In an ideal world, all academic offering pages would always be a blend of concise functional information, useful contextual information, and colorful details full of personality unique to each individual institution. Since we don’t live in an ideal world, I’ve included several simple things .edu web teams can do to improve major and degree pages.

Provide all the necessary functional information for each major or degree.
Functional information includes program (and course) requirements, types of degrees available (such as BA or BS), options (such as concentrations or foci), and program-specific opportunities that give the degree an edge over competitors (such as internships, co-ops, and research opportunities).

Create content subcategories that matter to prospective students.
Given that prospective students will shop around for a major or degree, what does each specific college or university offer that a student can’t get down the street at Middling University? Prospective students want to know what careers options the degree will open up for them, and what other graduates have done with the degree. Who are the faculty members teaching the core requirement courses? What are the most popular or interesting courses available?

Include relevant visuals.
Academic offerings are the core products colleges and universities offer to the public, but many universities have major, degree, and program pages with no visuals for academic offering pages at all. The major or degree is what each individual student will be living and breathing during most days at a college or university. Degree pages are a perfect place for photography related to the subject-at-large (i.e. biology images), visuals specific to the college or university (new facilities or labs), or portrait shots to add humanity (faces of famous faculty).

Shorten the distance to a finished application by having next steps on major and degree pages.
Prospectives who investigate several different colleges and universities may not get to the end of a finished application if it takes too many steps to get from an major or degree page to an application. These pages should offer immediate next steps related to enrollment (request information, get tuition costs, apply) rather than asking visitors to re-navigate through the admissions section of the site.

Make sure each program page is buttoned-up for SEO.
Following basic practices for SEO will improve the chances of targeted leads coming to a major and degree pages through search engines. For starters, content on these pages should be regularly updated, page titles should be unique, and meta descriptions should be clear and concise.

Provide links to related majors / degrees.
A major or degree page shouldn’t be a dead end for a curious student or an undecided freshman. Visitors should be able to see links to other, similar offerings. Related academic offerings can be created based on the most popular majors, minors, and degrees within each school or college.

Perform usability tests specific to academic listing pages.
There’s no better way to improve a page or set of pages than watching users perform (or try to perform) critical assigned  tasks. Doing short usability sessions (~20 minutes) to assess navigation to specific academic offerings from different parts of the site and to assess how users perform critical tasks on these pages can produce ideas for making these pages more frictionless.

Starting small
If the above steps to improvement sound easy, consider that scale increases the difficulty level. Many of our clients offer between 40 and 100 undergraduate majors, so deploying and maintaining content for individual academic offerings becomes a challenge just by sheer volume. If you’re thinking about enhancing your academic offering pages but have limited resources, I’d recommend starting small: begin working on the five majors or degrees with the highest enrollment.

A sample content model
One tool for showing intent, declaring functional requirements for different page contents, and mapping the effort involved in creating new major or degree pages is a content model. I’ve included a sample content model for an undergraduate major as a public Google document.

Three good live examples
Biola University: Biological Science Major
North Park University: Biology Major
Wofford College: Biology Major*

*Special thanks to Kylie Stanley Larson for providing this example.

File this post under the following: #HashtagStrategy

Originally developed by Twitter users as a means to categorize messages, the # symbol has crept from platform to platform to become a universal way of connecting content.

Hashtags are supported on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Google+ and Pinterest. The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook is working on incorporating the hashtag into its service by using the symbol as a way to group conversations. Simply put, hashtags are increasingly a part of how to communicate and bring order to our online worlds.

As the NCAA starts limiting the use of hashtags on the field and Facebook finds a way to incorporate them into its platform, it’s time higher education started paying more attention to the # symbol and everything it means.

Your institution needs a hashtag strategy.

A recent RadiumOne survey found that more than 70 percent of consumers favor using hashtags on mobile devices and nearly half feel motivated to explore new content when hashtags are present. As hashtags increasingly become an acceptable way to coordinate content, it’s imperative that institutions put thought into how and when to use them.

