Sessions about Web Content

In 2005, the LSU AgCenter launched a newly remodeled Web site driven by content management system (CMS) technology. Although this technology made it easier to add content, is the site addressing user needs? Learn about the results of a three-part study – a pop-up survey, a snail-mail survey and a usability study – to make a land-grant university Web site more valuable to clientele.

In redesigning our University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension publications Web site, we asked our web designers and programmers for the moon as well as assistance in meeting a short deadline. And how did they respond? With creative solutions, grace under fire and a team effort that enabled the Publications Section to meet our key goals. Learn more about how we responded to an administrative mandate for a new system and the lessons we learned. Most publications are available in several formats: web-friendly, printer-friendly, and printer-friendly no header versions (the latter is for on-demand printing on Extension letterhead). To achieve this (and a little more) editors, programmers and designers worked together to develop a system which would provide 1) enhanced metatagging of the content, 2) a content archive that captured all related text and graphic files as well as documenting revision changes; 3) a Web publication system that allowed for the Web site to meet University requirements for branding while offering some new reader services; and 4) systematic content review.

Ever wonder who is viewing your web pages? Are you curious about how visitors find their way to your site and how long they stay? WebTrends is a commercial product that allows you to answer these questions plus many others. By analyzing your traffic logs, WebTrends can tell you which pages are the most popular on your site, which Google keyword searches are leading people to your site, on which pages people are entering and leaving your site (you mean they don’t always start at my main page?!?), how much time visitors are spending at your site, and a whole lot more! The Alabama Cooperative Extension System has been using WebTrends regularly for about four years to provide figures for various assessment and accountability reports regarding our web traffic. Come see how WebTrends can help you learn more about the traffic generated by your state’s web site. You may be surprised at the results!

The CLEC Information Office serves as a communication resource for the Center’s interdisciplinary faculty, the Environmental Horticulture department faculty, and the Master Gardener and Florida Yards & Neighborhoods programs. Information Office staff coordinate media and public relations, internal communications, and strategic communication planning for these departments and programs. The staff also serve as writing resources for faculty, publishing their research and extension work in popular publications and Web sites. The CLEC Information Office was established to coordinate communication efforts between the UF and Florida’s Green Industry. The coordinated communication will allow all parties to reach the intended audience of Florida residents. The Green Industry in Florida generated $15 billion in sales in 2005 and UF is making a concentrated effort to become a visible part of this industry. In 2006, the Florida legislature established CLEC. The Center has faculty throughout the state and housed in multiple departments including environmental horticulture, soil and water science, plant pathology, entomology, and agricultural communication.

As we move to position eXtension as a high-quality, interactive learning environment for our Internet customers, visibility of our resource-based content increases dramatically. Top quality, professional presentation of content is a must. This includes appropriate writing styles and editorial review of everything publicly available. Professional photographers, videographers and graphic designers can use their talents to bring content alive. As eXtension strives to present the best our land-grant system has to offer, we must capitalize on the professionals from the Extension system to enhance and add value to the content being developed in order for us to successfully compete in the Internet world. Our marketing claims "the best, most researched knowledge from the smartest land-grant university minds across America," and we know those minds have been relying on ACE professionals to make other Extension resources top quality! Come hear from some currently involved in eXtension, and find out how you too can share your expertise through involvement with this national initiative.

Are you looking for a solution to manage your institution's Web presence and content? Come learn from the experiences of ACES, AU's College of Agriculture and UGA's College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences as we examine, demonstrate, and discuss the Adobe Publishing System. This is a scalable content management system with both client-side and server-side components. It utilizes Dreamweaver to develop site templates, Contribute Publishing Server to manage a user database, and Contribute to distribute template access and edit content. In addition, Contribute provides a means for site administrators to assign roles and restrictions to editors, a method to distribute specific content and editing capabilities, and an internal review and publishing system. Various techniques, troubleshooting, and tips will be provided.

