Welcome back to Web Marketing Wednesdays (WMW), Southwark Consulting’s weekly roundup of news and notes from the digital marketing world! This week’s edition of WMW focuses on web site and blog design – and why your web site is not good enough. We also look briefly at some tips on re-branding and a use case for Twitter at Harvard Business School. As our regular readers know, the aim of this column is to provide a concise rundown of key news items and tech tips for higher ed admissions and marketing staff. Read on for all the latest news…
While nearly everyone in the business school admissions space recognizes the utmost importance of their program’s web site, so many schools still have work to do in this domain (no pun intended). Of the many web site issues that admissions professionals and designers alike point to, perhaps the most popular of late has been ‘responsive design‘. For the uninitiated, responsive design is what allows a web site to resize and tailor its content to look great on multiple devices (from mobile phones to tablets to desktops). Offering a site that responds to different devices is vital in the current era, where many applicants will first experience your site on a small-format mobile device. For more information on the importance of responsive design and other key features that today’s sites need, check out 10 Reasons Nobody Reads Your Web Site/Blog and How to Make Your Web Site a Party People Want to Attend. While the latter is a bit of a promo for a web site theme, both articles offer excellent advice.
Moving from web design and mobility issues over to the content and branding side of things, I want to call our readers attention to three helpful articles that were recently published. The first two relate to content generation and presentation (e.g. how to come up with great ideas for blog posts or articles and publish them in a format that is compelling): 16 Blogging Resources to Improve Your Blog and How to Improve Your Content Effectiveness. And finally, for those schools who are contemplating a re-branding campaign, the third article is Mandy McEwen’s 8 Most Successful Re-branding Campaigns. While the piece is 100% corporate-focused, there are some concepts here for the higher ed side.
We’ll close this week’s edition of WMW with a great example of a use case for Twitter. It comes from the folks at Harvard Business School and relates to the following tweet they posted earlier today:
In this case, HBS is using its large Twitter following (currently north of 100K followers) to help identify great students in the Class of 2015 who they can then feature on their web site in a student profiles section. An interesting idea in terms of crowdsourcing the best nominees for student profiles.
That’s the web marketing news for this week. Thanks for reading!
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HI Graham, thanks so much for including my 8 ways blog post in your article. I really enjoyed the other 2 articles on blogging and content. Keep up the great work! Thanks again.
It’s my pleasure! So glad you enjoyed the post! -Graham