Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Jill Whitaker: People might look at a page and they'll see a report and they'll see a bounce
rate of like 95%. And sometimes they'll be like, that's terrible. And you're like, okay, but let's look
at the content. You know, because sometimes that specific page was just to tell people about a
thing and there wasn't another action for them to take. And then other pages, you need to look at
it and it's like, oh, that one, we had a clear CTA on it. Or we thought we did, and the bounce rate
is that high, that needs to be reworked. But this one with a high bounce rate doesn't need to be
reworked.
[00:00:31] Jeff Dillon: Welcome to the EdTechConnect podcast, your source for exploring the cutting
edge world of educational technology. I'm your host, Jeff Dillon, and I'm excited to bring you
insights and inspiration from the brightest minds and innovators shaping the future of education.
We'll dive into conversations with leading experts, educators, and solution providers who are
transforming the learning landscape. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite
podcast platform so you don't miss an episode. So sit back, relax, and let's dive in.
Jill Whitaker is Director of Web Services at Southern Utah University, where she's worked on the
institution's online presence for nearly 25 years. Serving as a director for the past 15 years, Jill
oversees site content design and policy compliance, leading a team of staff, students,
employees, and more than 100 campus web liaisons, while tracking analytics and accessibility
metrics that keep Southern Utah University's web experience both usable and inclusive. A web
devotee since coding her first pages in 1995, Jill pairs hands on skills in HTML, CSS, SEO and
CMS administration. With professional certifications in site approved accessibility and search
optimization for Higher ed. Her practical insights and candid stories make her a favorite guest at
the annual Annon Hill Cascade CMS conference. Today she joins us to share how universities
can keep their sites accessible, searchable, and future ready.
Well, welcome to this show, Jill. It's great to have you here.
[00:02:11] Jill Whitaker: Thank you. I'm happy to be here.
[00:02:13] Jeff Dillon: So I want to start with something kind of fun. I like to try to get to know our
guest’s first before we dive into the tech stuff, but noticed in doing a little research here that you
coach beginners to finish half marathons.
[00:02:25] Jill Whitaker: Yes.
[00:02:26] Jeff Dillon: Tell me a little bit about the distance running and how, how do you relate that to
website management and governance? Can you tie that together?
[00:02:34] Jill Whitaker: You know what? I can actually.
It's funny because basically with Both distance running and website governance, you have to
think about the short term and the long term goals and you can't let either of those trip you up
along the way. So like when I'll start, like I'm saying, you know, I coached hundreds of beginners
to do half marathons and you start early in the season and if you have somebody who's too
focused on I have to run 13.1 miles and it gets in their head.
But today you're running three. So let's focus on what we're doing today.
It's the same thing, you know, with later on in their training though, you know, if there's like, I'm
feeling awesome, I'm have five miles on the schedule today, but I'm going to go out and try to
run eight. But you get overly ambitious and you could hurt yourself, get an injury and you don't
make it to that 13.1. And it's kind of the same with managing a website. You know, you have all
sorts of tasks that you need to do. Right now I have to do this one right now. And there are the
people that are only thinking about this thing needs to happen right this second, just make it
happen. And then you know, as the manager, you have to be thinking, well wait, what's the long
term plan on this? What's the governance here? How are we going to maintain this? Does it
have to stay on the website in perpetuity or is this a limited lifetime thing? And so you really have
to think about the whole holistic view of how this fits into the big term web picture. But also how
do we make this thing happen in the right now and do it the best way possible.
[00:03:56] Jeff Dillon: I love that analogy. So it makes me think of, you heard the one where like
people grossly overestimate what they can get done in like a day, but they very much
underestimate what they could get done in a year or more.
I mean you could become an Ironman triathlete in a year. Really, anyone could, right? Yeah, you
can in a year. So I do, I do distance stuff too. So I thought that was pretty interesting. But I want
to point out your site. So Jill's from Southern Utah University and part of the reason I've got to
know Jill is through website management and content management systems and things like that.
