We recently attended Missouri’s regional HighEdWeb one-day conference. We had a great day and got lots of good information from our peers around the state. Here’s some of the information members of our office learned:

Brad:

• When designing and implementing a new website, you have to manage expectations of others at your institution. It’s impossible to please everyone.
• Hackers will often use university websites for cross site scripting, because people trust websites that end in .edu.
• Audio and video is much easier to find via search engines if a transcription is included with the media.
• You can use e-cards as gifts that people can give to one another on Facebook. The Gift Creator application is an easy way to brand your own gift-giving Facebook app and have students, alumni and fans use to share branded imagery from your university.

Sara:

• You need to use several layers of protection on web applications to prevent cross site scripting:
  • Input filtering when possible
  • Input validation
  • Output encoding
  • Using an intrusion detection system, such as PHPIDS or .NETID
  • Tidying the output, such as with HTML Purifier

Brian:

• Several markup strategies will improve your search ranking:
  • Use TITLE tags (Web Press: check)
  • Limit dynamically generated pages (check)
  • Use semantic markup (check)
  • Use META tags (check)
  • Keep presentation (CSS) and functionality (JS) external (check)
  • Microformat addresses (now planned)