We’ve now added a feature to the College of Education Calendar Application allowing users to download an iCalendar compatible .ics file to their computer. From there, users can import that file into any number of desktop or web calendar/appointment applications that support the iCalendar format.
Therefore, if a student is interested in an event taking place a few weeks into the future, they can add that event to their calendar application without having to type in all of the information.
One of the features we’ve been working to implement is a directory of various School District and Organization job listings pages. We believe this to be an important page to allow our students, graduates and other visitors to seek potential employment. This page allows School Districts and other Education related organizations to submit their HR pages or job listings pages for inclusion in our directory. We will then view the submitted site and, if approved, post it on our directory page allowing others to navigate to that page and view current employment openings.
We have now implemented online donations available through the OU Foundation website. Potential donors can now navigate to an online form in which they can submit a donation to the College of Education. On various pages within the Alumni and Donors section of the College’s website we’ve placed a button indicating that users can ‘Give Online’. You can view one of these buttons from http://education.ou.edu/alumni_donor/about_dev/ <– scroll down towards the bottom of the page.
Donors currently can give to both the:
Donors and Alumni can also join the Alumni and Friends Association online, with support for Dallas Area Alumni coming soon.
We will also be adding support to RSVP for the Celebration of Education online. These pages are currently in development and will be added soon.
View the Student Services Podcasts
Student Services came to Bill and me to discuss publishing a podcast aimed at helping students with their questions about advisement. Liz Ehrhardt and Dorothy Bradshaw recorded the initial entry for the podcast titled ‘Who is my adviser?’, a question and answer session explaining what the advisement process is and how students can take advantage of the process. We developed a quicktime movie and incorporated the audio along with a photo slideshow and published a webpage to host the podcast. The Podcast is located at http://education.ou.edu/studentservices/podcasts/. Students can view the most current entry or click on the archived entries to view them.
There is also an RSS feed to which students can subscribe to be notified of new entries posted to the podcast. We feel this may be a great way to reach our students to ensure that they have the information they need to succeed.
Well, now that the site has been up a bit and we’ve updated some of the ‘incorrect’ content left over from the old presence, I’ve been able to go in and optimize some of the code. I know this isn’t the best way to work (get the site live, then go back a fix things), however not creating the code myself from scratch has presented some problems. I’m cleaning up some of the cumbersome code and optimizing redundant code, etc. Following is a detailed description of my goals as I clean up the site:
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Wow, when you think of anything that has had a huge impact on the web-savvy community, you’d have to first think of Social Bookmarking. It’s the equivalent of calling all of your friends, relatives, adversaries, acquaintances and everyone else in the world with an internet connection and telling them that you’ve just read a great story, then reading the story to them and letting them offer their comments. However, you don’t have to sit on the phone, coffee in one hand and donut in the other, talking for days on end to get your message out. Social Bookmarking was conceived from the well-known ‘Favorites’ folder on your PC. If you’re saving a page to your favorites, wouldn’t your friends be interested in that page as well? Wouldn’t others? What if there was a way to save all of your favorites with comments and allow all of your friends to see what you’ve saved - and then make comments of their own? That’s the whole notion of Social Bookmarking.
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We’ve begun implementing a new feature for the search results page on the website. This new feature will deliver Featured Results (much like paid-advertising results) at the top of the search page for a specific term.
The problem:
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There is a profound difference in the way content is written for the web versus content written in papers and research. Web users have become accustomed to scanning through content and if not quickly becoming satisfied with the information, they click elsewhere. Therefore, it is extremely important to employ the ‘Inverted Pyramid’ technique when writing content for the web.
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I received information about an online Search Engine Optimization quiz from an RSS feed in which I subscribe. The quiz is offered by SEOmoz, which is a Seattle based SEO company that also runs an online community of those interested in learning better SEO practices. I was not aware of this company, but decided to subscribe to their feed as I feel they will be offering some great content. Anyway, I took the quiz and just missed the top ranking (SEO Deity) by just a hair. If you have been studying SEO techniques, this is a very challenging quiz and I would recommend giving it a shot. They offer great feedback on your answers, so you not only find out what you’ve missed, but why. My results are below:
89%
My primary inspiration to develop this quick little tutorial is to aid the members of the College of Education in creating content for the website that is keyword rich. However, this should be useful to anyone that is just beginning with Search Engine Optimization and keyword research. I’ve chosen to use the FAQ format with this tutorial as it is the quickest way to be sure I’ve answered questions that I’ve received regarding writing content for search engine optimization.
Keyword rich refers to content on a web page that is optimized for various keywords. SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) will show results based on a seemingly infinite number of factors [the number of factors of course is finite, but if you’ve ever studied SEO, you understand my slight exaggeration]; one of those factors being the relevancy of a web page to a specific keyword. For example, if someone was to search for the term ‘keyword rich’, the SERP would list pages that had that term embedded in the textual content of that page, as a page title, or in the meta-data.
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