It's always good to read and hear perspectives of other IHEs regarding web development. A great blog post with website redesign advice just came through my RSS inbox.

(And I swear I'm not sharing this just because I'm one of the featured advisors.)

Karine Joly, who maintains an excellent blog at collegewebeditor.com, has posted a link to her most recent column for University Business, now available in the December issue as well as online: "10 Tips to a Successful Website Redesign". I encourage you to read the article. One passage that hit home for me: "Expect some opposition and criticism from staff, faculty, students, alumni, and even donors for changing 'their' website." That certainly happened here in the wake of our redesign of vt.edu.

What tips would you add to the list?

This morning, I sent out an invitation to 100 people -- a cross-section of students, parents, faculty, staff, and alumni -- inviting them to join a new Virginia Tech web advisory panel.

You may recall that in our website redesign survey this fall, we asked respondents to indicate whether they’d be willing to participate in further research. This is our "coalition of the willing," so to speak. Think of this panel as a sounding board for our development work, helping to strengthen our user-centered philosophy.

As we continue to develop Virginia Tech’s web presence, we'll tap into the advisory panel via e-mail to get feedback on our ideas. From time to time, we also may conduct online “flash surveys” on myriad topics. We can address the panel as a whole when needed, or address a subsection if there’s an audience-specific question we need answered.

From my experience, this is a quick, effective, and inexpensive way to get feedback from an audience. I'd love to hear ideas for how we might further tap into the advisory panel.

Today we received the evaluations from last week's Web Development Symposium (held Nov. 9, 2006), and judging from the responses, a solid majority found the event to be extremely worthwhile. By my calculations, 81% gave the session an overall rating of 4 or 5, on a scale of 1-5 where 5 = "excellent." We are very thankful for the enthusiastic response.

A common thread through the 94 evaluations was a desire for more information and training around use of the university's web templates. We will be addressing that need during the spring semester by offering, through FDI, a course entitled "Dreamweaver 8 (Part Four): Working with the University's Website Templates." Our web developer, Elaine Oliver, will teach the course, which will be offered three times. Those interested in further training, please watch the FDI website for that course posting.

Planning ahead, we've already decided based on the success of last week's event to have a second Web Development Symposium next spring, with a focus on the enterprise CMS project. We're not ready to announce a date, but we're looking at late May or early June, which should give us time to have the CMS operational.

Again, thank you to those who attended the symposium. VBS is in the process of producing an online package -- video synched with the presentation slides. I'll send out notification as soon as that's available.

The University Relations Web Communications team operates with a simple motto:

Virginia Tech's Web presence will never be complete... We are in a state of perpetual beta.

To help you follow our ongoing efforts, Web Communications has created this blog to share news, discuss developments, and generally keep the university community informed of our activities. We'll post frequently on topics such as the selection of a new Web content management system (CMS), use of the university's standard templates and graphic elements, and writing for the Web. And quite often, we'll be asking the blog community for its opinions and advice on key issues.

Think of this blog as your lifeline to Web Communications, offering a chance not only to keep up-to-date, but also and to ask questions and offer comments along the way.

Our veteran webmaster, Bruce Harper, and web developer extraordinaire, Elaine Oliver, also will be regular contributors.

We look forward to some great discussions.