Whether you (or your supervisors) like to admit it, what you do as a Cascade web editor is important and complicated stuff. You help W&M maintain a unified web presence. You create the content that serves to draw visitors in and showcase your department, office or program’s best attributes.
Why not stockpile a few resources? We provide the Cascade Writing & Style Guide, but there are great external resources to help you successfully communicate on the web as well. Here are just a few:
- Fight Against Right-Rail Blindness – A great article recommended by Dave Malmquist (our fearless VIMS Cascade manager). Learn how your users are trained to ignore certain types of content in the right-column, and what you can do to maximize this valuable real estate. The good news? The base designs of our right-column elements win half the battle. The rest is up to you.
- Free access to lynda.com – Thanks to Swem, IT and HR, W&M students, faculty and staff now have access to lynda.com, an online library that teaches the latest software tools and skills through high-quality instructional videos. By logging into lynda.com, the campus community can access more than 1,400 training videos on a broad range of subjects, including business skills, photography, design, music and video, home computing, animation, and web design and development. New courses are added every week.
- Information Architecture: The Journey, Destination, and Return Trip – This is a free webinar presented by mStoner, November 20 @ 2pm. Registration required. Information Architecture (IA) is the way you organize, label, sequence and group elements on your site — from the smallest files and paragraphs to pages and entire microsites — all of it is managed through information architecture (description courtesy of Fran Zablocki, mStoner). If you’re looking to better understand good web structure and how users access info on the web, this could be for you. Please note: this is a live webinar, so we have not previewed the content. Some items discussed may not apply to the W&M website. Feel free to contact our office or your Cascade manager if you have any questions.
Happy editing!
~ Jesse