Knock off the dust of those hours of old archived video or go shoot some new video, but combine them with PowerPoint to create great looking and educational web presentations. This session will demonstrate how to use Adobe (Macromedia Breeze) Presenter, Camtasia Studio, and MS Producer, to combine PowerPoint with stock, talking heading, and/or production video to create and deliver enhanced web based presentations. We will give detailed, easy-to-follow tips from beginning to end on how to use each application to combine these videos with PowerPoint. We also will compare and contrast the difficulty level, start up time, features of each, and expense to creating a final product.

Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to learn about the behaviors and preferences of your Web visitors. Mike Atwell will guide you through setting up an account to installation and finally monitoring and interpreting the results. Pros and cons of the service will be discussed along with legal considerations.

You have a vision for a redesigned Web site: new features, better graphics and updated content. But if you want to win rave reviews, don't neglect the human side of Web redesign. Use these ideas for planning your redesign, selling your ideas to stakeholders, testing with key groups and getting users involved in maintaining "their" site.

Everyone has a horror story to tell about copyright infringement or plagiarism. It's clear that Extension agents and subject specialists are confused about when and how they should properly attribute information to its sources, and when they need permission to reuse certain materials. Several issues contribute to this confusion: The prevalence of electronic communications and the ease with which material can be forwarded, copied, pasted, and discovered; a heightened awareness of plagiarism in the public sphere and its consequences; and crackdowns on copyright infringement by individuals and companies as well as the federal government. So how, as communications specialists, can we help our clients navigate this bewildering information landscape? We intend to examine the subject from this perspective, with examples and answers to real questions. And be prepared to share your own horror stories and any happy endings during the discussion.

With more and more Americans eating out, it is critical that all foodservice workers learn about safe food handling. Without proper training, workers might improperly handle food and as a result foodborne illness could occur. The National Restaurant Association (NRA) estimates that a single foodborne illness outbreak could cost a restaurant an estimated $75,000. Chinese is the third most commonly spoken language in U.S. foodservice operations, following English and Spanish. In many areas of the U.S., food safety educators only speak English and so it is difficult for them to effectively train Chinese–speaking foodservice workers. This website was designed to help food safety educators reach this important group — Chinese-speaking foodservice workers. The website is divided into two sections — Student Tools and Educator Tools. All materials are based on the 2005 FDA Food Code

America is badly “out- of- shape”, according to health scientists; and it's not just grown-ups, but young people, too. Researchers predict that, if things don't change, today's children will grow up to be less healthy than their parents! Eat, Move, Learn enables you to take up this important current issue while also addressing national academic standards for sixth grade science... all in a way that comes alive in the classroom. Eat, Move, Learn is organized around the idea that we must "balance" the energy we take in through our food and the energy we spend in physical activity. Eat, Move, Learn helps you and your class to analyze the problems of food and fitness, find promising solutions to energy imbalance, and design a study to test your ideas. Eat, Move, Learn consists of 4 modules and 13 lessons that a class can use sequentially or individually.

This session will showcase an exercise DVD developed for children that is an exciting story based adventure. Find out what it took to get this complex animation and live action project off the ground. We will discuss the production process we used from script, to storyboard, to filming an actor on green screen, a new keying process, an the integration of Flash and AfterEffects for the final compositing.

Land-grant university publications have long been "open-access journals," making research available to the public and professionals who needed it. How can we now augment the Web presence of land-grant university research through a better understanding of online scientific databases? How do we approach the problem of getting the AES research publications indexed on the appropriate scientific databases? We have been pursuing such indexing for California Agriculture and will share our experiences. This is important not only to our user groups and clienteles, but to our faculty researchers.

Editors from three land-grant university magazines (LSU, California, Purdue) share what they’ve learned about redesigning a long-time print magazine into an e-magazine. It’s a whole new project that requires more staff, teamwork and learning new skills. But the results greatly expand readership.

