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Engineering Gets a Facelift
By Bob Bottomley | August 31, 2011
We just launched the new Bourns College of Engineering site. This project was not a complete redesign. The scope was much smaller: change the overall site template and redesign the home page. Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: Development | No Comments »
Keep it Simple: Call it a Dorm
By Ross French | August 1, 2011
Want to cause a ruckus? Go visit the folks who oversee your institution’s on-campus housing and start throwing around the word “dorm.” I can almost guarantee that you will quickly be told that “dorm” is not used and that the proper term is “residence hall” or something similar.
In the eyes of the housing people, “dorm” has hugely negative connotations. A dorm is just a place to sleep, while a residence hall is a learning community. A dorm is sterile and antiquated. A residence hall is state of the art and beautiful.
But your average student doesn’t care. A residence hall is a dorm. A dorm is a residence hall. The terms are interchangeable. Dorm is one syllable. Residence hall is four. Dorm wins.
And chances are when those prospective students go looking on your Web site for information about housing, the word dorm is going to be the word on their mind. They don’t want to have to think about it, they just want to know where they are going to live.
The morale of this story is to keep your content simple. It’s OK to use residence hall
Go ahead and ask a dozen students what dorm they live in. I bet that none of them take the time to correct your use of the term.
Topics: Writing | No Comments »
Being Present and Responsive on Facebook
By Ross French | July 25, 2011
On his blog, InsideTimsHead, Tim Nekritz (director of web communication and associate director of public affairs at SUNY Oswego) recently posted his Five Golden Rules for Social Media.
They are:
- Be present
- Be prepared
- Be responsive
- Be friendly
- Put goals before tools
I encourage you to check out his post and read the details, but I do want to touch on what I feel are the two most important items for people charged with managing a Facebook fan page: being present and responsive.
Being present means keeping your fan page active – putting up content on a regular basis. You don’t want to overdo it with too many posts, but you want to put up interesting content on a regular basis.
What is interesting content? Photos, facts, articles, questions. It can be almost anything that you can type into the box. What it isn’t is blatant marketing or shilling.
Being responsive is all about paying attention to what is going on with your fan page and answering the questions and comments that your fans post.
If you get a question, find out the answer and post it. If getting that answer is going to take some time, let them know you are working on it and will reply as soon as you are able. That simple level of responsiveness shows that you care – and it can make a big difference in how your organization is perceived.
Both of these tasks are time consuming. Depending on the volume of traffic on your site, you may find yourself checking it multiple times a day, particularly if there is an interesting discussion going on. Thirty minutes to an hour of time daily is not unheard of.
If you don’t feel you have the time to commit to these two items of social media maintenance, it may be time to sit and reconsider if a Facebook fan page is right for your organization.
Topics: Facebook, Social Media | No Comments »
Facebook: Avoiding Ghost Towns
By Ross French | July 20, 2011
When I come across an un-maintained fan page on Facebook, I have this mental image of a tumbleweed rolling through an old west ghost town. As I read the posts from six months, nine months, a year earlier, I can hear the wind whistling through the dilapidated old buildings.
Topics: Facebook | No Comments »
Captioning on YouTube – A Quick How-To
By Ross French | July 19, 2011
As a follow-up to my earlier post on captioning, I decided to give a quick primer on how to caption a YouTube video.
First, a disclaimer. This information is accurate as of July 18, 2011. It is quite possible that YouTube will change something tomorrow and make it so this is no longer accurate. They do things like that. Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: Accessibilty, YouTube | No Comments »
Captioning: It’s the right thing to do
By Ross French | July 18, 2011
Here at UCR we use YouTube as the host for the majority of the videos was post on the site. At the moment, we have somewhere around 150 official videos.
About two months ago, my then-assistant Tulasi Lovell and I began a fairly tedious, but extremely necessary task – we added closed captions to all of those videos. Further, any new video that gets added will also receive the caption treatment.
I had a lot of people ask me “Why are you doing this? Isn’t it a big waste of time? What’s the point?”
The answer for me is really simple – we did it because it was the right thing to do. Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: Accessibilty, YouTube | 1 Comment »
One Word or Two? The AP Gets with the Times
By Ross French | April 20, 2010
Last week, the Associated Press made an announcement that you probably missed, but one that will likely mean that you have a little bit of work to do if you oversee the content on a UCR website. Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: OmniUpdate, Writing | No Comments »
Footnotes are for paper
By Ross French | March 24, 2010
One of the bad habits I see from time to time on Web sites is the use of footnotes. Carryovers from the print world, footnotes simply have no place on the Web.*
Topics: Writing | No Comments »
E-Newsletters – Do Them Right
By Ross French | March 23, 2010
When I was a teenager, my family would get a monthly newsletter from the La Canada Flintridge Tournament of Roses Association. Even though I worked on the float almost every weekend during my high school years and knew all the scuttlebutt going around, I still looked forward to it. It was filled with neat little stories about the development of the float. When I went away to college, my mom would forward it on to me to keep me in the loop. Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: E-mail, spam, Writing | No Comments »
Hey, We Won!
By Ross French | March 11, 2010
The Web Development Team in the Office of Strategic Communications got some exciting news in our inboxes this morning from Sharon Duffy, the dean of UCR Extension. The University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA) has selected the new UCR Extension Web Site as the gold medal winner in their annual 2010 Strategic Marketing Awards. Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
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