The themed intros tie into the PBO campaign and focus on the areas of food, energy and water.

The video intros we created for the Powered by Orange campaign are now available for download and incorporation with your video projects. In this phase of the campaign we’re trying to emphasize the positive impact that Oregon State makes in the areas of food, energy and water.

If you have similarly themed material, and you think these would be an enhancement, feel free to use them. They’ve really helped to add a level of polish to our PBO video series, which is now focusing on research impact in the three key areas.br

A large number of OSU sites have moved to Drupal, and more are making the switch all the time.  Central Web Services offers robust support and training, and we will have a new highly customizable theme available soon as well.

We also should acknowledge the role our Open Source Lab plays in supporting the Drupal development community.

The fact that the President’s site is now hosted on our platform is good news for us.

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.

True Beaver Believer Kegan Sims officially joined Web Communications as our Social Media Specialist

Beginning on October 1, Kegan Sims officially joined Web Communications as our full-time Social Media Specialist. Join me in welcoming him aboard.

For the past few months Kegan has been devoting several hours per day to fostering conversation and driving traffic and membership to our various social media groups. He’s sponsored popular contests and earned quite a following. During that time, OSU was recognized by industry outlets and authoritative blogs as an institution to watch in the social media space. This recognition is due in no small part to Kegan’s efforts, as well as those of our Web Writer and Twitter Maven, Celene Carillo.

We’re pleased to have Kegan now devoting a bulk of his efforts to social media initiatives. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us with questions, suggestions and for consultation as you explore this exciting area of communications.

Students and staff gather in the MU quad for orange giveaways on Monday, September 1st.

We’ve launched the latest version of the Powered by Orange Web site. So far, the PBO initiative has netted us thousands of pageviews and thousands more social media connections. This week’s events marry online activities with live events to celebrate the start of a new communications effort, a new school year, and a year of OSU contributions to Oregon and beyond.

Congratulations go out to you, the web and marketing teams and anyone else who touches the Oregon State University website because you’re all doing a tremendous job at effectively optimizing your site for search engines.

Recognition also needs to go to our Admissions and Enrollment Web and marketing folks who’ve led OSU’s SEO performance efforts.

More student blogs can be found at blogs.oregonstate.edu, which also houses blogs for faculty and staff. This blog service was created by CWS and is based on Wordpress MU, providing an easy way for anyone in the OSU community to create and customize their own blog.

OSU's iTunes U site has been online for nearly a year and is now in the main iTunes U directory

Oregon State University’s official iTunes U site is now listed the main directory on Apple’s iTunes store. All of our content is also searchable in the main index.

iTunes integrates with our OSU Media Manager, so if you’re publishing course material or video series with that tool, it’s a snap to add it to iTunes. Contact us and we can help you make that happen.

Flickr is loaded with OSU images

We’ve become avid users of the photo sharing service Flickr here at OSU. We go way beyond merely having an official OSU account on the service.  Key content on our main OSU site and top level pages is integrated with our account.

Press releases (like this one) created by our news office use Flickr images. That way the image from the release becomes a searchable part of our Flickr presence. The multimedia page on our News site features a Flickr search and categories that pull from sets in our account. The pages also randomly pulls preview images from these sets right onto the site.

Our Powered by Orange campaign features a Flickr component, too. The Benny on the Move gallery features photos of people who have taken a cutout of our mascot, Benny the Beaver, and photographed him traveling around the world. This is done by merely uploading the photo to Flickr and tagging it with “bennyonthemove.” Our Summer Session program is also running a “Flat Benny” contest.

We originally started using Flickr for one of our student bloggers who traveled to Antarctica on a research project and chronicled his trip with hundreds of amazing images in Transmissions from the Ice Sheet.

OSU Archives is also a member of the Flickr Commons, joining the Library of Congress and the National Galleries of Scotland as the first university to become part of this group that shares archival photos with the world via Flickr.

We also share photos with Facebook and Ning, as well as via a number of other online services. But on the photo side, nothing is quite as extensive as our integration with Flickr. It folds nicely into our own site, and it also moves a lot of our content to a space where it is exposed to an audience searching for strong images. So far, it’s been an effective way to share our photos.