Listen Here: https://www.upandup.agency/podcast/nick-catto
Nick Catto has been designing and developing websites since 2001. Now, he spends his days overseeing the design and development of nuCloud as the platform’s Co-Founder and UX Designer. He also runs his own web development and consulting business at MrCatto.com. Previously, Nick worked as a senior UI/UX Designer for the NOAA Office of Coastal Management in Charleston, South Carolina. He also spent eight years as the Director of Web Services at the University of South Carolina Upstate. Nick has presented on standards-based coding and web design at conferences in both the U.S. and UK. A jack of all trades, Nick has always been fascinated with all kinds of technologies.
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- How Nick’s experience at the University of South Carolina Upstate helped him realize the marketing potential of an interactive and versatile digital campus map
- How Nick and his partners developed their own award-winning interactive map that later became NuCloud’s foundation
- Why an interactive map is a very different tool from a virtual tour, and why you must keep your goals in mind during the development
- How an interactive map offers greater data on users’ interests than a static image map, and how it may help drive new student applications
- Why you must make your institution’s map as accessible and easy to find as possible, and why you should add a link to your interactive map in the footer of your webpage
- How illustrations, rather than satellite photography images, allow your institution to curate the campus experience for map users
- How a digital map serves a flexible purpose that benefits many campus departments
- Why your institution can incrementally update digital maps to scale with your needs
- How nuCloud has recently begun developing 3D-printed Braille maps for visually impaired users to be able to explore campuses