Linnea Ann Williams's Blog Posts

Investing in the Future: How our team takes the time to innovate for campus

Linnea Ann Williams — Fri, 07 Oct 2016 18:45:16 +0000

One of the challenges we at Stanford Web Services face as both a software development group as well as a client-facing web design team is finding time to create new and innovative tools for campus amidst client projects. Most of the time we are heads down, working with clients to launch scores of websites each year. So how do we approach innovating for campus?

Card sorting: Defining related content categories

Linnea Ann Williams — Fri, 21 Aug 2015 17:30:03 +0000

Card sorting is a powerful, hands-on tool that we at Stanford Web Services use for helping content creators iron out either the information architecture of their site (meaning the big buckets of their navigation) or to develop categories for their content.

Recently, we used card sorting to develop a secondary sidebar navigation of "Related Content" that crossed the main navigation of a website, and these are my takeaways.

Habit Summit 2015: a Silicon Valley product design conference

Linnea Ann Williams — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 17:00:18 +0000

This last week I attended the Habit Summit, a day-long conference here at Stanford where industry leaders in software and app development get together to talk frankly about how to make engaging customer experiences and get people hooked on their tools and games.

New on Stanford Sites: Stanford BEAN Types module

Linnea Ann Williams — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 15:29:58 +0000

Over the last year Stanford Web Services has been building reusable modules to make website building faster and better, and then adding them to Stanford Sites. This post highlights Stanford BEAN Types.

Agile Project Management and its flavors: where does Scrum end and Kanban begin?

Linnea Ann Williams — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 20:18:09 +0000

Agile has become a big buzz word recently in the project management world. In this post, I'll try to clarify where some of the lines are being blurred between terms like Agile and Scrum, and what some of these terms actually mean.

Keep in mind while reading this that I am primarly trained in Scrum, so my descriptions of other Agile methodologies are only decently informed. :)

What is Agile Project Management?

From the ever-present wikipedia:

Top 6 things to do while your cache clears on its own

Linnea Ann Williams — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 22:05:39 +0000

Caches are a great tool, they store your website's database and code information in a way that loads much faster. But they DO mean that your changes don't appear right away.

Where are my changes?

One of the things we here at Stanford Web Services get emailed about most frequently is, "Why did my changes disappear when I logged out?" The answer is that the site caches haven't yet been updated, but they will if we wait a little bit (sometimes a few hours or so).

Choosing your project's internal web team

Linnea Ann Williams — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 17:02:11 +0000

Imagine you're an academic department or program and you're starting on a project to revamp your web presence. The first thing you'll need to do is figure out who should be on your internal web team that will see the project from inception to launch. This might be some combination of your staff, faculty, and students. But who exactly?

Scrum Resources: Learn about Agile Project Management

Linnea Ann Williams — Tue, 07 Jan 2014 16:00:22 +0000

Welcome back! We're kicking off the new year with a post on Agile Project Management. I've been speaking a lot to folks recently about Scrum and how to think about incorporating it into your team structure.

One form of Agile project management, Scrum is an iterative development process that focuses the development team on the highest priority work and increases the product/project manager's ability to forecast timelines and delivery. For Web Services, it has improved our project estimates and helped us to work in a more focused way on our larger projects.

Menu Tricks #4: Menu Block with Bootstrap Dropdowns

Linnea Ann Williams — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 16:05:49 +0000

Earlier this year, I wrote a blog post about using Menu Block module. In this post, I'll talk about how Menu Block integrates with Stanford's Drupal 7 themes to create dropdown menus.

To properly leverage the dropdowns in Twitter Bootstrap with Drupal, there are a few things to keep in mind...

Note: This post pertains to these Drupal 7 themes:

Holding Space: A Scrum Master Overview

Linnea Ann Williams — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 16:23:20 +0000

In June, I wrote a post about the role of the Scrum Product Owner in a website project. For this post, I'll outline the role of the Scrum Master and how it differs from the Product Owner role.