The goal of any hashtag should be to convey a key message of your institution’s brand marketing strategy and to coordinate conversation around that message. Each hashtag created should be easy to use and clear in its purpose. A hashtag strategy does not mean having a different hashtag for every campaign. It means putting thought into what you put behind the # sign.

Here’s a few guidelines for getting started:

Set a goal.

As with any social media endeavor, be sure to be able to answer the simple question: Why are we doing this and what is the goal? Whether it’s to connect content, build brand awareness or form a conversation, know the reason for the hashtag before adding it online.

Do your research.

There are any number of services out there that can help when it comes to researching the history of a hashtag. Is it already is use? What does it mean? How much traffic does it generate now? What the Trend, Hashtags.org and Twubs are just a few tools to get started. Do your research and remember that hashtags are open to all.

Avoid creating spam.

Twitter makes it clear in its help center: “Don’t #spam #with #hashtags.” The microblogging service recommends using no more than two hashtags per Tweet. Tweets with too many hashtags are hard to read come across as a desperate attempt to fish for traffic. Ask Brian.

Know that hashtags never really die.

Content from years ago may no longer swim in a Twitter stream but that doesn’t mean that’s its gone for good. Hashtags are searchable and, like most anything else on the Internet, can be archived.

Have fun with it.

Hashtags are not the secret sauce to getting something to go viral. Not everyone will use your hashtag just because you created it. Hashtags often are experiments. Try them out, see what works and coordinate conversation to build better community.

Photo by Quinn Dombrowski used under a Creative Commons license.

It’s not often those working in higher education on the web get a huge vote of confidence for spending time and money on any one particular feature. For those committed to providing accurate calendar information, that time may be now.

More than 92 percent of colleges and university find an online event calendar helpful, according to a recent survey conducted by Localist. Those numbers echo the 2012 E-Expectations Report in which 90 percent of college-bound students said an online calendar was worthwhile.

If you’re making decisions based on the 80-20 rule, focusing time and attention on an online calendar becomes a no-brainer.

So it should come as no surprise that 68 percent of survey respondents said an online event calendar was the most useful feature of a school’s website — well ahead of academic information (53 percent); news (48 percent); student and faculty directory (45 percent); map (30 percent); and, athletics information (21 percent).

And while getting people to recognize the importance value of an online calendar may be easy, the true challenge lies in getting them to submit information for it. Only a quarter of survey respondents said they ever entered an event on their respective institution’s calendar.

In the end, the data suggests your audience is looking for three things from an institution’s online event calendar:

1. Reminders about the events they want to attend. More than 80 percent indicated it was important to receive reminders about events in which they’re interested; 59 percent of respondents said they would like to hear about those events via an email newsletter.

2. A central place they can rely on for event information. A majority of respondents (56 percent) said that seeing all events in one place was their favorite feature of an event calendar.

3. More detail about the events already listed. Providing greater detail on events was the most popular response (61 percent) when survey respondents were asked what was the best way to improve an online calendar.

Looking to launch an online calendar of your own? Here are a few we’ve worked with in the past:

• Localist
• Trumba http://www.trumba.com
• ActiveData Exchange calendar
• EMS Master Calendar
• Bedework open source calendar

Why Big Data Is Awesome

If the internet is the engine of our digital world, data is the fuel that powers it. We wouldn’t have any of those cool social media tools without massive amounts of data flowing quickly and efficiently around the globe. These massive amounts of data continue to accumulate at such an exponential rate that we’ve now coined the term ‘Big Data’ to describe the innovations surrounding the possible uses of this unprecedented amount of information. Big data, combined with other recent technologies such as cloud computing, is already leading to remarkably transformative changes in all types of industries:

• GE’s Industrial Internet – or as they describe it, “The convergence of machine and intelligent data,” is changing the way that manufacturing industries work.
• The Hubble Deep Field project is using big data to map parts of the universe we’ve never seen before and changing astronomy in the process.
• In only 10 years, The Human Genome Project has used big data to reduce the amount of time it takes to map a human genome from 13 years to three days.
• The Obama Campaign used big data to get President Obama elected, twice.
• The Oakland Athletics used their ‘Moneyball’ big data approach, turning conventional baseball statistics on their head and forever changing the professional sports industry.

