If you find this post useful, check out our webinar, Mobile Web: A Crash Course, along with our Higher Education Resources.

It’s more than clear that young people are leading the growth in usage of smartphones and mobile web in North America - 42% of people aged 18-29 go online mainly via mobile phone (eMarketer, 2011). If your target market falls into this age range, as is the case with higher education institutions, neglecting this vital statistic would result in missed opportunities to connect with your key audience.

Marqui's friends at Lakeland College, a progressive, technology-embracing school in Canada, have recognized the incredible value of having a mobile website in the post-secondary education industry. They came to Marqui looking for a full website redesign, along with a brand new mobile website. Using our CMS for Education, Lakeland was able to launch a mobile website engineered with the same functionality and popular features of the full website, but in mobile-friendly format. 

When designing the user experience for the Lakeland mobile website, our team of mobile web specialists were sure to incorporate everything that the multi-tasking, social student of today needs to access on the go, including social media, event calendars, links to student portals, news feed, and a zoomable campus map. Combined with a course fee calculator, registration capabilities, and a job posting page, the essential features of the full site were wrapped up in a compelling icon-driven navigation, in a format compatible with all mobile devices.

Check out some visuals of the mobile website below. It's received some phenomenal traffic so far (mobile website traffic for Lakeland has increased over 200% since the launch in July!). We're proud to have partnered with Lakeland to build this, and encourage all higher education institutions, if they haven't already, to develop a sound mobile web strategy to fully maximize reach in their target markets.



 



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For more info on what Marqui can do for your mobile web presence, check out our tools for Mobile Website Content Management, along with our Mobile Design & Build services.

Landing pages are an important aspect of higher education institutions’ conversion tactics, but, if your landing pages aren’t converting your prospects to leads, then they’re most likely not optimized. Your landing pages are meant to prompt a certain action and by make them appealing, targeted and credible you increase your chances of turning your visitors into viable leads. So—how can you improve your conversion rates?

1. Differentiate. There is no set format that every landing page needs to follow. Using a unique format, with interesting functionality and including features like video testimonials can help you pages to convert much better than a standard, cookie-cutter landing page.
2. Match your target. Is your landing page relevant to the target of your campaign? Keeping each of your landing pages relevant to the target audience of each specific campaign can help your landing pages to convert much more effectively. 
3. Be Credible. Trust goes a long way towards increasing conversion rates. Using tools like customer testimonials and case studies can help your landing page appear much more credible, building trust and encouraging visitors to convert. 
4. Does your landing page match original offer? Nothing is worse than clicking on a link and arriving at a landing page that has nothing to do with the offer presented with the original link. Consistency is an important way to keep your visitors engaged. 
5. Only ask for necessary information. I know the temptation is strong to get as much information from each lead as possible but having to provide a lot of information is one of the biggest conversion deterrents.  Only ask for the information that you need. 
6. Test.  Different formats and content will work for different organizations, audiences and campaigns. It’s important that your consistently testing and experimenting with different landing page formats to help you see what works best for your organization.

Image by ChrisM70 on Flickr.

Recently, a well-known higher education blogger, Karine Joly, posted on her Higher Ed Analytics Blog an interview that she had with Avinash Kaushik on the state of Higher Education Websites and Web Analytics.

The interview itself is full of information that is extremely relevant to higher education marketers and some of the highlights include:

• In Avinash’s opinion, many higher education websites are still taking part in several negative marketing techniques: offline marketing (also using offline techniques and transferring them to their website so that many websites are “brochureware” sites), outdated marketing (many higher education institutions have websites that haven’t been updated in the last 5 years), “shout” marketing (non-interactive websites that push the school’s agenda with little or no user insight).
• Avinash recommends that higher education institutions can improve their websites with web analytics by taking advantage of initiatives like surveys, testing and usability best practices.

We think that both of these points are important, especially in higher educational institutions which many times tend to be behind the curve when it comes to innovative web marketing. While we agree with Avinash, we also have some tips that we think can help higher education institutions make the most out of their web analytics.

What are some of the important things that higher education institutions can be tracking with web analytics?

