Insights

The Northeast is lovely this time of year, but you know what’s lovelier? Hardcore higher-ed know-how. And that’s what I found last month at the HighEdWeb New York conference in Ithaca, New York, and the Web Conference at Penn State in State College, Pennsylvania.

We hate to brag, but we’re really proud of our awesome collection of colorful and plentiful collegiate pennants. They hang around the office as a reminder of all the cool colleges and universities we’ve worked with. Being so well versed in the world of higher education digital marketing strategy has taught us plenty of really important lessons, ones that we share with each of our clients as we kick-off a new project. And now we’re sharing with you.

Higher education is not going anywhere. But it is changing - in some ways, dramatically.

In recent years, the industry has seen rapid disruption that has driven a change in the way institutions communicate. Because the need to attract, retain, and engage students, faculty, alumni, and staff has not gone away, but it has become much harder to do.

That's where digital strategy comes into play. In a challenging and competitive industry, having a plan and a purpose can be the difference between shortfall and success.

In the wild world of web design, terms like UX and UI get thrown around all the time. But what do these mean exactly? While UX (User Experience) and UI (User Interface) design are both crucial components of delivering an exceptional web experience to end users, they are not the same. We’ll quickly break down the key differences between the two and talk about how the two integrate with each other.

After a decade of working with numerous Content Management Systems such as Sitecore, Adobe CQ, Ektron, Kentico, and Wordpress, I recently joined OHO Interactive and, for the first time, I’m diving deep into the Drupal CMS, including attending this year’s DrupalCon earlier this month. DrupalCon Los Angeles was a great experience - in fact, I was completely blown away.

Ever since Erik Runyon published his post on carousel statistics for the Notre Dame website, there has been plenty of debate on whether carousels are an effective way of providing navigation and information to users. Seeing that carousels are used universally on a wide variety of websites - including e-commerce, higher education, and B2B platforms - one would think the answer would clearly be yes. However, sites such as Should I Use a Carousel have fervently come out and opposed them.

While Oreo’s and Old Spice’s social media campaigns make it seem like Twitter is built for consumer-focused companies trying to sell a product, there is plenty of room for other folks trying to master social media to play ball as well. By fully utilizing its simplicity, wide reach, and analytical prowess, Twitter can become an incredibly effective tool for any marketer.

One of the foundational deliverables for a website project is a content audit. A website content audit is a comprehensive website evaluation that takes into account multiple quantitative and qualitative factors in order to gauge current content quality, components, connections, structure, and function. You know the adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”? Well, a website content audit helps us know what is broken so we do fix it. And often, you get the added perk of discovering some buried or obscured content gems that you’d want to do more with in the next iteration of the site.

Transparency flies in the face of silos, which are endemic to higher ed. Silos seclude people from one another and disconnect people from streams of information. This creates redundancy and inefficiency, inhibits the ability to gain broad buy-in, and makes communication challenging.

But when you strive to foster transparency, the walls fall away. People become humans, not just names on a list. Information becomes common knowledge, not the stuff of legend. Communication and connections become the currency by which things get done.