Big data is having an impact on many industries, and higher education is no exception…

Why Big Data Is Awesome For Higher Education

Why is data important to people working in higher education? Among other things, big data:

• Allows you to utilize Facebook as a killer marketing platform for free – because Facebook advertisers are willing to pay for ultra-targeted advertisements based on user behavior.
• Forces alumni and career services offices to increasingly rely on LinkedIn’s mammoth career and employment data stores to make connections for job-seekers.
• Causes your conference hashtag to trend on Twitter.
• Allows us, through predictive modeling, to become more and more adept at solving problems with student recruitment, retention, and job placement before they start.
• Provides a big source of analytical data (Google Analytics) to many websites, allowing us to make strategic decisions about how to improve our sites over time.

Why Big Data Is Awesome For Higher Education Websites

But what about websites in particular? Let’s take a minute to imagine what the typical college website contains — and then dream about what is possible with a website connected to and leveraging big data.

Without big data, we have static images and infographics to highlight statistics. With big data we can allow users to interact directly with our data through a tool such as Google Charts.

Without big data, we can embed Google Maps of our campus in our site. With big data, we can allow our users to dive deep into demographics – for example, using tools such as Polymaps to show alumni population density in real time.

Without big data, you can have a cool geolocation-based orientation game for tours. With big data, you could provide visitors an augmented reality campus tour using Google Glass.

With your default google analytics data you can generate useful reports, but imagine what is possible when you start to leverage big data practices to produce multi-channel conversion funnels.

Without big data, your alumni database is an island. With new tools such as EverTrue, you can begin connecting your system to the big data powering LinkedIn.

Without big data, you can showcase campaign progress through traditional profiles and videos. With crowd-funding tools powered by big data, such as Kickstarter, you can highlight progress in real-time.

Why Big Data Will Be Hard For Higher Education

What are the challenges standing in between today’s reality and tomorrow’s utopia?

1. Lack of good data: You can’t have big data if you don’t have good data. Good data involves:

• Data normalization – making sure there’s one authoritative source for data.
• Data standards – making sure there are clear rules and policies around data structure and use.

2. Shortage of good talent: You can’t have big data if you don’t know what to do with it. This will require:

• New skills to interpret and take action on all this data.
• Resources to clean up and improve existing data.

3. Lack of infrastructure: You can’t have big data if your systems don’t work with it. We need:

• Software systems that elegantly transform data into usable, actionable reports and user interfaces.
• Interfaces built to extract data from the myriad sources where it resides.
• Relational, instead of flat, databases.

4. Lack of awareness: You can’t have big data if you don’t know why it’s worth having.

• People need to be aware of the potential. Share this article with your coworkers!
• Campus leaders need to know where to go to get information and examples.

The challenge and opportunity for all higher education sites is to utilize big data to its fullest potential. Even the most beautiful, intuitive, and compelling sites stand to benefit from big data innovations in the years to come.

I’m not done with data.

I want to take a deeper dive into some of the amazing things we’ll be able to do with our websites thanks to big data, so stay tuned for more on this topic and its many permutations, including:

• Data Visualization
• Crowdfunding
• Predictive Analysis
• Augmented Reality
• Web Analytics

I’m also not the only one at mStoner who is paying close attention to these possibilities. With each new project we undertake, we’re looking for more ways to leverage data to create ever better, more impactful sites for higher education.

