Tag Archives: IWMW

The 10 harsh truths about Institutional Websites

Posted in News on by Paul Boag

This year I spoke for the first time at CASE. The subject was ‘The 10 harsh truths about Institututional Websites’

For those that don’t know CASE is “Europe’s biggest gathering of Alumni Relations, Communications, Fundraising and Marketing educational professionals.”

I am heavily involved in the Higher Education community with a significant number of Headscape’s clients being from HE. We even run our own Higher Education workshops. However although I have spoken at IWMW several times this was the first time I have spoken at CASE. Despite a rocky start it turned out to be a lot of fun.

Below is a description of my talk and a video I recorded. Hopefully you will find it useful.

Every organisation makes mistakes running their website; the nature of those mistakes varies, however, depending on the size and type of organisation. Institutional websites are often large unwieldy creatures plagued by bureaucracy. In this talk Paul will share some of the harsh truths surrounding these websites and suggests ways to tame the beast!

I would love to hear your thoughts on my talk – Do you have questions or can you think of other harsh truths? Post them in the comments below and lets discuss how to overcome them!

Battling Bureaucracy

Posted in Talks on by Paul Boag

I was fortunate enough to be asked to run a workshop at this years Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) in Aberdeen. The topic was Battling Bureaucracy.

A large proportion of the work we do at Headscape is with the Higher Education sector and so I always try to attend IWMW. Last year I had the privilege to give a keynote talk on Social Participation in Student Recruitment. This year I wanted to do something different and so chose to do a workshop on a subject close to the hearts of most Institutional web teams, bureaucracy. The abstract for my workshop read as follows…

Why is it that so many web projects within public institutions are delivered late and fail to stay within budget? In this session we discuss the challenges faced by institutional Web site managers and look at specific techniques to address issues such as design by committee, scope creep and internal politics.

You can find the slides below, thanks to the nice people at slideshare. You can also download it as a 3.5mb PDF.