Digital Content

I managed the Digital Content department at Ooligan Press, the non-profit student-run press at Portland State University, for ten months. The group was small comparatively—I typically had one co-manager and two to three workers—but we were constantly communicating with department and project managers about website and ebook work. If the question was how to do something technical, the answer was “ask Digital.”

Ooligan Press is a real press that produces real books, and having the privilege to manage this future-friendly department taught me the most important skills I learned in the publishing program: problem-solving, trouble-shooting, and teaching oneself.

Because Ooligan Press is run by students, I averaged four to twelve hours of work per week and tried to be proactive in pitching ideas to other department and project managers. By the end of my time as manager, I contributed to a 50% increase in site visits and a 56% increase in page views.

Here are some of the projects I oversaw:

• Developed Start to Finish—a project featured in Publisher’s Weekly
• Optimized the Ooligan Press homepage
• Increased website usability
• Redesigned the website for Ooligan’s annual publishing conference, Write to Publish, to match this year’s conference theme
• Assisted the finding, creating, and uploading of book excerpts to the website for all Ooligan Press titles
• Researched and implemented website search engine optimization (seo)
• Created or delegated the creation of graphics for website promotions
• Worked with project managers to create special web pages for the William Stafford and Transmit Culture projects
• Added an Events page and calendar to the website to promote Ooligan Press outreach and aid interested visitors
• Deleted, condensed, or updated out of date content to create a leaner site
• Started the process of advertising the press's award-winning status by soliciting copy from the Marketing department for a website Awards page
• Facilitated the compiling of metadata for the press’s twenty ebooks for upload to CoreSource
• In a ten week period, taught students with little to no experience with coding to revise and optimize ebooks for distribution

For more in-depth accounts of the homepage optimization and website usability strategies I implemented, as well as examples of website promotional graphics I’ve designed, visit the Ooligan Press section of my portfolio.