In other words, be congruent. Don’t tell your direct reports to write more descriptive subject lines with a message titled “Email Issue.” Don’t pressure your partner to get more exercise while you stay firmly on the couch. Congruence suggests an easy symmetry, where everything folds together and effortlessly aligns. When we feel congruent, we feel hopeful, authentic, and on the right track.

We know our campuses are special, organic communities filled with students, faculty, and staff who recognize the community’s unique value. Each time a new member joins, it shows that someone else appreciates the organization we devote ourselves to sustaining. In higher education, our efforts to build and maintain a web presence should amount to an institution-wide journey toward congruence.

Organizational consultant Andrea Mathews, L.P.C. puts it nicely:

“When we are authentic, we are congruent. The mind, heart, body, soul are all working together and going in the same direction. And the recipient of any communication from this authentic person is going to feel that congruence. She might not know what to call it, but she knows it and she probably likes it. It feels to both the sender and receiver a little like coming home.”

Congruence is so powerful that it should be reason enough for a school to pursue a website redesign. Instead, when thinking about whether or not to start the process, higher education professionals often do a lot of justification. This is busywork of the highest order; you can spend months benchmarking, quantifying successes and failures, citing non-compliance with standards, and on and on. All of this is important work that can help make the case. But I would argue that, too often, the sense of place your site conveys to prospective students, faculty, and staff is wildly different from your actual community’s sense of place.

This incongruence needs to be resolved, not just recognized, during your redesign process. If your transfer office had a dead-end hallway, how long would you leave up a sign with an arrow that said, “Speak with a counselor, this way?” What about the staff member who hands out three-year-old versions of your recommendation form? If your site’s navigation leads to broken links and outdated PDFs, it has the same effect: poor service and missed opportunities at every turn. Online, these mistakes can linger for months or years.

This is incongruence: the digital expression of your institution’s experience doesn’t match the actual version. Students and parents can sense it. If your web site’s design, navigation or content issues cloud the actual student experience, how can those students be expected to accurately determine whether or not they fit with your institution? Students leave school for many complex reasons, but some of those reasons undoubtedly relate to a sense of incongruence.

So, yes, benchmark and quantify away. But the largest lost opportunity in an aged or neglected web presence may feel more like incongruence. Trust that feeling.

There are URL naming structures to consider, keywords to be be added to page titles and the proper prioritization of heading tags in copy. Yet there’s one piece of data that doesn’t factor into most search engine results — the meta description.

Google more than four years ago made it clear where it stands on descriptions: “Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.”

Yet just because Google disregards the description, it doesn’t mean you should.

Search engine optimization is more than worrying about the “engines.” Optimizing a site for search also means optimizing for the people conducting the search. While a meta description may not influence ranking results, it can play a key role when it comes to click-through rates and inspiring a user to spend more time with you.

Every opportunity to enhance a brand, to draw in another reader or to speak to a specific audience can make a difference — even in a space as a small as the meta description.

What’s surprising is how many institutions, both large and small, forget to craft enough text to make this an engaging item … or make them too long to fit within the set limitations. The following are actual descriptions (with institution names removed) indexed by Google that appear in search engine results:

• Research affiliation: Center for Research Libraries
• [University Name] Home Page · Student Life & Services · News & Events · Library · Log Into Connections. Quick Links… Academic Affairs, Academic Calendars …
• Skip to Main Content. [University Name] · A-Z Index · my[University Acronym] · Events · Directory · Maps. Search [University Acronym]. Utilities. A-Z Index · my[University Acronym] …
• [University Name]. School of Social Work – Transfer Student Applications Mon, Oct 1, 2012, 2:00pm – Fri, Feb 15, 2013, 11:55pm. Holiday Helper …
• ©2011 [University Name] Admin Login T.O.P.S. If you’d like to provide feedback on our website, please fill out this form. More hence cheap …

Do any of those descriptions leave you yearning for more?

