April 10, 2007 Webmasters Committee Meeting Minutes

Present: Jamie Bethel, Tom Harmon, Charlie Kerlee, Jill Lenz, Sallie Varner, and Merry Wright.

Merry Wright, Chair, started the meeting at 9:09 am

New Business

  1. "Writing Right for the Web" Presentation Review

    Merry sent the 31 page presentation handout file with the emailed agenda announcement.

    Jill attended this 1½ hour web conference on March 5, presented by Bob Johnson from Academic Impressions as a live PowerPoint presentation. It covers the pitfalls of web writing and how they can derail your site's effectiveness. Samples from higher education were used to highlight good and bad practices and to demonstrate the value of a designated web editor and team.

    Jill reviewed the first 18 of 61 slides of the presentation which spurred discussion about designated web content editors.

    Recommended Best Practices

    1. Content written so it is easier to scan using small paragraphs, subheads and bullet points because users get impatient
    2. No top heavy graphics, with the important content pushed below the "fold", forcing uses to scroll to get to the start of the content
    3. Include meaningful Title tags
    4. Include "care" words" for example: "heart disease" might be what the general public will search for, as well as keywords, for example: "cardiovascular disease" might be what a practitioner will search for.
    5. Know your audience and consider your complete Web site as a "series of magazines", for example content, writing style and frequency of content updates will differ for all the different audiences including alumni, donors, practitioners, pet owners, potential students, etc.
    6. Create a web content editor and team of experienced writers with direct marketing or journalism background who know how to incorporate different writing styles for different audiences

    Discussion

    Roles and Responsibilities

    The majority agreed it was part of their webmaster duties to act as editor to check for proper spelling and grammar and most were already doing this. However, everyone agreed content could be written better to meet the best practices mentioned so far in the presentation. Jill shared two resources that may help identify our roles and responsibilities as webmasters.

    1. Identify Roles and Responsibilities from San Diego State Web Style Guide. See the "Content Owner" role, do we do this or are we simply site maintenance types?
    2. Who Plans for Accessibility? from CSU Access Project. See the "Content Expert/Author" role, that breaks the role into two sub-roles, one that writes and gathers text and one that prepares for the Web.
    Action Item

    The majority agreed we need help researching and focusing on our audiences and organizing the existing content according to these recommended best practices. We thought of Carol Borchert, long-time editor of the college's Insight magazine and other publications who has a scientific and journalism background and is familiar with our college as someone we could consult with. Merry will contact Carol to ask if she would be willing to review a few of our pages and offer suggestions at a future meeting on how to better present this content for the web.

    These are the pages we have in mind for review.

    1. College Brochure (Multiple pages long, this brochure was originally written by Carol Borchert a few years ago as a printed piece. While Linda Tarnoff maintains these pages, after posting she requested access for the respective webmasters to act as content experts and update their specific content as needed.)
    2. PVM Student Information
    3. Undergraduate Studies in Environmental Health
    4. Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology

    We will continue the review of the presentation at the next meeting.

The meeting concluded at 10:15 am.

The next meeting will be held on Tuesday, May 8th, 9:00-10:00 am, Environmental Health Building Conference Room 120.

Minutes submitted by Jill Lenz.

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