But if you go to Southern Utah University site, it is obvious it's for students.
Like how did you do that? Like, so you're a small, small what, 10,000 students in Utah. I guess
that's not Too small, mid sized school, public school.
And I mean, look at. You have a program finder. It's such a great site. I would recommend
everyone check out the site. But you've been doing this for a while. How do you, how do you get
all the stakeholders on board and how did that come about? Like to focus on prospective
students?
[00:04:58] Jill Whitaker: Yeah, keeping things centralized has been a big help in that regard. I think that
if people start to branch off too much, then your site can become fractured and you don't have a
consistent messaging also working hand in hand. I'm technically in the IT department, but I work
very closely with our marketing department and we at first, for many years tried to make our
homepage, this is for everybody, and here's information for the community and for our faculty
and for current students. Then after a while it's like, you know what, your homepage is not for
everybody, but it is for everybody in that you have to get all of those audiences into the
information that they need.
But you don't have to tailor the whole messaging to them. And then if you keep reminding
everybody that, you know, if you have some faculty member who's like, well, I would need this
announcement about my class on the homepage and then you're sitting there, okay, but is that
really where they're going to go look for it? And I think that everybody kind of gets it now, but it
was a little bit of a change when we started eliminating some of those internal announcements
from appearing on there and.
But keeping things centralized has been a big help in that regard.
[00:06:02] Jeff Dillon: Well, you've seen it like you've come further than many schools because
you've. It's obvious your homepage is largely for recruitment and retention. But back in the day, I
remember arguments over like, oh, we'll call them discussions, you know, yeah, the internal
content on your homepage. But most schools have at least come that far. Okay, we know we're
going to send them to the portal or this internal place, but it's quite a challenge. You coded your
first website.
We have similar timelines here back in 95.
[00:06:31] Jill Whitaker: Yeah.
[00:06:32] Jeff Dillon: Tell me about that experience that convinced you that the web was where you
wanted to build your career.
[00:06:39] Jill Whitaker: Well, I don't know if I was convinced that was my career path in that moment,
but I was studying communications in college and I was also studying computer science and the
web was coming along. And I'm sorry, this is fascinating. You know, you get to do stuff with
computers and everything, but you're also sharing a message and so you're communicating I'm
like, this is the future. This is so cool. And all of my communication professors in college were
like, why are you studying computer science? This is a completely disconnected field. And my
computer science professors are like, why are you also studying communications? These things
have no crossover. And then now here I am, the professors that I'm still in touch with, they're
like, did you have a crystal ball to see the future?
No, it was just that they both spoke to me. I was a computer geek and I liked communicating and
it felt like a natural convergence.
[00:07:29] Jeff Dillon: That makes sense. And I remember because we were kind of coming up on
similar timelines and I think of the book outliers, right? If you're at a certain age, a certain time of
your life, things, you're going to just absorb things better, you know, because they're right there
in front of you. So, yeah, that's a similar story.
Today you direct content design and policy for Southern Utah University's entire site.
What does a typical day look like for you? Or is there. Is there no such thing?
[00:07:58] Jill Whitaker: There is no typical day. I think that it always surprises even people on our own
campus when they hear about everything that I'm doing in a day. Because, you know, one hour
of the day I may be looking at, you know, tracking parameters and how we can do an ad
campaign through digital ads, all the way through conversion and tracking that and making sure
that we see that we've spent our money wisely. And then turn around in the next hour and be
speaking with the facilities office and being like, okay, how can we mark the all gender
bathrooms on campus? And then the next hour I'm talking to the provost's office and being like,
okay, so these are, you know, search terms that are being used on our site for academic
programs. And this is what's popular and trending and always being searched for. So use that
information how you will. And then turn around, it's like, hey, accounting services office, how do
we do an internal invoice form and how do we process that better? I mean, I literally touch every
areas of campus.
[00:08:52] Jeff Dillon: Right, right, right. So tell me, how many content editors or publishers do you
have on your campus?
[00:08:58] Jill Whitaker: We have over 100 people that have access to our CMS.
