Sunday, March 21, 2010
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
School Website Examples
The school website is also where more and more students and parents will continually visit throughout their time in the school.
Target Audiences
School Marketing Managers and key school staff should use the website for interaction between the various stakeholders within the school e.g. their students, potential students, staff, families and other interested people including parishioners.
Regularly updated bulletin boards and newsletters, upcoming liturgical and social events, St Vincent de Paul and other charitable needs and requests, photo and video galleries of school activities, etc, are needed.
School Website Examples
To view good school websites, for ideas for your own school's website, just go to your browser and type in such words as: 'outstanding school websites', 'school websites', 'best school websites', etc. There are so many good examples out there.
You may also visit various school websites, system-level office websites and diocesan websites for both ideas and for key personnel.
Two good examples which see the News as central to their homepage are:
St Joseph's Hunters Hill at http://www.joeys.org/index.cfm
Brisbane Catholic Education at http://www.bne.catholic.edu.au/.
Another couple of similar sites worth viewing are the Loreto Toorak site at: http://www.loretotoorak.vic.edu.au/home/ and Aquinas College, Southport http://www.aquinas.qld.edu.au/ .
Another good example follows and is a more detailed homepage version http://www.riverview.nsw.edu.au/, yet quite effective!
The School Marketing Manual for the Digital Age (3rd ed) 2010 by Bryan Foster develops these points further.
The school community will continually deelop their appreciation of the school's website and expect to interact more with it.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Blogs Essential for Church Marketing Plan
Blogs are becoming a very popular form of interactive, digital communication by internet users and hence have an important part to play for church marketing personnel. 'Blog' is the commonly used abbreviation for 'Weblog'.
Content may be brief or extensive. Blogs are used to allow interaction between the website's administrator/s and the website's visitors.
Churches could benefit considerably through the effective use of Blogs. These are ideal avenues to promote your church / parish and the various messages you wish to place in the public or private domain.
These days so many people wish to be valued through their involvement and feedback - blogs are one highly regarded avenue for them to achieve this.
Blog Posts
The website's / blog's administrators write a Blog Post (comment, information, news, challenge etc.) and publish this to their website's blog page. Blog Posts may also include photos, videos, audios and other graphic presentations.
The visitor to your website's blog page would then have the option to comment on your blog post's content.
Blog Posts may be of any length and literary style depending on the target audience. However, in most cases, brevity is the norm in these days of mass communication overload. Think newspaper article lengths for most blog posts. As a general guide I work on 200-300 words per blog post.
You need to make sure that the administrator has the option to accept or reject all comments posted in response to the blog post. If the blog post is available to the public, you need to be prepared to receive all sorts of comments, including spam (mainly advertising links). Unsuitable comments would then be deleted.
Church Marketers could use blogs in two primary ways:
• Parish website Blog
• External Blog sites, which you would point (link) back to your parish website.
Church Marketing Blogs are discussed in detail in the Church Marketing Manual for the Digital Age (2nd ed) 2010 by Bryan Foster.
Due to the enormous growth and interest in blogs, the church marketing personnel need to avail themselves of this unique form of internet church marketing.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Making an Index in Word 2007 Solution to Heavy Editing
When using a large document with over 50 000 words, heavy editing of the text and Index caused a problem with the Index.
I tried to eliminate various topics and page numbers from the Index, however when I either updated the Index or added more topics to the Index, all the topics which I thought I had eliminated reappeared.
I realize that there is a way to delete specific topics laboriously from each page from the Index ( see Windows , http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HP012264991033.aspx#4 ) but this is quite involved and beyond most writers scope when dealing with major editing.
To solve the problem of the reader not having to see these old unwanted topics in the Index, all I did was delete from the Index the unwanted topics and / or page numbers and save the doc as is. Careful not to update or add to the Index! When it was published these unwanted details didn't appear in the Index. True they were still there in the background unseen, but weren't visible to the reader, hence causing no confusion.
The text to which I refer is the School Marketing Manual for the Digital Age (3rd ed) 2010 by Bryan Foster.
Solving the problem of the reader having to see all the old unwanted Index topics and / or numbers, save time by not laboriously deleting individual topics and / or pages from the Index, as per Windows suggestions above, just delete from the Index and save the doc – but don't update the Index at the final stage – suggests Bryan Foster.