Examples of Good Meta Descriptions

The meta description space is a small area, sure, but there are institutions setting a strong example of how engaging that space can be. The following are examples of some institutions doing it right:

The stories these descriptions tell are so much larger than the 114 to 135 characters that comprise them.

As Greg noted, mobile share of traffic is certainly trending upward. To prepare to provide a better experience for these increasing numbers of users, it’s important to note that mobile users have different goals, habits and motivations. These users even have different sense of time–most phone screens timeout after several seconds and the coffee line is only so long, so users are hyper-aware of the moments they spend waiting for content. Over time, this has conditioned us to develop a truncated attention span.

According to our analysis and benchmarking of .edu sites, the behavioral data bear out much of what this shorter attention span would suggest.

Across the board, desktop users spend more time on site. Mobile users look at fewer pages per session on their devices, and, in most cases, bounce more easily than desktop users. One interesting insight was that the percentage of first time visitors to the site was consistently higher in the mobile population. Of course, this is a tricky metric, since a “new visitor” who visits as a mobile user may have accessed the site in a browser many times before. Still, making a site intuitive for new users is a worthy goal, no matter the motivation.

Optimizing your site’s performance for mobile viewports isn’t complex or mysterious. Here are some tips to help boost engagement on smaller screens:

Minimize site load time at small resolutions. A breathtaking feature image looks amazing on-screen, but while waiting for a heavy download, mobile users are very inclined to flick the back button and abandon their exploration. As Doug Gapinski mentioned in an earlier post on lessons for responsive design, five seconds tests the upper limits of mobile users’ patience.

Borrow from the advertising world. At your site’s smallest breakpoint, try shifting to an alternate headline with a clear messaging call to action (CTA). Think, “See How Sea Otters Form Social Circles” rather than “Our Research: Sea Otters are Social”. Asking the user to do something concrete helps them focus and increases the likelihood that they will follow through. Even better, run an A/B test to try both headlines across all viewports. You may find that a more active, CTA-focused headline will help your desktop users, as well.

Make it feel clickable. Creating irresistibly clickable link states for small screens is a simple CSS trick. On a touch device, it’s easier to click on a box or color field than an isolated line of text. By adjusting the appearance of your links and expanding the click area, you can help the user feel confident that their finger will land on the intended target. In doing so, you’re boosting your site’s usability and your users’ confidence.

tl;dr conclusion: A satisfied visitor is more likely to stay engaged and read additional content; if you assume you have five seconds to make a first impression and help your users navigate as quickly as possible, you’ll likely start to see your mobile engagement rates rise.

Consider, for instance, in 2013:

• Education institutions are now embracing and expressing their brands through their website, but many still mistake a logo, a set of colors, and a tagline for the essence of their community.
• Audiences have become more sophisticated and demanding, but their key information and service needs remain.
• Content is still king, but generating good content is still a big issue with even robust communication teams. Limited resources, varied skill levels, and issues of quality control in a decentralized publishing environment still pose significant challenges.
• The complete web experience now includes much more multimedia, social media, and SEO, but strategy, production planning, and ongoing curation still form the foundation for a well-deployed site.
• Most every client we know has a CMS, but that software remains a tool — not a complete solution — for managing an online presence.

I’d like to spend a little time in this and some subsequent blog posts musing about what what’s remained, and what’s changed, since the heady days of my first project. This afternoon’s topic: navigation.

About. Academics. Admission. Research. Student Life. News & Events. Athletics. Giving. (Marsha, Marsha, Marsha.) Look familiar? Augmented by audience links (current students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents) and task-based sets (apply, contact, visit), this topic-based link set has become stock and standard over the last decade … and for some fairly good reasons. Based on the mental models of prospective students (mostly undergraduates, if we’re going to be completely honest), this navigation (or some derivation) set gets them to all of the most important information they’re considering (do you have my major, where am I going to live and eat, what will I do when I’m not in class, what’s going on). The terminology is clear and functional, and all of the usability tests we’ve conducted over the years confirm the efficacy of the framework. Why fix what’s broken?