Several of them are awesome and they do a great job of keeping up with content and edits.
There are some that fancy themselves a little bit more developer than they actually are. And
then you have cleanup and try to rein them back in. And then you have the people that just once
a year pop in and have to Remember how to change a word?
[00:09:19] Jeff Dillon: Can't remember the same thing. They always. Yes.
So if you have 100 people, I remember at Sac State, I had over 800.
How do you keep these distributed authors aligned on the standards and the voice? Like, what's
your digital governance like there?
[00:09:34] Jill Whitaker: So voice is hard. If I see something that I think is really egregious, I actually
will kick it over to marketing and be like, you're the voice experts and you made the policies.
There you go. Address that. But standards, we use site improve on our site, and so we can
make policies and so we can see if somebody has put something up that, you know, they put an
image that's not optimized or if they're using click here on the website or they're doing little
things like that. Site improve is constantly crawling our site, and we get notifications pretty fast.
And then we will contact people when we see those issues coming up. And we're like, hey, we
noticed that you put these things in here. That way we got to fix this.
[00:10:08] Jeff Dillon: Do you have a formal structure there? Do you have, like a committee that
meets regularly or.
[00:10:13] Jill Whitaker: No, We've had various iterations of a web advisory committee, and it has
ebbed and flowed throughout the years, but now it's more that everybody on campus has some
kind of stake in the website. And so we all try to recognize that. We do have a Google chat
group where all of our web liaisons, that's what we call everybody who has access to our cms,
they're involved in there. And then so we can get conversations going. It's like, hey, I forgot how
to do this. Can someone help me? And then it's fun because somebody else on campus, like, I
remember how to make a link. I'll show you, you know, and they start taking over some of that
for me. But it's not a formal governance committee anymore. It's now more marketing and web.
We work together to come up with rules, and then we push it out to the group and they work
collaboratively.
[00:10:59] Jeff Dillon: Right. Gotcha. You've kind of been known for a real strong commitment to
accessibility.
And I kind of want to know what tactics have moved the needle the fastest on the compliance
and the user experience for accessibility.
[00:11:15] Jill Whitaker: Well, siteimprove helps with that because it's very easy to say we have a
crawler and we have this report that says that you've done something wrong. You know, you can
point at a report that way.
But the other flip side of that is, and I don't want to say It's a tactic. Because it's not just a tactic,
but having people on our campus who actually have disabilities and they have needs, you know,
and having them test our, you know, what we're putting out there, that helps a lot. And then
when we do have somebody on campus who is creating something that is an accessibility
violation, and if they push back and say, well, nobody's going to try to use this, that has this
problem, and then we'll be like, hey, do you know, so and so on campus, they've given us
permission to say, you know, this person uses a screen reader or whatever. And they're like,
yeah, I know that person. I'm like, they use a screen reader. Wait, what? You know, they
pictured the blind user as the person walking around with the white cane. I'm like, no, they just
have really extremely low vision from a degenerative eye disorder. And so they're using a screen
reader to navigate the website. And it blows people's minds. They're like, wait, really? And it's
just. It's the human empathy. And so that's why I didn't want to say it's a tactic, because it's just
pointing out that that's somebody that's sitting in an office adjacent from you. They need this.
[00:12:30] Jeff Dillon: I remember, and this is a while back, but a lot of faculty and people who weren't
developing pages very often didn't know what accessibility was. They thought it was making
sure you had a PDF available for your webpage, which is kind of the opposite, you know.
[00:12:44] Jill Whitaker: Oh, yeah, PDF. The worst way to have accessibility, it.
[00:12:47] Jeff Dillon: Was there's really no understanding, or they wouldn't even equate it to the
digital space. It would be about, like, doorways and stuff.
