Mobilizing 300 reluctant content creators

Date: Friday, July 14, 2017
Time: 4:15 - 5:00 pm (EDT) (UTC-04:00)
Location: Room 1028
Format: General Lecture Session

Session description

This session was selected as the "Best Speaker" of WPCampus 2017. Congrats Brian!

Get to know Brian before he presents. Learn why he loves higher education, his favorite tools, and how to be a guest with him on the WPCampus podcast.

NC State's central IT office employs almost 300 people, whose areas of expertise range from high-performance computing to video production to installing fiber optic cable. By tradition and budgetary necessity, every single one of them has content creation and editing privileges on our unit website, oit.ncsu.edu. After years of a content free-for-all, the result wasn't pretty: 2,500 pages total, with lots of out-of-date information, duplication, broken navigation and accessibility issues everywhere.

In this session, we discuss how we stepped back from the brink, took control of our content, and — with a few homegrown plugins and help from the WPCampus community — taught our 300-person content team how to build and maintain a good website.

Key takeaways

  • Don't do things the way we're doing them! (But if you have to, this is how we did it.)
  • Most content creators want to do things the right way and are receptive if you approach them sincerely, with respect, and with a clear governance plan.
  • Gentle nudges inside of WordPress can help guide users toward best practices.

Presenter

Brian DeConinck

Headshot of Brian DeConinck
Front-End Designer & Developer, NC State University

Brian DeConinck is a front-end designer and developer with NC State University's Office of Information Technology. As part of the OIT Design team, he builds custom WordPress themes and plugins for academic and administrative units on campus, helps run campus Multisite environments and advises campus clients on their content strategy. In all of his projects, Brian is committed to universal design principles of accessibility, usability and user empathy. Brian is also co-host of the WPCampus Podcast.

Sessions

  • General Lecture Session: Mobilizing 300 reluctant content creators

Session video

Sessions were recorded and have been uploaded. View the schedule or visit our main videos page to view the videos.

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