Academic Web Blog

Advancing the web for university departments, institutes, and projects

Understanding the Scope of Web Projects image

Understanding the Scope of Web Projects

If you're like many of the clients who come to us for help with their websites, it is often hard to get your arms around just what is involved. We've found that some analogies to things everyone is familiar with—building a house, and planting a gardent‐are often helpful.

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Art History Website Leads in Design, Function

Most university department websites are, to be blunt, unattractive and underwhelming. It's a blunt assessment, but it doesn't take a lot of browsing around to see that it is true. For the University of California, Berkeley History of Art Department, it was time to break out of the "ugly and hard to update" model that is the curse of utilitarian websites.

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Continuing Education Site Delivers Self-Service Courses

Webvanta recently completed a new website for ATrain Education, one of the premiere suppliers of continuing education training for nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists, and related professions. The new site replaces a custom-built, PHP-based site that required many business processes to be performed manually, was hard to update, and had some weak spots in user experience.

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Mobile SEO: Google Raises the Bar

Google recently announced that it will soon bemaking changes to how it ranks websites based on their mobile behavior. Google has also published a more detailed list of Common mistakes in smartphone sites.

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Happy 20th Birthday Web! image

Happy 20th Birthday Web!

Last week, the global technology community celebrated the Web's 20th birthday. Considering its impact, the Web must rank as one of the most important inventions of all time.

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Music Academy Site is Carefully Tuned

The Music Academy of the is a remarkable place. Founded in 1947, the classical music school serves about 150 of the world's best classical music students with an 8-week summer program. We were thrilled to be selected by the Academy and its marketing consultant, Patty Gessner, to build and host a new site for the Music Academy.

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Reconsidering Motion in Web Page Elements

The top-of-page slideshow or carousel has become very common in modern web designs. These design elements allow that precious top-of-page real estate to contain more content, by adding the time dimension so the same spot can contain multiple items. They also introduce some motion into the page, which makes it seem more attractive. However, they have their downside.

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Optimizing Your Site for the iPad Mini and iPhone 5 image

Optimizing Your Site for the iPad Mini and iPhone 5

In the past few months, Apple has rolled out an iPhone and an iPad with different screen sizes than previous devices. If you haven't yet paid attention to making your site mobile-optimized, the popularity of these new devices, along with many other options from Apple and in the Android world, make it that much more important for you to do so.

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