[00:12:53] Jill Whitaker: Well, and a lot of people don't even think that it's. They. They just think it's
blindness and deafness. You know, it's like that, those two broad ones. Msner you realize that
mobility impairment can be a problem how? I'm like, well, they can't maybe not use a mouse, so
they're navigating in a different way. So when you say click here, you're basically pointing out
that they cannot do that, or colorblindness. I mean, somebody could be the most intelligent, top
of the campus food chain. They could be colorblind. Nobody knows that. But if you put
something on your website that's done in a way, they cannot distinguish it if you haven't done. I
mean, the spectrum is so broad. And I've heard this thing, too, that all of us are temporarily
abled because you never know when something can happen.
[00:13:33] Jeff Dillon: And there's so many great tools out there. You've listed Sightproof, which is
one. We used it too at Sac State when I was using Cytoprove. It was so amazing and so
powerful and I found that it was almost one of the instigators that helped us launch this web
redesign where we did a burn and build, right? We took our 12,000 pages, got rid of them, and
we didn't even do any copy paste and built it up to like 1200 pages. And it was a year and a half
project. But my question or comment is about Site Improve that. You know, when you have a tool
that provides you so much information, it was almost overwhelming to say, like, we have so
many stale pages, we have so many accessibility errors. Like, yeah, let's tackle the biggest ones
first. But how many pages do you have? Do you find any of that to be true?
[00:14:19] Jill Whitaker: At SUU, we are probably approaching that 12,000 mark. We do have a cap on
our site improve of 10,000 scans. And so we have cut off some of our oldest press release
folders and stuff like that, so they're not even being scanned anymore, which kind of scares me.
Hurts me a little bit, you know, but we've got a lot out there and site improve can do reports
regularly. So at least having automated reports every month going to our web liaisons that tells
them you've got these errors. And so then they're scared. It's like, oh, I got this big frowny face in
an email saying that x many errors in my site, like, what should I do about that? It's funny how
much a smiley face or a frowny face can impact you still, even as an adult. But that helps them
feel like, well, I want to get a smiley face, so what can I do to make this better? And so then
sometimes our web liaisons educate themselves or they reach out to get that education and try
to prevent those from happening in the future.
[00:15:13] Jeff Dillon: You're also known for offering the Hand in Hill community tips on Cascade. Like
you present at conferences. I feel like you're really good at squeezing the juice out of whatever
product you have.
What feature still flies under the radar but still saves you hours?
[00:15:29] Jill Whitaker: Okay, this sounds really silly, but when there is a title field with every image
that you upload into Cascade, and so many of our content contributors just skip over that field,
they upload an image and then they walk away.
If you go and type in a description of what that image is right there, right when you upload it, that
makes your alt text. Every time you try to incorporate that image into your page for you also, it
gives you some searchable words so that when you're trying to remember what that image was
or where you uploaded it into the site, you can search in Cascade. Cascade's got a really robust
backend search and so if you have things tagged and labeled appropriately, then you can
usually find it pretty fast.
[00:16:10] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, we use Cascade to attack state. There's a lot of great systems out there. I
did, I do like hand in Hills Cascade and what I'm seeing, and I, and I know Hannah Hill's doing
this as well, is using AI to help. I thought the first thing would when I first saw AI like a few years
ago, the ChatGPT launch. Yeah, I'm like, wow, now can we actually populate metadata and
titles? Because it's already there on the page. Just do it for the people. So I know they have that
now.
[00:16:37] Jill Whitaker: Yeah.
[00:16:37] Jeff Dillon: Are you using any AI features in your content management right now?
[00:16:41] Jill Whitaker: Not really. We are self hosted on prem Cascade and the AI generated, you
know, helps that way follow the cloud. And we haven't gotten there yet.
Our, you know, administration's like, but why do you need all that extra money? You're running
fine. And so that it's not turned on yet, but that's the future.
[00:16:59] Jeff Dillon: Well, send this podcast to the administration. Tell me, hey, you guys got to get
the cloud version.
[00:17:03] Jill Whitaker: Okay, Jeff said so.
[00:17:07] Jeff Dillon: So SEO and analytics are also part of your toolkit. How do you translate bounce
rates and search terms into decisions? I think you talked a little bit about this.