1. Applications to the school and the navigation paths a user used to get there
2. Conversions rate on different calls-to-action (schedule a campus visit, download the course calendar, request school information etc). 
3. Top content (who’s reading your blog? What pages do new visitors find most useful?)

What metrics are important for higher education institutions to be tracking?

• Visitors - number of visitors, unique versus returning visitors, number of page views, visitor's geographical location (you can choose this as an advanced filter). 
• Traffic Sources -  direct, referral, search engine
• Content (Site Interactions) - top content, entry and exit pages, navigation paths
• Goals (Outcomes) - conversion rates, conversion values, conversion paths, funnel analysis

What can help you to be more successful with your analytics?

1. Segment! You don’t always want everything and too much information can actually be more detrimental than not enough information.
2. Tag URLs to help you determine the success of initiatives like email and pay-per-click campaigns. 
3. Make sure you’re tracking goals and conversions so you understand how effective your campaigns are (goals could be campus visits scheduled, number of course schedules downloaded etc). 
4. Use social media to monitor your online identity, brand awareness and brand sentiment (remember, the younger, more web-savvy students are taking part in social media, this can be an invaluable source of information!)
5. Set up a reporting schedule to track your key metrics (be an analytics advocate in your institution and share these reports with website stakeholders).

If you want some additional resources on this topic we recommend:

This presentation on Google Analytics and Higher Education
The Trending Upward Blog written by Shelby Thayer

A recent independent study  performed by JISC, an organization which, “provide[s] world-class leadership in the innovative use of Information and Communications Technology to support education, research and institutional effectiveness,” looks at higher education’s current use of Web 2.0 technologies, the challenges facing Higher Education institutions and how they can be addressed.

While the study was performed on higher education institutions in the UK, after reading it we think that many of the findings hold true for institutions in the rest of the world as well.

Key findings for Web 2.0 use in higher education now:

• Web 2.0 technologies are being deployed across a broad spectrum of university activities in similar ways in the UK and overseas
• Deployment is in no way systematic, and is driven by the professional interest and enthusiasm of individual members of staff
• In both learning and teaching usage is patchy but a considerable work base does exist
• While advice and guidance is available to institutions, there is no blueprint for implementation of web 2.0 technologies and as such, each institution is currently choosing its own path

What critical issues do these findings raise?

These issues were determined by JISC and they feel that addressing these issues is integral to, “capitalizing on the momentum that exists” within institutions.

• The digital divide – This is one of the most important issues that needs to be dealt with and involves ensuring access to technology for all students and the development of practical skills in its use.
• Information literacies – This means ensuring that students possess the, “skills and understanding to search, authenticate and critically evaluate material from the range of appropriate sources, and attribute it as necessary.” The concern here from a student’s perspective is that they feel that institutions need to develop a certain level of web-awareness among students so that they can, “operate as informed users.”

The ongoing drivers to change

• Tradition – There is a change in students’ perceptions of teaching where they are looking for traditional approaches to learning (ie personal contact) in a modern setting (ie web supported).
• Environmental factors – This is the digitization of learning materials and creating a receptive audience of teaching staff and learners
• A richer educational experience – This is developing learning approaches that are active  and undertaken within a community and, “based on individual’s interests,” which are widely thought to be the most effective teaching methods and which Web 2.0 technologies are well-suited to supporting.

Report conclusions

Web 2.0, the social web, has had and is continuing to have enormous implications on student behaviors which has lead to strengthened feelings towards and desires for community in the web space and an impatience and preference for quick answers and a casual approach to evaluating information.
The disconnect which is currently facing higher education institutions is that traditional learning methods have been constructed on, “a wholly different set of norms,” which is causing frustration and difficulty for the learning process and a movement for change led by the students themselves.

This isn’t a comprehensive summary of the report by any means and it is definitely worth taking a look at. You can download a full copy of the report here from the JISC’s website.

Image by  Athena on Flickr

As Mashable mentioned a few days ago, Facebook has partnered with a social marketing firm, Context Optional, to build a facebook page dedicated to university resources for students and parents. As the page says in it’s about section,
 
“We started this Page to share our tips on how to best use Facebook as a student on campus.

This Page is dedicated to helping students establish an interactive presence on Facebook by engaging with their campus community.

