It was my way of wrapping my head around some definitions in preparation for a brainstorming meeting I was having with my boss, to prepare for the VP meeting today.

Ok, so my boss and I have this meeting. Both of us are whiteboarders. I don't know how I would survive in my day-to-day job without a whiteboard. For some reason, drawing something out on a whiteboard just clarifies everything and makes you think of nuances that you hadn't considered before.

So we started with writing out the "Cs" and "Ps" of marketing (for those of you who have never studied marketing in an academic setting, marketing academics love nothing more that alliteration when they describe what they do):



This covers a lot more aspects of marketing that I previously did in my blog. When you say "marketing" to people in our industry, the typically think of something that resembles public relations, or building and maintaining relationships with your stakeholders. This is the fun stuff - the tools you use to actually COMMUNICATE with your audience. It might be designing a print piece or a website, starting a social network or writing a blog. But REAL marketing goes so far beyond that. It involves pricing, product placement, marketing research, ROI, predictive modeling, etc. This is true whether you are doing print or online marketing.

So we're sitting there staring at this on the board and it hits me - marketing is just like writing a paper. When you write a paper, you follow three basic steps:

1) Introduction: Say what you're going to say
2) Body: Say it
3) Conclusion: Say what you just said.

Marketing is basically the same thing:

We concluded that we're really good at step 2 (telling our story), but aren't as good at steps 1 and 3 (planning and evaluation). I suspect this is the same at a lot of schools. I can tell you that I see very few blogs from so-called marketers on anything other than the second step and very few presentations at conferences on anything other than the fun stuff. That's one of the reasons I'm so psyched about presenting at the Stamats Integrated marketing conference on ROI in November (On a sidenote, my thoughts are with all my friends at Stamats. I've worked with them for the past four years and have been out to their office in Cedar Rapids several times. They are all really good, really smart people and I wish them nothing but the best as they recover from the flood).

My boss and I also concluded that because we are not great at all three steps, we aren't fully meeting the needs of our constituency:

A little background: One of the things I really appreciated about coming to work for the development office at Dartmouth is that they took the time to define who they are and what they stand for a few years back. This resulted in three core values:
1) Donor Focus
2) Results orientation
3) Teamwork

Being good at all three points will allow us to be MUCH better at creating a donor focus on our marketing. Planning, research and evaluation will allow us to take a much more strategic approach with our communications, which will ultimately make us better at what we do (which also kicks into the "results orientation" value).

Key Takeaways:
1) Marketing involves storytelling, but really goes far beyond that.
2) You can't avoid the stuff that may not be as fun to do - it's not all about flash and getting yourself into conferences. It's about doing your job.
3) Ultimately, you will better meet the needs of your audience more by doing all three steps.

Postscript: I later twittered this dumbed down version of marketing and we collectively realized that not only were we describing marketing, but had also pretty much solved all of life's problems:

My Blogging Manifesto

Last night I had like a six hour conversation with Kyle James. We talked about a ton of stuff,but spent a good bit of time on our own philosophies about blogging. We have VERY different philosophies. That's not bad, mind you. Just different. And it was eye-opening so I thought I would take a moment to put my own philosophy into words.

Why I Blog

• I blog for myself, not for people who may read it. I think you have to blog for yourself to be successful - if you're doing it so that others will think you're a cool kid, you've missed the point.
  
• I blog to organize my thoughts. It may be in preparation for something I'm doing at work (or in response to something I did) or it could just be for my own clarification. If people find value in that, it's a bonus.
• I blog because I believe we're all obligated to share the information we have with others in our industry. I wish more people offered unique opinions instead of playing it safe.
  
• I blog because it keeps me on my toes and continually moving forward into new ideas and strategies.
  
• I blog because I have been since 1999 on various topics and it just seems natural at this point.
• I blog because I think it's fun. Those rare opportunities where you get to have a discussion with people who disagree with you are invigorating.
  