[00:17:17] Jill Whitaker: Yeah.
[00:17:17] Jeff Dillon: A little more about that.
[00:17:19] Jill Whitaker: Yeah. So search terms are, you know, fun because if you go and look and see,
we've got a homegrown program finder that we've built and so we can go and show, you know,
what nursing is always the top search thing. So do we need to be spending money on ad
campaigns for nursing? Because people are coming here already. That's in demand, you know,
so maybe what we need to do is be working on building out more robust content for organic or
we need to be, you know, building out in house so that we can have more students involved in
the program and you share that information with stakeholders.
Explaining analytics is funny too, because you, you mentioned bounce rate. People might look at
a page and they'll see or report and they'll see a bounce rate of like 95%. And sometimes they'll
be like, that's terrible. And you're like, okay, but let's look at the content, you know, because
sometimes that specific page was just to tell people about a thing and there wasn't another
action for them to take. And then other pages, you need to look at it and it's like, oh, that one, we
had a clear CTA on it, or we thought we did. And the bounce rate is that high, that needs to be
reworked. But this one with a high bounce rate doesn't need to be reworked because the whole
point of that page was to say, there's this thing that's happening on campus and you must be
there physically. That's all you need to know about it.
[00:18:35] Jeff Dillon: I feel like we need new metrics because bounce rate doesn't mean a lot in itself,
just like you said. But what if you combined it with time on page? Yeah, right. That's a good
metric. If you're only on there one second, that's probably not good.
[00:18:45] Jill Whitaker: Yeah, exactly.
[00:18:46] Jeff Dillon: 10 seconds may be fine, but if.
[00:18:48] Jill Whitaker: They bounced, you know, 95% bounce rate, but they spent two minutes on
that page, it's like, oh, they were absorbing the information on that page.
[00:18:55] Jeff Dillon: Combine it. Let's create some new metrics. Yeah, I think we're getting close to
that. I want to talk a little bit more about AI. Are you using any features? Are you excited about
anything that you've seen out there, what other schools are doing, or do you have any plans to
use AI in your. In your role as a web director there?
[00:19:10] Jill Whitaker: Clearly, I'm excited about the possibilities. There's so much cool stuff out there
and it's really fun to. Sometimes when you've been stumped on something that is not working
and you can just feed your code into AI and be like, what am I missing? And they're like, oh, we
found that missing semicolon. You know, things that you spend forever beating your head
against the wall before all of this. That's awesome. But there's also a side of it that is a little bit
scary to think about. You know, a whole future of zero click searches, you know, where people,
all of the information is being scraped from your site and then output into a search engine. And
it's like here, this is what we've assumed is right from this website. And when you've got a whole
bunch of content contributors that forget to unpublish things when they are expired and old and
no longer part of the university's actual story, who knows what that AI out there might be pulling
together and cobbling together and being like, well, we found 14 different references about this
on the page and all of them are contradictory. So we've just mashed them up into some kind of
answer. Good luck.
So there's a little bit of what does that mean for the future of my role and for the future of
websites? I mean, is it all going to be whittled down to generative output?
[00:20:20] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, that's the front end to look at. And then I don't, I don't even. I've seen so
many different ways schools are using this. But if you look out in the world, there's not a lot of
institutions that are using Gen AI in their search yet. And I've seen a couple that are trying and
it's really hard, it's not easy to do. And I think one of the keys that I've seen because I spend my
last few years in content discovery and search is that a human still needs to be in the loop at this
point.
[00:20:46] Jill Whitaker: Yes.
[00:20:46] Jeff Dillon: Yeah. Because you know, you often do want these dots connected. Like oh
yeah, I had figured out that, that dorms means residence halls but all those synonyms don't
always connect and you want the ability to connect. We're seeing this from the other schools I, I
talked to who are using advanced search solutions as well.
[00:21:03] Jill Whitaker: Yep.
