Posts filed under 'Portals'

Content is King (still)

The phrase “Content is King” has been around for a while, but it still holds true.  While website design is intrinsically valuable, visitors aren’t searching for design—they’re looking for information. They arrive by typing in a URL, choosing a bookmark, or clicking on a link. The aesthetics of the site has no bearing on their initial arrival.  Once there, of course, imagery and graphics help.  But, lacking the “right content,” a visitor will quickly leave, and perhaps never return. 

For your college or university, the need to provide prospective students with quick access to current and relevant information is intensified. This generation moves fast, thinks fast, and wants their information fast.  According to a recent study by Noel Levitz, James Tower and NRCUA on the E-Expectations of high school students, 66% and 61% of A and B students (respectively) rated website content more important than the multi-media experience, and 73% of all students wanted their desired information to be just a few clicks from the home page.  These findings are significant when you consider that another 2006 Noel Levitz study on institutional E-recruiting practices found that according to 40% of campuses, 20% of their electronic applicants had made no prior known contact with the institution before applying. 

So, what’s the takeaway here?  When it comes to your website, content matters!  And, when it comes to recruiting, you need to make sure that the really important stuff like academic programs, tuition tables and financial aid—the stuff that decisions are made from—can be found right up front.   Good content, complemented by helpful navigation and attractive design and imagery is the foundation of a great website.  Add to the site marketing mix some social networking tools, such as the previously discussed blogs, and you’ve competitively spiced up the offering. 

Other tools such as RSS and rich-media add real content value too, but we’ll save that discussion for another day…

Lance Merker
Guest Blogger, May 2008

CEO
OmniUpdate, Inc.
lance@omniupdate.com

Add comment May 13th, 2008

Portal . . . what is it good for?

Last week we attended the Alliance Conference in Las Vegas. One of our presentations prompted a discussion of portals. We all did a show and tell, and after we showed our portal, one attendee asked why we even had it — since we had stripped it down to bare functionality and skinned it to match the look and feel of our main website. I said “our CIO asks us the same question every time we pay maintenance fees on it.”

This is certainly not a new question for us or for any school. In fact, we ask and try to answer questions about portal implementations each summer at the Portal Conference in Gettysburg. Our presentation last year on thin portals spawned a number of great ideas from the attendees of that conference.

We predicted at Alliance that we would be pulling the plug on our portal in 18-24 months — as soon as we had a solid architecture behind our website that could handle the authentication as well or better than our current portal. We suspect that we will then be faced with some other technoexistential question around that implementation. So it goes.

What do you all think? Portal, intranet, thin secure layer, nothing? What do you do at your schools now? More importantly, where are you headed?

Thanks for reading.
Ted Simpson
March Guest Blogger

Director, Technologist, Dragoman & Project Manager
Maryland Institute College of Art
tsimpson@mica.edu

Add comment March 15th, 2008