We also want to hear from you, so please use this Page as a forum to discuss the unique ways in which you are using Facebook as a University student.”



The page already has almost 12,000 likes and a growing following of users that are commenting, and posting items to the page’s wall.

On the page students are able to find out about events, campus communities, deals for students and parents, and they are also able to post university related content.
According to Facebook, the page was developed to help get more student-created content up on the website and help give tips on how other students can and are using Facebook within their university community.

We think this is a great initiative by Facebook and there have already been some helpful information posted about everything from statistics on the amount of sleep students need for optimal performance to examples of how universities (like Kansas State) are using Facebook in the classroom. Check out the new page and let us know what you think!

Recently, Karine Joly, a higher education web specialist, wrote an interesting post on her blog, Collegewebeditor.com, recounting the results of a survey she performed last year on the use of web analytics in higher education institutions. We are constantly telling our customers that if they aren’t already using web analytics, they need to get started as quickly as possible, and we think that the results of her study will be very helpful for our higher education readers.

The study found that while web analytics are still, “in their infancy,” within most higher education institutions, they can (and have been proven to) make a big difference for higher education institutions’ interactions on the web and that the reason many institutions are having difficulty implementing web analytics is because of they are more decentralized and have a hard time utilizing one set of best practices.

The study also found that:

• 95% of respondents indicated that web traffic data is tracked at their institution
• 92% of respondents who use web analytics use Google Analytics
• 72% of respondents who use web analytics spend less than 2 hours a week working on it and 70% do not have a dedicated web analyst in their institution

After reading her post on the study, we were shocked (and pleased) to read that 95% of the respondents have web analytics in place in their organization. This was much higher than we anticipated and shows us how far many institutions have come in their attempts at improving their web presences. After reading that wonderful statistic however we were disappointed to read that most of these respondents don’t actually interact with their analytics on a regular basis, and that most don’t have a dedicated web analytics in their institution. 

Especially in large, diverse organizations, frequently and regularly checking and updating your web analytics data is essential for online ROI.  Universities, often being as decentralized and diverse as they are, can benefit hugely from have a dedicated web analytics expert (or even a team) that can help to segment their information down into as many details as possible, and to really keep track of how different areas of universities main website and micro sites are doing. 

If you want to learn more about getting started with web analytics, check out our post on that topic here.

For a more detailed analysis of the survey results you should check out Karine’s post on UniversityBusiness.com

Most likely if you haven’t already implemented a content management system in your institution you will one day soon. The web is a crucial marketing channel for higher education marketers due to the rising popularity of online enrollment and engagement. With such a large target audience and a high number of content contributors, it is no longer viable or efficient to be running your website with reliance on IT, or highly technical individuals for website updates. As a result, more and more institutions are turning to content management systems as a solution. Implementing a CMS can sometimes be a complicated task, especially in higher education, so we’ve put together a list of our top tips for surviving a CMS implementation.

1. Make sure you understand what your requirements are before you start evaluating vendors. It is important when you are choosing a CMS that you are looking at solutions which have the core functionality that you actually need. Ensuring that you have chosen a CMS that fully meets your needs and can help you reach goals makes for a much easier implementation and training process. Doing a comprehensive analysis of what your organization actually needs, can help choosing your CMS and ultimately implementing it a much simpler process.
2. Don’t get more functionality than you need.  Many CMS solutions are much more complex or too simple for the goals that your organization wants to accomplish. Tools like these are a hassle to implement, and come with an ugly learning curve and often defeat the purpose of trying to make your web content management easier! 
3. Make sure your solution offers training and support. So you think you’ve chosen a vendor, but do they offer training for their solution? You should be choosing a content management system that is easy for non-technical users to pick up quickly and easily, but that doesn’t mean some training isn’t necessary. Choosing a solution that offers training to simplify the implementation process is very useful for a smooth transition, especially in institutions where multiple users across different faculties and with a wide range of web experience will be using the application. 
4. Have a strong website management process in place. One of the best ways to ensure a problem-free implementation is to make sure that you’re not entirely relying on your CMS to solve all of your website problems. If your organization doesn’t have a solid content strategy in place, then a CMS can only do so much to improve your web presence. It’s important that when your CMS is implemented you also have the content development strategy, resources and infrastructure in place to make sure it’s a successful initiative.