[00:21:04] Jeff Dillon: And one thing I want to, I want to let you know, I'm doing this research and I'm
looking at search terms that universities are, that if you go to a campus homepage, the actual
search bar, whether it's Google or another product, you look at nursing, you said nursing's your
top one. So the generic terms like nursing is kind of generic, although it's a program, are getting
the pretty low click through rates compared to if you ask search for an actual course or more
specific, even more long tail like AI type searches, it's drastically different. I don't have the data
yet, I just only talked to a dozen schools. But it's kind of, kind of crazy how it's shaking up the
search landscape too.
[00:21:40] Jill Whitaker: Yeah, that's one of those things that kind of as two distinct users, you know,
you've got the ones that know precisely what they want and so they've got the whole long tail
query and then you've got the probably more the younger set, you know, prospective student
set. There's like, I don't know, maybe a nurse, you know, and so they don't know all of the
specifics. But then if you have somebody who's worked in an industry for a while and they're like,
oh, I've already been a registered nurse for a While. But I would love to know how I can move
into fnp. Family, nurse practitioner or how I can move into an msn, you know, and different levels
that way. I doubt a high school student is ever going to think, yeah, fnp, how do I get that? But
when you've had somebody that's been in industry and that's where audiences in higher ed are
changing so much too, you've got more and more non traditional routes that we need to think
about and consider. There's all of the different changing audiences and changing goals of the
base student. It's not the same core student that we've had forever.
[00:22:35] Jeff Dillon: Right. I feel like every week and month it's changing.
[00:22:38] Jill Whitaker: It is.
[00:22:39] Jeff Dillon: So if you could give every new Web Content Publisher 1 Gadget or book or a
mindset on their first day, what would that be and why?
[00:22:47] Jill Whitaker: I always go back to the book Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug. It's just, it's
a classic. It's been published for a long time.
You probably. Yes, somewhere right back there. I have mine over there in a bookshelf.
But it's a classic because I think that sometimes people try to be too cutesy and they overthink
how they want to talk about something. And so instead of making your links, you know, it's like
you'll be part of the family. And it's like, wait, what does that mean? What is that? And it's like it's
just jobs. That's really what we're advertising. It's jobs. It's like, oh, you know, I mean it's, it's
straightforward. Especially now I feel like it's even more relevant because that book was
published first like 20 years plus years ago. Yeah, I feel like it's even more relevant because we
have even more information, data points coming at us with social media and you know, search
engines and AI and everything coming at us so fast and everybody is absorbing this information
with such fractured attention these days that I feel like even more.
Don't make me think.
[00:23:51] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, I love that one. We'll put, we'll put a link to that in the show notes.
So let's fast forward, oh, let's say just three years. What does a well run university web team
look like and what skills does that team have to have?
[00:24:05] Jill Whitaker: AI is going to be on there in three years. I mean that's obviously going to be
part of it. I think a big part of it is even more so having that communication and that human voice
aspect of it because you can't have the stereotypical coder that sits in the dark office and cranks
out some code and then the marketing person that's over here making bold promises. And they
are two separate things. I think that there has to be a lot more overlap. You've got to have the
marketers that understand the code base and what's going on underneath, and you've got to
have the coders that are developing things that understand click through rates and calls to action
and things of that nature.
[00:24:43] Jeff Dillon: That's a great point. You know, you make me think of an article I've outlined I'm
writing here is it used to be there was the IT team and the marketing team. They would try to
work together and often it was challenging at best. And sometimes you have a great
relationship, but often it's just, you know, it would roll out software and say, go to training. We
have the software now. We know it's different. We know marketing is saying, we need this, we
need to work together. IT can't keep up with what's available out there. So we know that that's
happening. But I want to take it a step further and say, like, I've seen the most successful
institutions recently be the ones that have a leadership role. Usually it's a web director like you
that's in the marketing team.
[00:25:19] Jill Whitaker: Yeah.