• I don't blog because I think I'm smarter than my readers. Anyone who calls themselves an authority on the web in higher education is a liar. There's always a new idea to explore or a new technique to learn. We all have areas of expertise and unique perspectives to offer, whether we put those perspectives in words on a blog or not. The irony of self-proclaimed experts is that they often are resting on their laurels and don't really have any new ideas to inject into the community. I hope I never become that sort of expert.
  
• I don't blog as some sort of grand master plan. This isn't branding to me. I'm not putting on some sort of front for the sake of presentation. I say what I think, mundane or critical, because I think having an opinion is far more interesting than being a sheep.
• I don't blog as a way to seek approval from people who may read it. If you agree with me, great. If you don't, that's fine too. I wish that more people who disagreed with me would say so in the comments and start a discussion about why.
  

To blogroll or not to blogroll

I was chatting with Kyle James last night and he asked when I was going to do a blogroll so we could trade links.  I kind of went "ehhhhhhh....."  I'm not the hugest fan of blogrolls.  I've been blogging on various topics since 1999 and use to do them as a matter of course.  But then people asked to be included and if they weren't, they got offended.  Of course, it's less about the blogs I actually like to read and more about promoting people that I may or may not like so they'll promote me in return.  So I say bag the whole thing entirely.  I've got a decent amount of readers and am not thrilled with the idea of whoring myself in an attempt to get a few more.

But just in case people are actually interested in the things I read, then here is my list.  It's short and sweet (I'm not crazy like Matt and read like 9 billion blogs a day).  Hope you find something useful!

Higher Ed Blogs
I actually read very few higher ed blogs.  By and large, I just feel like I hear the same topics covered time and time again with very few unique perspectives.  Plus I think most of them are incredibly boring (sorry guys!). That's why I started using the cartoons and screenshots in this one - I just think its more interesting and readable that way. Anyway, I do read a few fairly regularly and here they are:

MattHerzberger.com: So apparently people think that Matt and I have this rivalry going on but the reality is that we've been friends since SXSW 2006 when we met and the uwebd meetup and hung out together for the rest of the event. We were actually suppose to present together last year at HighEdWebDev but I dropped out due to leaving the job from hell. I wish Matt would blog more but when he does, I think he has a lot of great insights.

.eduGuru: Yes, I do actually read Kyle's blog lol. I really like all the info he gives on analytics. It's one of those subjects that isn't really that sexy but is so necessary to what we do.

Tales from Redesignland: Just dead on cartoons from Tony Dunn parodying what its like to live in our world.

mStoner: mStoner is the only vendor blog I read with any sort of regularity. I have a huge problem with people promoting vendor blogs because I think that a lot of them are just fronts to sell colleges things they really don't need and that most people that work in higher ed just don't know any better. But with mStoner, I don't feel like he's trying to sell me something and I think the information is great.

I read some others but these are the ones that really stand out in my head as something I will also click through on when I see it pop up in my RSS feed.

Non-Higher Ed Blogs

I think we can all agree that higher ed tends to be way behind the times. That's why I find the majority of my inspiration from non-higher ed related blogs. Here are some of my favorites:

Creating Passionate Users: Although there hasn't been a post to this one in over a year, I still find myself referencing it all the time. It's just full of really great information that is extremely applicable to what we do. Plus it has pictures and that's never a bad thing.

A List Apart: Kind of a standard for anyone doing web work. I'll be live blogging from their event in Boston in a few weeks.

Laws of Simplicity: Super cool blog by John Maeda that is an extension of the book he wrote of the same title.

Edward Tufte: I got turned on to Tufte when my boss suggested that I go to a presentation he was doing in Boston a while back. It absolutely blew my mind. Well not so much a blog as a message board, I do think it has a ton of great information that is very applicable to what we do (though I don't think Tufte understands the web nearly as well as he thinks he does).

Head First Labs: The blog that accompanies the awesome series of Head First books.

MarketingProfs: This website has so much good information I it, I don't even know where to begin. Very readable and applicable across the board.

Conversation Marketing: A really great, well-written and entertaining blog about internet marketing.

THINKing: Great blog for marketing, advertising and branding.

Those of my favs of the moment but I'm always on the lookout for more. Suggest your favorites in the comments and I'll definitely check them out!