As a Web consulting company, we spend almost every day talking with college/university administrators about their websites. I might ask a prospective client, “how do you feel about your website?” or “is the site effectively meeting the university’s objectives?” Frequently, marketing directors will candidly admit that their websites ‘need help’ or ‘ought to be refreshed’, but they aren’t doing anything about it.

Often, these executives run into a common problem: they don’t know where to start. There may also be variations of this challenge. For instance, many colleges distribute ownership of the website across many different departments, so it can be difficult to get people ‘on the same page’; most university administrators have busy schedules during the school year and just can’t find the time to make long term plans for the Web.

Whatever the obstacle is, please know this: if you’re a higher education executive who’s responsible for the school website, you cannot afford to put an underperforming website on the backburner....Click here to read more.

From feature phones to smartphones, small tablets to large tablets, desktops to netbooks and ultrabooks, the variety of devices people use to access web content is growing rapidly.  Times have changed from the days of just computers and smartphones. Even then, optimizing content for site visitors was a bit of a challenge. The first initial attempt was building a separate mobile website.

So, you had your regular desktop-based website and your separate mobile website, and maybe even different content between the two. You may have been dealing with different tools and different content management systems serving both. This approach was a maintenance nightmare, since in some cases, you were maintaining essentially two separate websites....Click here to read more.

Well, this is the obligatory time for reflections on the past year and predictions for the next. I’ll try to minimize that here and just share my thoughts on two topics that I’ll be particularly focused on in the coming year – social media and mobile – or more specifically, how best to leverage both for business-to-business and business-to-consumer engagement. Let’s start with mobile…...Click here to read more.