Today is day three of the Amercian Marketing Association’s Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education (for which Converge is providing a live tweet stream). Digital marketing strategy is a very hot topic this year in terms of presentations. This was also the case at HighEdWeb2012, where many presenters discussed web strategy, social media strategy, mobile app development, etc. While all of these are related, there have been many insightful and informative presentations at this year’s higher education marketing conferences focused on web strategy and development.

At HighEdWeb2012, Erik Runyon delivered an excellent session on rapid web site development in which he focused on the redesign (actually, two redesigns) of the Notre Dame web site that was completed in an extremely short time period. His main point: It is important to give your web site personality. When someone visits your site, he/she must feel like “This is what it is like to attend this university”. Erik was initially tasked with redesigning the Notre Dame site because it was deemed “not Notre Dame enough!”

Another key takeaway: Think Mobile First. When redesigning Notre Dame’s web site in 2012, the team developed for mobile first due to the rapidly increasing level of consumption of site content on mobile devices. Check out the 13:00 mark in the video embedded below to hear Erik speak to that point. And, if you have time, please watch the whole presentation.