Professional School Programs: Easy-to-Scan 9 Options Available People interested in a professional school’s areas of study have the same top tasks as any potential student: Find the programs available and get more information about the program(s) of interest. The University of Rochester School of Nursing makes that easy to do by using 9 large content […]
Home Page Navigation Highlights 25 Task Links Most higher education home pages still use audience-based navigation on the home page and throughout the site: Prospective Students, Current Students, Alumni, Faculty & Starr. Most website visitors, however, are not looking for a particular audience. Instead, they have a task in mind and want to complete it […]
Xavier University Story Continues: Creating the Most Distinctive Home Page in Higher Education Last week I presented the first two answers to questions I sent along last year to Xavier to learn more about how they decided to position a “Search” box and the dominant feature of the university’s home page. Here today are the […]
Connect in 5 Seconds or Less to Create Marketing Strength Yes, you have 5 seconds or less when a web page opens to make a connection with someone visiting that page. People have to immediately see something they understand and that “something” had best be based on a top task the visitors want to complete. […]
Have you been as amused as I have been about the alarms these last few weeks during the build-up to Google’s April 21 change to mobile-search ranking results? Did you believe that a devastating “mobilegeddon” was descending upon us? Yes, the change is important. No, it will not destroy your student recruitment results or your brand […]
Blowing the doors off university website design: innovation run wild at Bucknell A couple of weeks ago someone posted a request on a higher education listserv… Could anyone recommend a firm to create a website design that would “blow the doors off” other university sites? One of the first people to respond used a new […]
Marketing strength in website design: don’t try to “Blow the doors off” Last week on a Listserv for university web developers someone asked for recommendations for design firms whose work would “blow the doors off” typical higher education websites. The request caught my attention. What were university websites that fit the “blow the doors off” […]
Higher education marketing: Slow website = lower student recruitment performance This past week I had the pleasure of doing a workshop at the Corporate Learning Network‘s conference on Effective Marketing for Online Education in San Diego. Before getting deep into “Speed, Simplicity, and Top Task Completion: 3 Critical Steps to Boost Online Enrollment” I asked […]
Scan 9 Academic Program Areas in 5 Seconds on the Home Page Nearly every college and university website has a navigation link to “Academics” at the top of the home page. From that point you may or may not be able to see the academic programs offered in one link or in a drop down […]
eduWeb2011: Expert panels will discuss marketing & web design Marketing and web design are the topics of 2 panel discussions planned for the upcoming eduWeb2011 conference in San Antonio in August. Earlier this week conference chair Shelley Wetzel asked her advisory board members to share their thoughts with her on the most important elements for each […]
Customer Carewords and Top Website Tasks Gerry McGovern gave a webinar yesterday to 60+ plus people from around the world, including several from the higher education sector in the U.S. and Canada. The purpose: focus on the special ability of Carewords research to identify top tasks that people coming to a website want to get done and to generate interest in future […]
My first task this morning left me smiling. I was reviewing several web pages sent from a potential Customer Carewords research client, a regional public university “down South” here in the States. The pages were not online yet… this was a series in redesign to replace the current site not long from now. Something was missing… and […]