Information online

At a recent meeting, I and a bunch of our decision-makers were trying to make changes to how we use some of our brochures. Costs are rising, both in terms of printing a piece and the cost of postage to distribute them, and budgets are being cut back, so it was time to take that hard look.

And I finally heard one of the sentences I've been waiting for out of our Executive Director's mouth:

"People are looking for this information online."

. . .

Thank you. And darn right they are.

Even putting aside the fact that we created this piece because the colleges stopped printing their own pieces with similar information, there's the doubles and triples that students get of the same brochure, not knowing it's in their folder already or that there's one in the mail to them, etc.

And besides which, they're getting the information the way they want to already. The related pages in question on our site are our most popular pages. We know people are accessing this information there. Even our Knowledge Base entries show it's the most popular question people have in mind when they get to our site.

So I presented a mock-up of a new landing page for the subject in question. I poured all the information we had about the subject onto a page and then faithfully trimmed it by half.  I did not go the half again that Steve Krug recommends because--frankly--this was just a mock-up. I didn't have the go-ahead to spend more time on it, really.

And the first response? "Awfully cluttered," and "wordy," to quote the two folks in question. Absolutely right, and I'll admit it. I could certainly spend more time and cut it back more.

And thank you for recognizing what people want on the web: clarity and simplicity.

Be succinct. That's my best web writing tip.

This is, however, super difficult to do when you're dealing with a multi-campus system that's truly (more or less) integrated in terms of curriculum and admissions. With 12 academic colleges at this campus and another 6 throughout the rest of the other 19 campuses scattered across the commonwealth. And especially when multiple campuses offer majors that have the same name, but are different programs with different curricula and options.

Not an easy task. But one I have to tackle.

But tomorrow. I almost missed today's post-per-day due to midnight hitting, and that just won't do, now will it?

Geology and tech: the end is the beginning is the end

I think I prefaced over this last weekend that I wasn't going to have a theme with this entry in mind.

I started college as a geology major. Somewhat obviously, I didn't stick with it, but it's still a great interest of mine.

Some of you know and some of you don't that I have an MFA in Creative Writing. So a lot of my so-called "personal" reading is actually keeping up on that end of things for me.

And to combine both interests, I recently read Threshold, by Caitlin R. Kiernan. It's very much in a genre I used to write--a pseudo-magical realism, if magical realism in literature could be divorced from its Latin American roots (which it can't be, really). It starts out gritty, modern, and then wanders gently into science, myth, urban legend, and a particular superstitious nature you find in the south.

But my main point in addressing the experience of reading this book was the following passage, voiced by our narrator, Chance, who was in college as a geology major at the time:

"Can you think of anything else I could do with my life that could ever possibly be half this splendid, half this important? I'm learning to read, Deke, and not just the handful of things men have been around long enough to write down. The history of the whole damned planet is written in rocks, just lying there waiting for us to learn how to read the words." - p. 177

It's this urge that drives me, strangely enough, in my current work as well.

I'm learning to read in a larger sense than I've ever read so far. And to some extent this was an evolution: I did, after all, start on email quite awhile ago, then moved to forums, then Livejournal, then Blogger, then Facebook/MySpace, then Twitter, and Google Reader and the big feeds (Slashdot, BoingBoing, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, etc) got stuck in there somewhere too (and I may be skipping steps, of course: on the multimedia end, Flickr and YouTube are two examples, but I'm talking about text here, in the main).

But in terms of an educated and informed community that I can have face-to-face contact with and shares my academic/work interests, this is a first (which might be, I might add, because my college/grad work had little to do with technology). Not just casual friends giving updates on their lives, but I get a touch of friendliness and personality alongside the theory.

So I get these fantastic ideas as well as the context surrounding them: the problems that were faced to prompt them to come up with these ideas. It's good stuff.

But larger than that, and for a longer period of time, I've been learning to read people and their interaction with technology; learning to read the evolution of society due to technology's influence; learning to read how technology is changing our minds and changing our spaces.

I'm reading the future. I've already learned to read the past.

So between geology and tech, I feel like I've got the span of things.1 And while this current tech iteration is more minute than an atom in a drop in a bucket in terms of geologic time, it's monumental for us living in it.

And I get to read it. And better yet, write some of it.

[1]Oroboros.

fresh

Just visited Tait Farm to do the CSA pick-up thing. And on the way back, over Nittany Meadow Farm, the masses of clouds had slices in them, allowing beams to come through. Gorgeous.

I picked up some mint and lavender plants while I was at Tait, and realized while walking back to my car that growing plants and fresh things make me happy. Not that I didn't know this before, but it was notable then.

Now, out of my monkey suit. Though this particular monkey suit garnered me two compliments today, and my hair at the meeting I wore it for garnered two more. This suit's one of my better combos: "spiffy," as J. put it minutes ago. It's got a very subtle pinstripe in coral, and a matching, almost shocking solid coral lining which you can see pretty well at my cuffs when I raise my hands or arms at all. I was amazed that I managed to find a matching coral blouse, but I managed to. It's a good look, if I do say so myself.

The hair's my new favorite 'do: my version of a French twist, the proper version of which always fails because I have too much hair. Instead, I get a bit of a knobby bit at the bottom, but it still looks decent for awhile--until I get too many flyaways, anyway. But the whole thing I've got anchored at two points, only one of which is usually visible. No bobby pins.

I got another appearance compliment earlier this week: the colleague in question called it my "mystery woman" look, for some reason. It's a long wool skirt, soft pink shirt, and funky/romantic jacket with slightly puffed shoulders. I like it quite a bit (picked it up at Target on sale: don't tell).

My project for this weekend is an annual tradition at this point: writing the Free Comic Book Day article for the guys at Comic Swap, to be put out in the Centre Daily Times next week. Deadline's Monday. I could say that it should write itself by now, but it won't. There's always something new, and I certainly have to change it up each year. I'm skipping the staff's favorite picks this year for that very reason, I think. But they've got a guest artist coming in, so there should be plenty of other things to cover.

Off to eat before people arrive here.