doteduguru

Another busy, but ultimately productive week in the books.  Some really good reads this week also.  I spent a good bit of the week setting up our new First Year blogs and let me just say, wow.  I don’t know if it’s a wow because 80% of the kids are off to the races with their blogs or because I am absolutely blown away with the craziness of their content?  Kids fresh out of high school really have no fear about what they tell to the world and how they say it.  Two bloggers specifically are running away with the show already.

• Mapping Memory: Web Designer as Information Cartographer - This is an interesting read by Aaron Rester from the other week on the A List Apart site.  Approaching web design from more of a cartographer instead of a architect is something I haven’t really thought about before.
• Add Compression to Your Web Server - Your web server should be compressing your files before serving them to your users. Why? There is no reason not to, 99% of browsers know how to decompress them and if you’re serious about hosting a professional web site, you should know every second it takes to get your content from your web server to your user counts.
• Five Ways to User Social Media to Reach People Who Don’t Use Social Media - Wow if there was a must read of the week. This is it. At least for me. So go learn how to convince people that EVERYONE needs to be reading .eduGuru!
• How Search Engines May Use Images to Rank Web Pages - It has been a fairly common belief that a search engine will look at text associated with web pages when ranking those pages, but information from the search engines about how they might actually use text related to images has been somewhat scarce.
• 5 unusal ways to market your product to college students - A quite interesting list of product ideas that could appeal to college students… hmm
• The revised Commandments of Email Marketing - Head of Marketing giving us the updated and revised 5 commandments of email marketing. How not just for admission folks.
• Power Headlines To Increase Conversion - Certain power words and phrases consistently outshine other words, and you can tailor these to the needs of your target audience — and have them scrambling to find out more!
• Measuring SEO: why rankings are worthless - Go beyond rankings and measure basic metrics like the growth of traffic generated from the organic search listings. Segment that traffic per keyword and go measure the conversions, preferrable per keyword. And get even a greater insight about the quality of this search engine traffic with metrics like bounce rate, time on site and returning visitors. But interpretate those metrics with care and take in account much more information besides the metrics.
• The future of search - I am a search addict. I ’m naturally inquisitive – I’ve always liked finding things out. Plus, I’ve worked at Google on search for the past 9 years and 3 months. Of course I search - a lot. Yet I would guess that on any given day, I only do about 20% of the searches that I could.

And now for the Funny Video of the Week.  Well this week I’m going to help some of my boys do a little promotional effort.  In case you haven’t seen the video here’s your chance.

Many came to help and we even saw a local rival mascot do his best to assist in the search.