From what I can tell, what’s changed mostly is how we’re willing to display that information. We used to insist that everything must appear “above the fold” and that nothing important could be hidden by a dropdown menu. As we all move toward mobile-first websites, however, we’re pushed more than ever to adhere to the priorities that we’ve identified in our strategy. We must compress, reorder, perhaps even cut, and that’s a good thing. On the flip side, we have more liberty than ever before to layer information and explore navigation and touch-and-gesture native layouts. And this is the space in which I think that innovation in navigation will happen.

BACKGROUND ON THE WEBINAR AND THE SLIDE DECK
We know that audiences experience institutional brand through an ever growing list of social media channels; but you can’t expect your audiences to connect the dots. Instead, you need to develop an institutional plan that will allow you to stay on message across multiple digital channels like social media aggregators, websites, content hubs and social media campaigns. Not to mention that when social media is isolated from your broader communication/marketing strategy it’s a risk. The webinar included specific suggestions and demonstrated best practices through case studies from several educational institutions.

For your reference, here’s my slide deck for the webinar via SlideShare.

QUESTIONS WE DIDN’T GET TO DURING THE WEBINAR

Can you talk about the merge, mashup and convergence of mobile/social/digital interaction? Meaning that the tools and the strategy are reliant on one another.
A few months back, I wrote Mobile + Social = Social + Mobile. A read of that post offers more of my thinking on this topic. To be effective during the convergence of mobile and social, the key thing to focus on is content strategy. We know that social apps are hugely popular on mobile devices. When your audience is using an app developed for Facebook or Twitter, for example, your focus does not need to be on the design or the technology. Instead, you can turn your attention to the content that you’re producing. So as you are creating content for social, here are just a few ideas that take into account that, with increasing regularity, this social content will be delivered via small screens:

• Make it visual.
  Use photography, graphics and other visual elements; these are always popular on social and they can quickly convey a brand message.

• Make it fun.
  Your audience is likely standing in line at the grocery store or waiting for the movie to start while using social on a smartphone. Use whit, humor, storytelling, and even the quirky and unexpected to connect with them.

• Whenever you can, send them to mobile-friendly content.
  Social content is typically filled with links back to your .edu website and that’s good. Remember that there will be some frustration if I you get my attention on social while I’m on my mobile phone, but then you send me to content that isn’t mobile-friendly.

Should different platforms (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.) be used to communicate different aspects of an overall social media campaign?
Absolutely. The point of integrating various platforms is that your channels become mutually reinforcing. So, your marketing campaign on social might use Twitter for announcements and insider information, or Facebook for a topical timeline, or Pinterest for a photo contest. The idea is that all of the channels are featuring content that is on message and creating the buzz, actions, or egagement that you’re trying to achieve. (In case you missed the webinar, a social media campaign is a focused effort to achieve goals using a variety of channels appropriate to the results sought. (Oregon State University’s Powered by Orange is a brilliant example of a higher ed social media campaign.)

If your background is not in marketing/media, what is the best way to try to teach yourself and learn more if you’re managing social media as your job responsibility?
This is a very important question. In some ways, there’s never been a better time to be a professional communicator. However, we all need to stay current and I’m glad you’re thinking about this as it relates to social. I have two recommendations for you:

1. Use social media and other online communities to increase your knowledge. Twitter, in particular, is a super professional development tool. When you follow skilled social media strategists and thought leaders in higher ed marketing, they’ll be sharing links and information that will be useful. EDUniverse and Higher Ed Live are two communities that are chock full of suggestions and best practices related to social media. Participate in those communities and get the most from what your peers have to offer.
2. Personal use of social media is also an effective mode for learning more. And, the experimentation that you do on your personal channels is both rehearsal and test-driving for things you might try on your institutional channels. My favorite post on this topic comes from Todd Sanders. Todd is a thoughtful advocate about an approach that relies on personal use of a tool first. He writes, “My number one social web rule is to play with ‘the tool’ through a personal account before using it on a university account.”

