UVM Blogs

So you’re tasked with creating and distributing an email newsletter for your department. Creating newsletters can be a labor of love. A lot of effort often goes into wrangling content, formatting, and designing […]

A plethora of free WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) HTML editors have been released over the years. Several of these – SeaMonkey, KompoZer, Nvu – grew out of Netscape Composer, which was last updated in 2004. SeaMonkey and KompoZer have not seen  much meaningful development in several years and Nvu was discontinued in 2005 thus leaving [...]

Visitors are accessing websites with an ever increasing array of devices and browsers from desktop computers and laptops to netbooks and tablets, and, of course, mobile phones. The challenge for web developers is to design their sites to look great and be easy to use on everything from a cinema display with 2560-by-1440 pixel resolution to [...]

Too often our website is merely a one-way conversation with our audience. You probably have read that engaging our web visitors is not only important for generating web traffic and higher search engine rankings, but it is also an indicator of the overall success of website. So how can we create bi-directional conversations on our [...]

Many university websites, including ours, suffer from a split personality disorder. As emails seem to indicate, most site visitors perceive the institutional website as a single entity with ultimate power residing with the infamous Webmaster. One might expect that as our institutions have oversight from administrators and administrative bodies, so…[Read more]

Website development has taken on a dark passenger in recent years. As the number of websites continues to grow exponentially, the internet now ubiquitous in our daily lives with more and more of our personal information passed around online via online shopping, bill paying, banking accounts and Facebook, the number and voracity of individuals…[Read more]

The folks at Google have cornered the market on web search and are leaders in email and online maps, but as many of already know, they have also taken the lead in many other corners of the Internet including web metrics, news feeds, document sharing and calendars. Google Calendar offers a lot of useful components to leverage [...]

This summer we are finally developing the mobile version of the UVM main website. When this project was in the initial planning phase, I imagined our mobile site to be a CSS-modified version of the main UVM website that fit better on mobile devices. In researching the project not only did I discover that mobile sites [...]

In the past week I was contacted by two separate individuals regarding an online text to speech application called ReadSpeaker. For those unfamiliar with the product, ReadSpeaker is a commercial application which claims to improve web accessibility for visitors with “low literacy and reading skills, limited English proficiency, dyslexia or related…[Read more]