Image by Martin Kingsley on Flickr.

Social media and its use in the classroom is an enormous issue for many higher education institutions today. How social media can be used effectively for teaching, the challenges and possibilities that it poses, and successful implementation strategies are all hot topics for educators. To help give some insight into the social media and education landscapes, we've found 5 video resources to help educators get their minds around the issue social media poses.

How to Be a Social Media Change Agent from Harvard Business.

This interview from Harvard Business features Josh Bernoff, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research discussing social media and its effective use.


Social Media in the Classroom from San Diego State University

This video involves a series of interviews with students from San Diego State University discussing the use of social media in the classroom, its educational benefits and the challenges faced with its use.


Face It! Social Media with Intention: Online Presence 101 from Dartmouth

This presentation discusses how social media can help jump start graduates career search, and the opportunities available between social media and the emerging job market.



Social Media: The Possibilities and Challenges from CACommunityColleges

This video is from the CETC & CUE Online Teaching Conference and features a discussion about the possibilities and challenges available to educators who are using social media as a teaching tool.

We know that finding inspiration for a higher education web design can sometimes be difficult. Whether you are updating a current site, or planning an entire redesign, ensuring that you get all the right elements for an effective site can be challenging. To help give you a creative boost, we've found 7 effective higher education website designs from around the world. Enjoy!

Emily Carr - Vancouver, CANADA

Let's start with Canada shall we? (We are located in Vancouver after all). Emil Carr's website has a nice clean layout and design, with bright highlight colors and rotating images on the homepage that emphasize some people of mention at the university and some of their artistic achievements.

University of Boston, Bostonia - Boston, USA

Bostonia is actually a micro site of the University of Boston. The website makes great use of large images and a magazine-style layout. 

Bournemouth University - Dorset, UK

Bournemouth University's website has another very clean layout with lots of whitespace, bright accent colors and easy-to-use tabbed navigation.

Queen's College, University of Melbourne - Melbourne, AUSTRALIA

Queen's College is part of the University of Melbourne and the website has a colorful eye-catching design, and is the best on our list in terms of social media integration on their homepage. The site does an excellent job of pointing potential students to their social media accounts especially Flickr.

National University of Singapore - SINGAPORE

The National University of Singapore has another simple layout, with easy navigation for university news, upcoming events and galleries and good social media integration with a link to the university's Twitter feed in the main body of the page.

Universidad Europea de Madrid - Madrid, SPAIN

This website has a nice image rotator that depicts several of the degree programs available at the university and it makes a pleasing use of dark colors in it's design, the only website on our list to do so. The homepage also has clear social media links and a detailed news feed. For optimized usability, the site  has obvious links at the top of the page to the webpages for other languages for the benefit of  international students.

Saxion University of Applied Sciences - Deventer, NETHERLANDS

Saxion University has the most minimalist layout on our list today. Despite it's simplicity, it maintains great consistency through the site and has nice bright hover states for the top navigation. The only drawback of their no-nonsense design is their lack of social media links, even though the university does have at least one social media account @saxion on Twitter.

With education budgets getting tighter and tighter, and the number of responsibilities and possibilities available for university web departments growing, the typical work load for higher education web professionals has dramatically increased over the last few years, and it doesn't look like it's going to slow down anytime soon. On top of that, the newer applications like mobile web marketing and social media are continuing to become more popular and education websites are under more pressure than ever to compete.

Most universities know that to stay competitive on the web today, an institution needs a dynamic website with significant social media functionality to ensure that your website is up-to-date, that your content is fresh, and that you provide web-savvy students the information they need in a format they like and recognize.

More often than not, the answer to getting your website to the level it needs to be at is to introduce a web content management system (CMS). An effectively implemented CMS can help you create and edit your content quickly and easily, keep your website relevant and the distribute the content development workload so it is no longer in the hands of and over-worked IT or communications department.

Sounds like a good idea, right?

