How Educational Institutions Can Take Advantage of the Internet?
Do you know that it has already become normal for people to look after a job, a training course, make an airline reservation, hire an employee, and find a used car on the Internet? Which shows a need for educational institutions on the Internet. Your future students, who look for new knowledge mainly on the Internet, are the population to whom you should have every reason to reach. It is time to show that you have a modern educational institution that understands the internet and addresses its students in an interactive way. Here are a few ways how you can achieve this.
Let your site be informative, precise, interesting and easy to find and use.
The essential things that need to be considered to build a good webpage:
Many institutions that do not have experience with the management of sites focus on how it looks and neglect many aspects of its aims. To create a good site, besides a good designer, you should have a person that will make a good informational site structure. This person may be hired, or a member of your team, but in any case, he/she has to cooperate with someone who knows your institution and its advantages and knows how to focus on important matters.
Website must be fast-loading - this is one of the preconditions for the site to be characterized as good. Avoid making the entire site in "flash" or making extensive use of heavy graphics and complicated applications that make the site load slower, so that people wouldn’t have to wait long to get what they need.
Besides looking nice, the site must be structured so that first-time user can easily find the things he/she Besides looking nice, the site must be structured so that the first-time user can is looking for. As much as it is possible, the relevant pages or links should be easy to find at a click of a button.
Think about the needs of your visitors and not only of your own desires - define who are the visitors of your site (primarily your students and future students) and organize the site to be as useful to them as possible. For example, some educational institutions use the main positions on their web-sites for information that does not represent the primary needs of the visitors. You need to look from the direction of a visitor. The site should attract attention and offer interesting data. Provide useful information – your site should provide useful information that people can use without having to look hard for it.
Optimize your site for Internet search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.). - For this you need a webmaster who understands SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Optimization is important because it allows you to help future students to find your site, when searching the Internet. How do you know that you have a well optimized web-site? Go to a search engine and do the search for some of the keywords for you (e.g. name of your school, training course, etc...) and see which position your site holds in the list of the search results. The higher it is - the better. And do not forget: Optimize the work at the beginning, but optimization is a permanent task, that should happen continuously.
Some useful questions to ask an SEO:
Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
What's your experience in my industry?
What are your experience developing international sites?
What is your most important SEO techniques?
How long have you been in business?
How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them? Update your site - You cannot make it and then leave it. The site must always be updated with up-to-date information. Unfortunately, this responsibility is not often given to a specific person or the person doing it does it as a side-job. And do not forget, when making a website, to go for one that has a CMS system (Content Management System) that allows you to easily update content.
Create your profile or group on Facebook
Global Internet Social Networking communities, such as Facebook, can be your tool for wider representation to a networking group of users of these sites, and can be useful as a tool for attracting future students, communication with them and strengthening your brand. See how others are doing - Cambridge, Stanford, University of Arizona, Znanje.infostud.com. If you want to, you can create a similar site on Myspace.com, or at some community-type site.
Post photos to Flickr
Photos are something that can breathe life into your presentation – we all know how pictures of smiling and satisfied students can influence visitors to feel closer to your institution. Of course, photos can be put to your official site, but it would be useful to upload photos on some world-famous and highly ranked online photo
management and sharing applications. You can establish your "channel" on Flickr.com and present your photos in a variety of ways.
Use YouTube to promote your videos
You can film a video clip of your institution and post it on world famous site for video clips like youTube. the more places you present on the Internet, the easier the people will find you. A link to your youTube.com channel can be placed on your site. However, have in mind that these films should not be pure advertisements. It would be good to have clips that are informative and provide some useful information to the visitors that would keep their attention.
Last thing you should do is marketing or advertisement.
No need to spend a huge amount of money in order to be known on the net. You can simply use virtual marketing.
References:
http://www.buildwebsite4u.com/
http://www.how-to-build-websites.com/
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/