January 2012 – Web Strategy at UBC

Consolidated UBC web analytics: better data, better metrics, better SEO

The UBC web infrastructure is decentralized and web properties are managed within individual units which consist of faculties, departments, programs, research centres, administrative units etc. It is estimates that more than 1400 websites exist under the UBC domain. Many more sites might reside outside this domain despite an affiliation with UBC. Sites can be hosted on UBC infrastructure or externally. Despite this fragmented landscape we all share some common goals:

Building websites that support UBC’s and unit goals, such as student recruitment, community engagement, knowledge dissemination or donor relations
Optimizing sites for conversions and retention
Improving the user experience and increasing satisfaction with our UBC web experience.

The question is if optimization of individual websites will lead to the best results or if we should incorporate a more holistic approach to evaluate and analyze user behaviour and experience within our overall domain and network of sites?

Video at UBC and how to run a YouTube channel without videos

When I started at UBC at the end of 2008, I was surprised about the absence of really good videos about UBC. But as it turned out, that assessment wasn’t correct at all. The more people I met and the more I learned about the organization, the more obvious it became that we had some good videos, but we (as in all of us at UBC) did just not publish them very well. Some videos only existed on DVDs and were played at fairs and other videos were hosted on a local webserver and streamed only on a single website that made it hard to find it – if you did not happen to specifically search all UBC sites for videos. We essentially missed out on a lot of traffic that sites like YouTube offered.