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“I’m not a technical person” is perhaps my least favorite excuse for avoiding new tools and trends. Working in web development, and being the person who is in charge of introducing my clients to new technologies and strategies, I hear this line almost daily.

Although it can be frustrating to hear, I know what people are actually saying when they tell me they are “not a technical person.” They mean: “I won’t understand this.”

In a quest to connect and engage with prospective students, college and university marketing teams are turning to student social media takeovers of official social media accounts. These first-person, student produced narratives help schools to tell stories from new angles, to present an authentic, unmoderated perspective, and to grow their audiences.

Three experts on the topic shared their experiences and processes for letting students take the reigns during a panel at the annual CCA conference:

Do you ever feel like your website is a mess?

It’s like a cluttered garage that you wish someone else would just clean out–get rid of the trash, sweep it out, and put anything of value back on some nice shiny shelves.

You could turn around, walk away, hire an agency, and tell them — fix it!

But, it’s your job to clean it out.

To help you dive in, we’ve outlined a seven-point action plan — if you follow it, you’ll end up with a good understanding of what’s in your “garage” and some first thoughts on all of the key areas for a new website.

Each year, thousands of developers, designers, content strategists, and industry leaders gather at DrupalCon to share their ideas and experiences using one of the world’s most popular open-source content management solutions. For the 2017 conference, two of our developers and several other members of our team had the opportunity to attend the conference in Baltimore.

Recently, in a kickoff meeting for a higher education website project, the vice president of marketing announced that to get the website done on schedule, she was informing the president that the internal marketing team would cancel an issue of the alumni magazine and some other annual projects from their schedule.

“It’s the only way the site will get done. We need to free up resources,” she said.

I appreciated this straightforward, no-nonsense approach to resource planning for a website.

The American’s with Disabilities Act was first passed in 1990, at a time when the internet was still in its infancy and the bill was focused primarily on physical spaces. Over time, the bill has adapted to creating accessible spaces in the digital world as well — as have the penalties for failing to do so.  

Congratulations! May 1 has passed. That means you have sent out acceptances and yielded your class. Well done. Months of hard work have brought you to this point — time to take a breath.

But then what? After all, the phenomenon of summer melt is real. Content holes still need to be filled. And how can we make sure we do an even better job next year? As we slide into summer, here are five action items to keep you rolling.

“How does our site compare to our peers?” This is one of the most common questions we get from our clients. To help answer it and to benchmark your site, we’ve compiled the analytics on a set of higher education websites to understand the current browsing behaviors. This data captures browsing behavior between January 1, 2016 and December 31, 2016.

Real-world accessibility solutions have been commonplace for some time. Wheelchair accessible ramps outside of buildings, braille numbers on ATM keypads, and chirping audio cues at crosswalks are just a few accessibility features we often take for granted. How accessibility translates to the digital space, however, is a question that industries across the web are still struggling to answer. Particularly in higher education.

Last month, in response to a Justice Department accessability order, The University of California, Berkeley had two options:

Higher education institutions tend to define “non-traditional students” or “adult learners” as students over 25 who are returning to college to complete an undergraduate degree or undertake an undergraduate degree for the first time. Under this definition, approximately 38% of college students in the U.S.