[00:25:20] Jeff Dillon: And so that person has almost like, I wouldn't say autonomy, but they see the
whole picture. They can select, they can provide recommendation, they can do the
implementation and then, you know, manage that solution. And I feel like it's not like let's get IT
and marketing to work together, but what if we kind of almost merge them in a way and have
that, like have a leader that has some sort of. It's not even, I wouldn't even call them IT skills
because it's such a different world now. Like you almost don't need IT skills, but you need that
some experience in like the newer technologies and how you go about that. Like, so we'll see.
[00:25:55] Jill Whitaker: It's a convergence. I mean, there's a whole IT literacy that everybody is going
to have to have. And I see it even in my daughter's curriculum in school. I mean, they teach a lot
more coding and IT literacy in middle school level, you know, and I feel like people are going to
come up and they're going to have a lot more understanding of technology underlying things.
[00:26:15] Jeff Dillon: You know, one question, I want to ask you one more because I forgot to ask this
earlier, but I feel like you might be pretty centralized ssu. I'm not sure, but the bigger schools
often have multiple CMS's and you know, R1s. They're just, just in a different boat. But do you
wrestle with rogue micro sites at all? And how do you, how do you deal with that?
[00:26:36] Jill Whitaker: We do. I mean, there's always that chance. You have stuff like Wix and
GoDaddy commercials out there telling any monkey can build a website. And you're like, that's
true, but they're not doing it right necessarily. And then people have a purchasing card and they
can just go out and like, well, I just bought a domain. I just bought, you know, a WIX account and
stuff. And so we have had a lot of rogue micro sites that pop up over the years and then when
they. We find them either due to the person who registered the domain and made that site, then
has moved on to new roles and then there's just this thing floating out there and the new
person's like, how do I get this.
[00:27:16] Jeff Dillon: Department'S lock out of their own site?
[00:27:18] Jill Whitaker: Yeah, essentially. Yeah. So then we have to go through recovery processes
and migrating it back into the fold.
One thing that has really helped is being in touch with our procurement purchasing office and
they have now set rules on P cards on campus. And so if people are trying to make purchases
on things that are registered as web hosts and domain registrations and stuff, it blocks their
purchase until they get approval. And the first office is like, hey, it, Jill. You know, do you guys
approve this? And we're like, no, we do not.
[00:27:48] Jeff Dillon: We do have a maybe.
[00:27:49] Jill Whitaker: Yeah.
So that's actually been a huge improvement. And that's something that has only come about the
past couple of years.
[00:27:55] Jeff Dillon: Yeah. Yeah.
Well, that's great advice. And is there any advice you give to like new web directors coming into
the field right now?
[00:28:03] Jill Whitaker: Oh, I think giving up some control and letting, giving trust to your team, that's
huge. I think that that's something that you need to do is you need to surround yourself with
people that you trust and you need to give them that trust and not stress yourself and wear
yourself out too much because you're still one person. You can't do it all. And I, I wrestle with
that every single day. I feel like that's even. I've somehow made it a detriment to my department
in some ways because for many years I'm like, I can just keep working at home and all night
long and do all these things. And then I had a child and then I'm sitting there, I can't work all
night anymore and then. But I did all this stuff of like two full work days in a workday and now I
don't have that time anymore and it's near.
If I had just actually distributed work and then also stepped up and said, hey, there's too much
work coming in right now, then maybe my team would have grown more than it has right now.
[00:28:57] Jeff Dillon: Good advice, Jill. Well, it was great to have you on the show. We'll put links to
your site and your LinkedIn in the show. Notes and Perfect. Thanks for having being on.
[00:29:06] Jill Whitaker: No problem. It's good chatting with you. Jeff.
[00:29:16] Jeff Dillon: We wrap up this episode. Remember, EdTech Connect is your trusted
companion on your journey to enhance education through technology.
Whether you're looking to spark student engagement, refine edtech implementation strategies,
or stay ahead of the curve in emerging technologies, EdTech Connect brings you the insights
you need. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss the an
inspiring and informative episode. And while you're there, please leave us a review. Your
feedback fuels us to keep bringing you valuable content.
For even more resources and connections, head over to edtechconnect.com your hub for edtech
reviews, trends and solutions. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.
SA.
