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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: June 2, 2004
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Latest Update: June 9, 2004
E-Mail Icon jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

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Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, June 2004.
"Fair use" encouraged.
Here is what Jeanne had to say during our interview... thewebhostcompany.com Can you tell us a little bit about your personal background? Jeanne Female. Degrees in physics, math, French, education, sociology, law. Phi Beta Kappa. Chose teaching over computer programming for very large government agency. Bias towards a liberal arts education that continues to entice with ever more roads we might venture down. Desidned web site because web offers us a tool that can overcome temporal and spatial barriers. thewebhostcompany.com How would you describe your business, what sorts of products or services do you provide and what is your target market? Jeanne I provide summaries of works I fear my students and community will not find the discretionary time to read, and offer web discussions on the relation of these works to current events. I cross disciplines into visual sociology and anthropology, using art as well as photography. Our target audience is all who would share in the discourse of a liberal arts background and education. thewebhostcompany.com How large would you say your business is in comparison to other firms in your industry? Jeanne Hmmm. Hard to answer for academia. Our universities are relatively small state colleges in large state university systems, one rural, one urban. One plausible answer to your question is that I will teach over 240 students next semester because my courses are so popular, and it is a pleasure to do so, for it extends the range of our target audience for continued lifetime learning with our site. thewebhostcompany.com What would you say your biggest advantage is over your competitors? Jeanne My college allows me the freedom to explore creative new alternatives to learning that unite community and the academy. thewebhostcompany.com How long has your company had a presence on the Internet? Jeanne Our site and the Dear Habermas project for integrating community and academic learning have been on the Internet since January 2, 1998. thewebhostcompany.com How and why did you decide to go online, and what obstacles if any did you encounter during the process, how did you overcome these obstacles? Jeanne To encourage collaborative work instead of competitive testing and rote memory. thewebhostcompany.com What is the main function or purpose of your website? Jeanne Teaching that is accessible to all. thewebhostcompany.com What sorts of things did you consider in deciding how to structure your site in terms of both organization and design? Jeanne Tried to take into account the conflict of time and space that an urban community college (or rural, for that matter) presents to its students. None of us have adequate time any longer to read deeply in ever multiplying fields. Yet we want and need to know. Our site structure tries to make meaningful shortcuts available and to provide many alternative paths to suit individual needs. thewebhostcompany.com How long after launching your site did you begin to see results, and were the results what you expected to see? Jeanne Immediate results in the students gratitude for answerability and collaboration with their teachers. After a couple of years the students began to write and share the site collaboratively by taking increasing responsibility. Today we trust each other as professionals to mount a gallery exhibit of our work each semester, and to put a virtual version of that exhibit on the Internet. thewebhostcompany.com Has your business benefited from being online, if so then how much business do you attribute to your website? Jeanne I couldn't manage to teach 240 students next semester without the website. The Internet extends my reach. thewebhostcompany.com How often do you update your website, and what sorts of things do you take into consideration with each update? Jeanne Daily. We have a weekly issue. Some of my students depend on the site for news when they haven't the time to follow their local newspapers. Each update tries to round out the presentation of the site as a whole, so that students are constantly aware of how the academy fits into their lives. thewebhostcompany.com What methods do you use in order to drive traffic to your site? Which would you say are the most and least effective ways to generate traffic? Jeanne Don't usually do that. But recently I joined a Summer study group in Europe that I could not attend, but could take part over the Internet, and offered our Internet Exhibit as our contribution. The conference topic was the rapprochement of the academy and the community. thewebhostcompany.com Have you employed any search engine optimization techniques? If so, what specifically have you done, and has it been successful? Jeanne We created a site index early in the project, and I am spending weeks this summer updating our topic index and site index. Educational research teaches us that we categorize and remember material according to our own cultural and life experiences. So our site index includes words like "horse" to find the link to "Home was a horse stable." That techniques has been as useful to us as to the students. I don't get feedback from the non-students who use the site, as I'm not responsible for their grades. thewebhostcompany.com Can you give us an idea of how much traffic you receive at your website? Jeanne WE post site statistics weekly at http://www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas/default.htm#histstat. thewebhostcompany.com What role if any do you have in the design and maintenance of your site? Jeanne Complete control. Both of our schools, California State University, Dominguez Hills and University of Wisconsin, Parkside afford us space on their servers, and in addition we are hosted by Earthlink. That provides three mirror sites, which is helpful to our target audience when I make a mistake they can get around by using the mirror site. thewebhostcompany.com How much time and money would you say has gone into your website? Jeanne A great deal. I often spend ten to twelve hours a day writing when I'm not teaching. And I usually add materials daily. My university has supplied very little of the technical equipment and software I need, so that I have had to do that on my own. thewebhostcompany.com Was there much of a learning curve for you as far as the internet and web sites were concerned? Jeanne My alternative work choice was as a programmer for a large government agency. I write directly in html, and managed to learn html with very minimal tech help, mostly because it wasn't available to me. The learning curve is most important to me in that I need my time for curriculum design and discussion on site so that I have little time for higher end program learning. thewebhostcompany.com Were there any mistakes you made along the way with the site that you learned from? Jeanne Yes. I listened to a colleague who told me I shouldn't use imagery. He liked things neat and minimal, all writing. Over the first couple of years I learned that my talents as an artist were more appreciated by all of us than the overwhelming site of a page full of writing. Our archives, http://www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas/jcls.htm, indicate that we switched to extensive use of imagery in August of 2002. thewebhostcompany.com How soon after launching did your site become profitable for you? Jeanne From the moment it was launched. It's grown like Topsy, and we've had to structure and restructure numerous times so that the initial effect of the site is not to overwhelm. But most of us feel like we're in paradise with the Internet. thewebhostcompany.com Is there any advice you would give to others who are trying to make their websites more successful? Jeanne Use your own reactions as a guide. Most of the restructuring we've done because WE couldn't find things. Making the site more efficient and user-friendly for us makes it more user-friendly for those we teach. thewebhostcompany.com Thank you for your time, Jeanne. I'm sure this will be very useful information for many of our readers. Jeanne You're very welcome.