Some of you may know that I took a full time job as the webmaster for Marygrove college last year. Well, it has been 9 months, 10 Joomla! sites, 6 Wordpress Bogs, and a bunch of social media web services later... and they are starting to integrate as a cohesive effort.

In this meetup, we are going to team up with Refresh Detroit to have a demonstration and discussion of multi-site CMS web design.

More info below, oh ya... and we will talk about Joomla! 2.5...

We all know that our web presence is much more than just our website in the current moment of technology and marketing tool proliferation. Yes you should have a website to anchor your presence; but you also want to be represented on every social media site available. Getting facebook, twitter, and whatever the broadcasting / networking darling of the moment to integrate and promote your content is a must... but what about when you content is on more than one website. Should you have more than one website? When is it appropriate to segment your presence online? How do you create an online ecology of web sites that all share similar branding but still have a unique voice for different niche audiences? These are the questions I have been wrestling with for the past 6 months in the realm of higher ed.

I would like to take you through a tour of planning, discover, and in progress work for Marygrove College and their online presence. In this discussion we will tackle some of the usual questions about the tools of the trade, which CMS should I use, which services are worth setting up. But more so, we will try to capture a higher lever discussion of the relationships between pools of information online and areas of focus that deserve a unique presence online. How to serve a global community and the niche communities within it. How to recruit and train those folks with the knowledge to become contributors and curators of the content online. And how to tread all of these conversations without losing your job do to the possible political miss steps inherent in such an effort.