Thinking outside of the office

Archival issues abound in our office. Once a story moves off of our main news well, it's time to type your keyword in the searchbox and hope your result turns up somewhere in the top 50.

I told my colleague that I could never find the results I needed using our search. I was looking for an education story and typed in "education" or some generic-type word like that and got results that were far too broad. But what was I expecting? My colleagues enjoyed a good laugh at my expense. "Why didn't you just type in the person's name in the story?" At the time, I agreed I needed an IQ test and the meeting moved on.

This morning, however, it occurred to me that if we thought like our Web page visitors who have no knowledge of our institution, we might find that the search I requested wasn't far off the mark. The scenario: Visitor from outside our University comes to our Web site on the day we run a story about our teacher education program. Reads the story and moves on. Two weeks later, the visitor remembers reading something on our web site and wants to find the story again. The visitor cannot remember anything about the details of the story except that it was about education or teacher education. What are going to be the search results for this visitor?

Archiving our past stories in a place where we can set our search to search only our main news well archive and not all over the entire institutional web site is critical. Maybe not for us but definitely for people who don't work in our office. If the person we wrote the story about couldn't find the story when she did a search, there's no way the audience we want to reach outside the university will have any luck!

Castles in the air

In a meeting about what we'd like to accomplish on our Web site, I notice again that the Web content editor has to straddle the fence between the tech and editorial worlds. I can dream up all kinds of content for my Web pages but I can't make it happen alone. So cooperating with the one person we have on staff who might be available to help with programming is essential. I need to respect the programmer/developer's time but also need to push the content envelope to make progress with our site. But how hard do I push for what I want in content before I push away the very people I need to make my projects happen?

The wild, wild west

When desktop publishing first made its appearance, people went crazy with the different typefaces, sizes and characteristics and how all of them could be used in one piece. Wasn't it better to communicate with big type, small type, several fonts, underline, bold and italic mis-mashed on the same page? It took awhile for the dust to settle and for general guidelines to reach the Lone User and now most of the Wild West has been settled—-at least in the professional field.

Video, podcasts and blogs. Where do these things really fit in. Because they are available should they be used with abandon? Taking time--time we often do not have--to determine the best use of these options seems hopeless as we rush to create the next multi-media Web page. The stampede is on and I can't help but imagine myself accidentally leaping off the not-yet-noticed cliff. But planning these videos and blogs takes time and if I don't start now, I might be crushed under the competition.

Confessions

My educational background included reading long novels; spending many hours combing through text for shades of meaning, foreshadowing, ambiguity and paradox; and writing lengthy papers where thousands of words addressed the burning importance of the symbolic nature of the Sir Lancelot's sword. (I doubt I need say more on that subject.)

For the past eleven months, I've taken on the responsibilities of a web content editor and none of my illustrious past accomplishments are very helpful in fulfiling my new responsibilities which basically are to provide copious amounts of information to web page visitors who have only about 60 seconds to spend looking at our page before leaping off into the World Wide Web for something more interesting.

I wonder if most writers, like myself, picture the following scenario: A visitor to our Web site notices the link to my story on Professor Soandso and her groundbreaking research. Eager to learn more, the visitor leans closer in to the computer screen, eagerly clicks the button and is presented with my story. She carefully ruminates over all of my precisely chosen words--thinking to herself what a nice turn of phrase she has just read--then, upon reaching the end of my story, she says, "My, that was an amazing read. I really want to find out more about Professor Soandso."

But of course, the truth is, my visitor has the attention span of a toddler, reads the first sentence or two (if I'm lucky) and then wanders off to play in someone else's backyard.

How do web content editors say what must be said in the short time we have before our guest leaves? How do we make the impression that keeps a visitor coming back to check out our site on a regular basis--even if she doesn't stay long?