CMS is nothing new to web literate audience but every one has his or her own issues related to scalability, maintenance, training and customer service. The highest challenge people could face in the future would be the data migration with the change in technology, such as from one system to another. CMS could contain enormous amount of data. Unlike conventional HTML data, CMS data has no meaning unless the proper engine or tools are not in place. Growth of a CMS database is rather unlimited. Someday, system administrator needs to look back and see the scale of the CMS. Most users like heavy customization of CMS software. They expect almost everything to be integrated together into one system. This leads to a complex system where training and maintenance could be a challenge for developers. This discussion is primarily to share experiences of participants citing their own systems and discuss the solutions or best practices. We will demonstrate the CMS at College of Agriculture of Kansas State University and discuss accomplishments during its development.

Web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a web site and to share and distribute content. This session will focus on techniques, methods, tools for implementing Atom syndication feeds. Some of the topics that may be discussed will include feed validators, tools for different programming environments, and tags to include for use by eXtension. eXtension has standardized on Atom for its syndication feed format.

I have developed three systems for collecting information via the World Wide Web. These three systems started from a belief that Extension faculty and staff needed a free technology that would allow them to develop, deploy, and collect the information from their clientele, whoever that might be. It has always been my belief that technology can be made accessible to the most computer-illiterate of us, if you just build it to be flexible, easy to use, and powerful. I think I have created some systems that can live up to that expectation. Since I believe that Survey Monkey is one of the most popular web-based survey systems, I have studied their implementation, and believe I can offer a similar system at no cost to the user with no limitations. Survey Monkey only charges $20 per month for their professional service, which is a great deal. Still, if you need a survey to be active for more than a month, their fee of $200 per year is still a good deal. Mine is free.

Section 508 requires that electronic and information technology be accessible to persons with disabilities. In keeping with this regulation, web sites should be designed with accessibility in mind. In this seminar, we will provide and overview of the Section 508 standards and how they relate to W3C Guidelines for web accessibility. We also will describe and demonstrate ways to implement accessibility requirements through the use of markup, CSS, and LIFT (a server-based tool that dynamically generates customizable text-only views of web sites).

In this session, learn to increase the power of your web sites and engage your most important audiences. We’ll review national sites, from YouTube and Wikipedia to Target and Coca-Cola. We’ll ask audience members to bring examples of successful and less-than-successful sites. After discussing what works and doesn’t, we’ll walk through a strategic process, starting with research and the discovery process, when goals and audiences are fully defined. It continues with a brand personality and promise definition. During the storyboarding examples, we’ll show the six questions that should be asked for each page of your site, and how to create an outline and detailed sitemap that gives your developers the information they need. We’ll also show how to connect your customer’s goals with technologies – when are blogs appropriate? How can you enhance your site with videos, sound or slideshows in a way that is goal oriented? How do you avoid falling for the latest bells and whistles and remain goal oriented? Finally, we’ll show examples of the process, from initial proposal forms, storyboards, and graphic design standards, to actual sites developed through this process.

Extension news comes into the eXtension Virtual News Room via RSS feeds and atom feeds. Which land-grant universities have news coming in by feeds? What land-grant universities have had news releases posted on the eXtension news site? eXtension metrics will answer these questions and more.

Getting traditionally-minded Extension educators to embrace the web as a key educational delivery tool can be difficult, if not downright impossible. This presentation will cover how a team of communicators and web developers combined their sense of good timing with technology grant funds to help Extension faculty in one county office reinvent their county Extension website. The effort resulted in a more informative and user-friendly website that offers greatly enhanced educational delivery and information marketing opportunities. But even more important was the team’s success in helping Extension faculty and staff overcome some obstacles and prejudices about audience identification. Team members will describe their roles in the design and implementation of this web development project and how they worked closely with faculty and staff to help them rethink their use of the web. Ultimately the team intends that this will be a model project that all other county Extension offices in Oregon can learn and benefit from.