Transcript Center of Excellence’s Website: Your best friend

Websites and Social Media:
Your new best friend
How to make the most of your website: It’s one of
your best marketing, branding, awareness tools
Topics
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An overview of the CoE for ICT website
Effective tools & techniques for strengthening your
website
Social Media (Twitter, specifically)
How the Coe for ICT uses its website(Google
analytics, evaluative data, blog, etc.)
Ultimately, the tips here can be used by educational
institutions, programs, divisions, to think about how
to effectively market themselves and create a
brand/image that is targeted to a specific audience.
An overview of the coeforict.org
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Word Press (http://www.coeforict.org/wpadmin/index.php)
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WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool
and content management system (CMS) powered
by PHP and MySQL. It has many features including a
plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress
is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet's "top 1 million"
websites and as of August 2011 powers 22% of all new
websites.[5] WordPress is currently the most popular
CMS in use on the Internet.
Google Analytics
Istock Photo (http://www.istockphoto.com/)
Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/)
Dashboard
I’ll be taking you through a hopefully a quick post, and a
look at Google Analytics.
Istock Photo
For Graphic Images and photographs we use IStock Photo on a
pay-as-you-go credit system. And, X dollars will by X credits.
Vimeo
Vimeo is a video-hosting site. The center produces video content from the
majority of their events, as well as “The Life of an IT Professional: A Five Minute
Story”, which are student-produced interviews with IT professionals. The videos
have proved to be an excellent marketing tool for the Center’s website. We also
learned that really three minutes or less is the best time for an informative video.
Effective Tools (Do & Don’t)
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Date stamp updates to your website if you
feature them. It’s difficult for a visitor to
assess if it’s new or old news, if there is no
date stamp. Always archive featured website
news or new information by month/year.
Make a practice of publishing evaluative data
on your website if it’s an event or training, as
you can use the comments to advertise the
event or training if it becomes a regular
occurrence.
It’s crucial if you are creating a new website
to view it in more than one browser, i.e. it
might look great in Explorer, but content
might not be apparent or aligned correctly in
Chrome.
Consider tweeting. The more you can
generate traffic to your site, you are building a
brand and create awareness about what your
college, program, institute, degree or
certificate does for the CTC system.
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You should add new content at least
once a week to a website on the main
page, if not the other sub-pages of your
site. Update content and then
“announce it” on your home page. It
keeps visitors coming back because you
are giving them a reason to come back.
If you blog, you need to have a minimum
of two new entries each month.
Otherwise, consider retiring it.
If you have a resource “library” keep the
documents/resources relevant and
current.
Think of the space on your page. If
there is too much text and/or
information, the user will lose interest.
Keep a lot of white space around text
(less is more).
Don’t post a word document to your
website. Do post or upload a PDF.
Social Media
Tweeting has multiple purposes:
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As I look for topics to tweet about I find out a lot of information in the technology world I
didn’t know about, so you are constantly educating yourself.
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The information leads to website traffic and that’s a good thing.
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You are showing your customers, in our case, educators, industry, students, that you care
enough to try to find information that is useful to them.
Tweeting
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Tweeting requires consistency.
Make it interesting, vary your topics, you can also look at what interests your followers and tweet about it.
Google “tips on tweeting” for an overview before you start to tweet.
Tweet about conferences you are attending while you are actually at the conference. (Google “tips on
tweeting at a conference”.)
Realize that punctuation is still important, and there are ways to really edit your 140 characters, w/o
compromising the tweet.
Use tinyurl.com to shorten a URL.
Use tweet pics to load photos/images. First upload the photo then tweet. If you tweet and then upload
the photo, your tweet disappears and you have to RT (or, retweet). http://twitpic.com/photos/coeforict
If at first you don’t succeed, tweet, tweet again!