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Be a Web Site Hero, Put Stars in Their Eyes(1)
5/11/2005
CAMPUS WEBMASTERS ARE BRIGHT, CONNECTED, STRATEGIC THINKERS AND OUR COLUMNIST ARGUES THAT THEY ARE TOO OFTEN UNDERUTILIZED
A recently-published white paper, titled Her'es of the Web, says an awful lot of very nice things about college and university webmasters. It says that college and university web content managers are the hardest working web content manager[s] on the planet today.
That's probably true, and for more reasons than the white paper discusses. The white paper (which is partially an ad, but worth reading anyway) purports that the average college or university website contains 250 times as many pages than the average other website. Higher education websites make up less than .01% of all websites, yet they account for over 2.5% of all web content.(2)
It g'es on about how vital and important higher education institutions are to our society and individuals in it (no argument there) and makes the point that college and university webmasters play a vital role in perhaps the institutions most valuable learning-related asset (after faculty, of course). Later, it talks about how important it is to be moving to content management systems in order to handle all of those pages and their growing numbers, gives a few Do's and Don'ts about selecting web content management, and then ends with a product pitch. But, like I said, its an interesting (and quick) read.
And its right. College and university webmasters are super-talented, mostly reasonable, strategic-thinking, collaborative, and attuned to their institutions missions.
How do I know that with such certainty? Well, for five years now I have been the listowner of www.uwebd.org UWEBD, otherwise known as the discussion list for college and university webmasters. (Its not-for-profit, there's nothing in being listowner for me other than some work and a lot of pleasure at being connected with so many great people.)
These five years have been a pleasure. The list, which will shortly admit its two-thousandth active subscriber is simply the best of its kind, beyond comparison actually. I can say that with humility because it has nothing to do with me but to do with the qualities of the subscribers. It's an active list, something like 20-30 messages a day, and often about controversial topics such as--Who controls the website? Techies? Media Relations? Admissions? Marketing? as well as more mundane topics. But there has never been a single flame war. (Despite the fact that techies, marketers, PR folks, admissions folks, and many more, are all represented in UWEBD.)
Think about that. An old, big, active list that has never had a flame war! That tells you a lot about the UWEBD community. A recent post from Molly Ives Brower, at the University of Buffalo, also tells you a lot about UWEBDers:
I speculate that we populate the web so visibly because we were the first to discover it. This list on its own probably has more people who have been putting up web pages in some form or another for 10 years or more than just about any comparable web design list--because higher ed had the infrastructure first.
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