Last week I attended the HighEdWeb Association 2009 Conference held at the Hilton Milwaukee City Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This is an annual conference for any higher education web professional…new or maven. Because I attended the conference last year and Sarah Barnes (former OIT Web Coordinator) attended the year before, we found the presentation tracks very worthy (Applications and Standards; Marketing, Management, and Professional Development; Social Applications and Content; Technical Propeller Hats Required; Usability, Accessibility and Design; Corporate Partner Presenters; Poster Sessions). Fortunately, Sarah’s presentation proposal was accepted so we had the opportunity to share content presenting on Using WordPressMu (WPMU) as a Content Management System in a University Setting.
Since Sarah was unable to physically attend, she Skyped in from home. The presentation began with Sarah explaining why OIT needed a content management system and why she chose WordPressMu, such as the easy customizable web interface and its extensibility through plug ins (extensions of WordPress code). At the end, I demonstrated the areas we customized for our content managers to fit their needs such as widgets (portable code), and the media library where content managers can upload and store files such as images, flash, pdfs, and html. There seemed to be a number of people interested in using this particular system. View our presentation notes…
Although the conference was three or four days, depending on whether you attended workshop, I found it to be enough time to meet people and have informative discussions about the web. Throughout the conference, attendees actively networked with many groups and individuals. It’s a great opportunity to discuss project ideas and receive some feedback among those in your field.
Keynote speakers last year were the highly accomplished Jeffrey Veen and Kyle Ford. Jeffrey is the founding partner of Adaptive Path and project lead for Measure Map. Kyle Ford is the director of product marketing at Ning, Inc. and before that, he was associate product manager for Yahoo! Inc. This year’s keynote presentation Cooking Up Gourmet User Experiences on a Fast-Food Budget was by Jared Spool, a top rated speaker and founder of User Interface Engineering. He discussed inexpensive techniques on website usability that will save time. Jared also presented a workshop Designing for Content-Rich Sites working with us on how, as the title states, to improve usability for websites with an abundent amount of content. He gave many examples of poor and successful navigation based on actual data, not arguable opinion.
[The other keynote, a social media speaker, unfortuately received poor reviews and harsh Twitter comments.]
There was an opportunity to attend the best presentations based on everyone’s evaluation forms. These included Kevin Prentiss’s session on student created content using web 2.0 tools, Susan Ragland’s session on website usability, ”Maybe the Purpose of Our Redesign is Only to Serve as a Warning to Others” session by Anthony Dunn, Lori Packer’s session on strategies to demonstrate the importance of social media to your boss, and Paul Gilzow’s session titled “Cross-site Scripting: What Is It, and How Can You Protect Your Site from Becoming a Victim?”
Some other great sessions I attended were “Show Me the Data: Usability-driven Web Design” presented by Jason Alley and Kenneth Newquist from Lafayette College. They shared techniques on how to improve a website’s usability by learning how visitors actually communicate with the site. They described the usability testing in which they used ScreenFlow to gather enough information for making changes. Kyle Bowen’s presentation “Pop Culture Communication: Microsites, Major Impact” was highly entertaining talking about how microsites can help your department gain more visitors and more media coverage. I also enjoyed Joel Herron’s talking about his interactive map platform for the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
Check out the entire list of sessions. 
I would definitely consider going another year. Not only did I bring back great content, I had a lot of fun. In fact, I’m still keeping in contact with these folks through Twitter. Anyone else with a good conference experience? Other conference suggestions?
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