If you think a CMS might be right for your higher education institution, here are a few tips on how you can choose the right CMS to meet your needs:

1. Define organizational goals. Once all the stakeholders in your institution are ready for the change to a CMS, it’s important to define the key goals of each department, faculty and the institution as a whole and  to communicate those goals between the future CMS users. Once these goals have been established, you can start deciding what functionality can help you reach those targets, and how you will track them to measure your success.
2. Prepare a new content strategy based on distribution. Your new content management strategy will be based on a distributed model rather than a centralized one.  One of the most beneficial features of a CMS for education is that it puts content creation into the hands of multiple individuals rather than one web or communications department. However, this will affect your content development strategies and plans, and will require communication/training on proper content development so that you can ensure you have proper brand consistency in place and that you understand how you are going to define workflow and approvals across departments and how you will maintain scheduling ownership.
3. Do your research, and understand what you need. It is important when you are evaluating vendors that you are looking at solutions which have the core functionality that you actually need. Many CMS vendors offer products that are much more complex, or too simple for the goals that you want to accomplish. Before looking at possible solution, it is a good idea to do a comprehensive analysis of what your needs are as an organization based on the goals you defined earlier. Choosing a solution that has the correct functionality to meet your website’s targets can ensure that you end up with a product which effectively meets all of your organizations needs. 
4. Don't focus solely on the technology.  The most important feature of a CMS is that is allows non-technical users to edit and create content more easily. To focus solely on the technological aspects of a CMS rather than the user experience it provides, is counteractive to your goals and the benefits of implementing a CMS in the first place. Make sure that when you’re choosing your CMS you focus on the product's user interface, support system, help and the overall user experience, rather than the more technical aspects (although those are still important).

Bonus tip: another final point that I'll add that can be beneficial depending on the size of your institution, is to choose a vendor that offers a solution which is targeted specifically towards the higher education industry. These CMS products can have additional education-specific features that more general content management systems don't provide,  which can help make your site more appealing to your target audience and lower implementation costs.

Being an education communicator is never easy—especially when faced with trying to engage today’s breed of technically savvy students. Many communicators are having a difficult time reaching out to constituents, students and alumni alike as larger portions of these groups turn to social media instead of the traditional media, still used by many institutions as their main form of communication. In this difficult environment innovative communicators are taking advantage of social media to reach their audience on a whole new level and are having measureable success.

So how do they do it? Take a look at how social media can be used in education to supplement your current communication strategies:

Twitter – A free micro-blogging site which allows users to enter 140 word or less posts known as “tweets” which are then published to the user’s profile page and are visible to their followers. Twitter is hugely popular and appears to only be growing.  A recent study done of students found that over 20% of students use Twitter, and of those, over 71% stated that they expect to increase twittering during the upcoming school year.

So how can you use twitter in education? Twitter is a great place to post pointers to online resources; school and class updates; and student reminders, and it also offers a way to get instant feedback about lectures, school related issues and news. Schools that have experimented with Twitter , have found that is has been an excellent way for students, faculty and staff to communicate with each other.

YouTube —The number one free video sharing site on the web with over 40% share of the online video market. Millions of videos are watched daily on the site which contains mostly user-generated and uploaded content.

The implications of YouTube in education are huge. YouTube can be used to enhance distance learning, to upload supplementary lectures and information like news reports; to contextualize an issue with video examples; to provide screen capture videos for demonstrations and can be easily embedded into lectures and presentations to provide interest.  YouTube now even has a separate site specially targeted for education videos.

Slideshare —A social site which allows users to upload PowerPoint presentations that are freely available online and easily embeddable for others to make use of. The site has many community features like tags, comments, communities and related slidecasts. I think the benefits of this one are pretty obvious: lecture material can be easily disseminated, students can locate other presentation s on the same or similar topics and teachers are able to build up a library of online resources.

Facebook Fan pages —A social networking site where users can add friends and send them messages; view their photos and updates; comment on updates; join networks of other users and send out notifications about themselves. Facebook Fan pages can be used as an open communication forum for students and faculty at an institution. The page can contain photos and videos from and about the institution and information about events, news, and important issues that are relevant for those who are members. Many schools have excellent Facebook Fanpages and are certainly taking advantage of what those sites can offer to their students.

Image by funkandjazz