Being EDU™

The most recent redesign of the Middlebury College external website deserves mention for its new tableless CSS markup and 508 compliancy. The new site has a decidedly more marketing-oriented and friendly design.

If you're a school that wants to start a blog for reasons of recruitment, communication, academic voice, strategic planning, or community-buiding, but you've been hesitant to, I feel your pain. I used to work for a "marketing communications consulting firm in higher education" where they once recommended an admissions-focused blog for a client with a $30,000 price tag for implementation. No wonder the client ran for the door.

As big fans of Basecamp, we were excited to try out 37signals' personal information manager, Backpack. A lot of applications have claimed to be online organizers, but Backpack is the first web app that really comes close to being a true web-based brain.

Most colleges and universities have an IT department that deals with incoming spam to your school. However, If you're a department or administrative webmaster you may have noticed you still get spam to the email addresses on your site. Or worse, administrators or professors complain to you that they do.

If you haven't heard of flickr yet, it's the perfect time to visit, sign up for a free account, and start photo-sharing, photoblogging, and using one of the most user-friendly web applications available today. If you're a school, read on for some ideas on what your admissions office or alumni association might do with Flickr.

On a recent project I found a need to apply a single style rule to Safari. Initially I turned up a great link to dithered.com which has all known CSS filters. Unfortunately, I could not locate one that filtered for Safari only.

If you're considering blog software and want to save some time trying to navigate various feature lists and options, take a look at this blog software chart comparing features of various user-installed (not hosted) blog software packages. It's a good start. I suggest downloading the trial versions, installing them, and testing them out for yourself. It's also a great idea to read through the user manual and the user forums and see if the blog can be configured to your needs. If you're looking for someone to create a blog for you, contact us.