It’s Civil War time again and battles of all types have been raging between Oregon State University and the University of Oregon. In the middle of it all the Web Communications department has been waging a war of our own. For the last few months it has been our goal to surpass the number of Duck channel views and subscribers on YouTube. Well what better way to accomplish a goal than to take advantage of a rabid and passionate audience. Because of the incredible support and dedication of Beaver Nation we were able to accomplish our goal (on the actual day of the civil war none the less!).

Much of the success can be attributed to clever cross promotion on our other social networks. Also, we had some real success recently with a couple videos. Even reaching the top 25 videos on YouTube EDU.

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This wireframe diagram divides the screen into functional areas (click to enlarge)

This past summer we formed a project team and steering committee to address the design of OSU’s home page and top-tier pages. The home page is OSU’s public face, with more than 70,000 hits per day, it regularly reaches a broader and more diverse audience than any other communication.

The timing for this redesign is ideal, given the fact that the look and feel of the home page hasn’t changed in several years, and also the new Brand Identity Guidelines for the university were officially launched in September.

A team of advisors and Web professionals from across campus are collaborating on the redesign project. Most of the work from this summer focused on the information architecture, the physical structure of the links and navigation was determined, and the allocation of the screen real estate for different tasks was determined. The work produced a wireframe sketch of the new home page. This is our roadmap for moving forward. We will now be filling that wireframe with design, content, navigation and imagery.

There are three teams currently working on the redesign. A Visual Design Team is creating mock-ups of the look and feel; the Content Team is determining parameters for links and feature content, and the Technical Team is deciding on the architecture and performance. A steering committee representative of the entire campus is reviewing the process.

Our goal is to have a new home page ready to demo and launch for the new calendar year. I’ll be posting regular updates on this blog so that our users can follow the progress and provide feedback. Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts.

This is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. – Clay Shirky

But we also did something different. Celene Carillo, our Web Writer, took part in a revolution. She live-tweeted the morning’s proceedings from OSU’s official Twitter feed. That’s a first for Oregon State. Celene has built our feed up to a respectable 900 followers in only a few months, and, more important, has managed to foster conversation and establish connections to OSU students, grads, alumni, staff and others on an individual basis. We’ll work to continue to build such connections with new grads and young alums through our Powered by Orange Twitter, Facebook and Linked In efforts, as well as a number of other initiatives taking place on the social Web. About fifty new followers joined during the course of graduation, and Celene interacted with grads who were tweeting right from the floor of Reser. While those are very real connections, especially for an institutional voice, they may still seem like a modest form of communication.

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But Twitter is proving this week to be anything but a modest form of communication. There’s a revolution happening in Iran, much of it fostered by the conversations happening on Twitter. In fact, this Web service was even tapped on the shoulder by the U.S. State Department, who asked them to postpone their regularly scheduled maintenance so as not to impact the role that Twitter was playing in the mass demonstrations growing in Tehran.

Our grads are heading out into a changing world. It’s evolving before our eyes, technologically and politically. As Web communicators, we deal with many of these changes on a daily basis, and as soon as we get a handle on something, it seems to slip out of our grasp. We all know there’s a lot of potential in the changing Web. But it’s also frightening and exsasperating as we’re forced to give up control of the message and watch colleagues in the traditional media struggle with this revolution. Add to this the uncertain economic climate that our newest alumni now face, and it can be downright frightening.

But if we meet this unquiet revoution with a small measure of the hope and confidence of those new grads who left Reser Stadium with their families and friends last Saturday, we’ll be just fine.

Office of Government Relations

This is Your OSU: A Report from President Ed Ray

Office of Financial Aid

We’ve also expanded our numbers through the addition of a graduate assistant focusing on video and multimedia for the Web. Our first project is a profile of longtime OSU communicator and intrepid bluesman, Jeff Hino. We’re glad the new term has started and we’re happy to have new students on our team, reminding us of how valuable they are to the work we do.