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 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

Word Press (http://www.coeforict.org/wp-admin/index.php)

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) 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.

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 MediaTweeting has multiple purposes: 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. The information leads to website traffic and that’s a good thing. 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 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!