The UNC-Chapel Hill Webmasters group had a nice discussion on 4/8/2011 about many-things-mobile. Topics included mobile device-wipe, use of mobile devices to access web-based information and the development of mobile-optimized web sites. Of interest to me was the discussion of traffic from mobile devices. Below I talk briefly about mobile traffic on a few sites in the College of Arts and Sciences. I then pursue a very short Socratic dialog with respect to mobile efforts.
Category: Articles (Page 1 of 2)
Have you created a UNC VoiceThread account yet? VoiceThread is a web-based application that “allows users to post media files and then invite others to provide comments in writing, with voice or with video.” ITS Teaching and Learning has partnered with the VoiceThread folks to roll out a UNC VoiceThread pilot.
Andrew Synowiez, a co-founder, graduated from UNC in 2005 with a BS in Computer Science and lives in downtown Durham. Andrew has also spent time at NPR, published photos in Sports Illustrated and USA Today, and digs heliotropism. Andrew took some time away from building a company and studying the diurnal motion of plant parts to answer a few of my questions…
What is your role at VoiceThread?
Something akin to a Chief Aesthetics Officer. I’m responsible for the look and feel (design) of essentially everything people can see and interact with on VoiceThread.
How many active VoiceThread accounts?
Around 100,000 users.
You’re not positioning VoiceThread as a “Web 2.0” application. How come?
Because we fundamentally don’t understand most “Web 2.0” business models which often seem to be based on fantastical exit strategies and market delusions about “new realities.” You should build what you understand and so we’re building VoiceThread’s business like you would a paint store, a restaurant, or even a print magazine. Online business can look and behave so very different from off-line ones, but great businesses are more alike than different. We imagine being a part of our customers lives 5 years from now and work back from there.
Prior to working at UNC, I have worked with WordPress from a design standpoint. However, now that I am here at UNC, I do a lot more work with the content that actually goes into the system. One thing that I have noticed is that the majority of the posters that I come in contact with fail to split their posts up into “introductory” and “expanded” chunks of text. Maybe it is because they really like having their entire posts available on their homepage, or maybe they just don’t know about WordPress’ page break tool called the <!–more–> tag.
We have all seen them, those empty random pages that pop up when you accidentally dived into the unknown realms of a particular website – a 404 page. No one ever likes seeing these pages. To see a 404 page often means that something you were looking for is either outdated, no longer exists or resides on a page to which the link is somehow broken. What a 404 page amounts to for you, the website visitor, is equivalent to a hill of beans.
That is, up until now. Some people are finding useful and creative ways of taking your journey to the lost outer realms of their website and turning it into a creative and effective tool for helping you find your way back to where you started, or at least back to content relevant to your search. Take a look at the examples provided by Smashing Magazine and others, on creative and fun ways to take what is lost and turn it into what is found.
- Smashing Magazine / “Wanted: Your 404 Error Pages” / July 25th, 2007 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/07/25/wanted-your-404-error-pages/
- Smashing Magazine / “404 Error Pages Reloaded” / August 17th, 2007 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/17/404-error-pages-reloaded/
More Articles on 40 pages
- Martin Korner / “Error 404 – Page Found!” / August 28th, 2007
- WordPress.org – “Creating an Error 404 Page“
- fiLi’s Tech / “WordPress : Turning 404 not found random visitors to blog readers” / August 11th, 2007
- Blogtrepreneur.com / “Creating Effective 404 Error Pages for WordPress” / August 28th, 2007
Special thanks to Billy for bringing this up in the webmaster’s meeting on Thursday. It reminded me that I read the Smashing Magazine articles about a week ago and that they might be useful to some of you.
Joomla! 
lead developer Louis Landry announced Joomla’s release candidate of Joomla! 1.5 RC1 on Saturday July 21 . ITS Web Services has been testing Joomla! 1.5 “Mapya” (Swahili for “new”) for several weeks and we love it! The second release candidate is scheduled for early August with the expectation that a final stable release will be delivered shortly thereafter.
For more information about Joomla! Mapya, please visit http://joomla.org/.