UM-Flint University Relations

I am very pleased with the re-launch of www.umflint.edu. Yes–I know there were issues of slowness with the site which had to do with servers, but overall the launch went about as smooth as these things can go.  That is why we only do it once every few years.  It is a disruption, but a […]

On October 29, 2010, the brand new redesigned UM-Flint homepage will go live after more than a year of preparation and work. Here’s what you can expect to see: With the impending first-phase launch of the umflint.edu homepage, we can’t help but be proud of how far we’ve come. To show exactly how far that […]

Well this week has been rather interesting with the release of Google’s Instant Search and with next week Microsoft releasing their beta of the 9th version of Internet Explorer. We are in an age where performance matters more than ever.  We have seen this progression over time of things getting faster online, from minutes to seconds, […]

Any business, public or private, has an input/output paradigm. You give a clerk $2, you get a soda. You enter a number in a phone, you get some sort of response on the other end. You go to Google and enter a search term, you get search results. Even such vital things as hospitals work […]

I’ll be the first to say that I’m not an illustrator, nor am I a classically trained designer, however that does not mean that I can’t draw.  Humans by nature are visual thinkers, which historically can be shown by the cave paintings in Lascaux in France.  Drawing allows us to present the ideas in our head to […]

As a new homemaker in the early 1990s, I just had to have one of the hot appliances of the times:  the automatic breadmaker.  Panasonic produced the most popular version of this insta-bread making wonder.  All you

Last month Paul Woolcock and I gave a small presentation detailing some of the features that LiveSite offers as it pertains to authoring pages.  Since then, I am happy to say that we have major moves towards being able to roll out LiveSite to production. Last week Paul, Tim Todd, and I worked with Kevin McMonagle, […]

This month, UR spent a good deal of time and made a great deal of headway on our largest and most important ongoing project: the redesign of the UM-Flint website. For those faculty and staff members charged with maintaining their department’s website, the most eagerly anticipated aspect of the redesign process may well be the […]

In the upcoming months, work will be done to convert our current content management system over to a system called LiveSite. LiveSite will allow for much easier creation and maintenance of web pages, and with its implementation will come a new look for the entire university website. You’ve probably seen the screen shot of what […]

Finding the pain points in a site for a user is easier than you may think.  There are couple things that you can do to fairly quickly uncover the usability problems of your site or web app.