Tuesday, October 14, 2014

"Meet the Staff" Series - Daphne Hunt, Director

Web Services would like to share with the community a bit about our team such as what we do, "a day in the life", and other interesting things about the make-up of our team members. Each Web Services member contributes something very important (and very different) to the overall team. To start off with, here is a little bit about myself! -Daphne

Full name: Daphne Jo Hunt
Daphne Hunt
Title: Director of Web Services
Length of time in Web Services at Tarleton: 8 years
Top three areas of expertise: Web strategy, web team/project management, graphic design
Topic Interests: Same as expertise, with additional interests in video production, photography, and web analytics
Favorite thing about my job: Working with such a talented group of staff members each and every day!
Favorite hobby: Making crafts! I have a craft room at home and have recently made hair bows, a fall wreath, and a "fairy garden" for my bird bath.

A "Day in the Life":
  1. Check homepage for any out-of-date information and make sure important information gets posted. (Tarleton's homepage is my "baby" that I must keep nurtured.)
  2. Check and respond to emails throughout the day (which as you know can take a while here at Tarleton!)
  3. As the day rolls along, check in with all the members of my team to see how they are doing. Since we are all in the same office area, it doesn't take too long to figure out what's going on!
  4. Go to meetings. We love to collaborate and share information with other departments, so I do spend a lot of my time in meetings. Anywhere from 2-4 hours a day on average. I meet with Marketing & Communications, Information Technology Services, and many other teams on campus. I get to meet a lot of people in my position!
  5. Monitor my team's projects & tasks on Asana. We enter all of our projects and tasks to this system in order to keep track of and prioritize all of our outstanding projects and tasks. At any given time, my team can have over 100 pending tasks in the queue as a whole! We each get several tasks done each day so we are constantly making headway.
  6. Develop strategies for improving our web presence and for improving how we communicate changes to campus. Making policies and guidelines for the web is one thing, but communicating those things to campus is just as important. I also give guidance to my staff about how to communicate to our colleagues, because I believe strongly in transparency, respectfulness, timeliness, and reinforcement.
  7. Give feedback and advice on projects and tasks. I help to ensure we are still moving in the right direction and at an appropriate speed to get things done.
  8. Team meetings: We usually have an official team meeting one or two times a week to discuss major projects and other topics that have come up during the week. We also have several "unofficial" team meetings during the week as needed - if nothing else, to just be able to share a joke and keep everyone in high spirits on a stressful day!
  9. Design graphics such as homepage highlights and advertising banners. I love graphic design so I section off a sliver of my day to work on these types of tasks.