Changes to Twitter’s API are coming in 2013. How might these changes affect those relying on Twitter RSS feeds on their website? See this related article from mashable.com.
Although Twitter will end support for RSS, and the new API will become mandatory on March 5, 2013, “More tweets across the web” describes the option to “…to embed interactive timelines of Tweets on any website.” So the short answer to this question is, yes, relying on RSS from Twitter as the integration tool for social and websites will be problematic. What we can learn from all of this is that the API of any social platform is likely to change regularly and must be regularly on the radar of higher ed web developers. In the best of circumstances, enhanced API leads to enhanced social media integration.

Content and strategy still come first.
Responsive web design is a set of design and development practices. Underlying both design and development, the need is still similar to the original challenges posed by web development: how do you deliver the right content to your audiences? Addressing strategy successfully is still the first step in deploying successful tactics.

Respecting the foundational ideas of responsive web design means providing a better experience across devices.
In the foundational book on responsive design, Ethan Marcotte articulates that fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries (code that changes CSS styles based on browser width) are all criteria for responsive design. We underscore these fundamentals because all three techniques were identified as foundational ways to provide an optimal experience based on the width of each visitor’s browser. As responsive design has gained popularity, you can find many examples of partially responsive sites that don’t cover these three fundamentals well—for example, sites that aren’t fluid between breakpoints. If you want the end product to be great, you have to honor the core fundamentals.

Performance is critical.
NBC reported on research showing that a majority of mobile visitors will only allow a site to load for about five seconds—any longer and the average visitor moves on to do something else. We agree that responsive development practices need to be tailored to deliver content as quickly as possible, particularly to mobile devices. To optimize our code, our development team (with our responsive development efforts being spearheaded by Jim Johnson) is concentrating on a variety of techniques that involve compression (making things smaller), consolidation (reducing page requests and making code as efficient as possible), code structure (ordering or delaying the load of elements in a sensible order), and custom content (changing page elements based on media queries). By optimizing the code, we help our clients deliver sites that load quickly. If you’re looking for more on these topics, responsive gurus Dave Olsen and Erik Runyon both maintain blogs focused on web performance.

Mobile is different, so the mobile breakpoint needs special attention.
Responsive design offers opportunities to rearrange content without building custom mobile sites or applications, but we have discovered the mobile view requires extra attention. Author and speaker Luke Wroblewski outlines the increasing importance of mobile devices used to access the web, including how mobile devices are used and how usability conventions change in a mobile context. Our own experiences with mobile usability testing have confirmed that using less than a third of standard desktop real estate to present content radically alters how people interact with sites. To assist with mobile usability, we are now constructing mobile wireframes, prototypes, or full mobile comps (or some combination of those deliverables) so our clients can better understand how page elements will change for mobile visitors. We’ve also begun folding in mobile-specific usability tests to better understand how visitors interact with the site in a mobile context.

Patterns are a helpful way to find responsive, usable page elements.
The fewer components a page has, the easier it is to build responsively. The issue we’ve come across in higher education is that many of our clients need pages that include many different components. In other words, we aren’t just addressing how basic page elements such as navigation are handled across devices; we’re also solving for the little things like multi-column text, tab structures, and tabular data. Considering patterns (what others have built) for page components is a way to avoid rethinking the wheel or creating pages that are mostly responsive but contain unusable page elements. To help with this, we refer to resources such as author and speaker Brad Frost’s pattern library.

Don’t leave planning out of your process.
I mentioned wireframes, prototypes, and comps above. These are all planning elements. What I’ve discovered is that trying to leapfrog planning usually results in one person (often a developer) being asked to make critical content or structure decisions as an afterthought. I don’t think there is necessarily a hands-down best approach to planning, but my advice to anyone about to engage in a responsive design process is to make sure you include some kind of prototyping.