Here at Chapman, our blogs come in all shapes and sizes.  Blogs have popped up in different ways and at different times, and in some ways this is a good thing.  However, to the visitors of our blogs we may appear disjointed and unorganized.  We are on a variety of platforms (wordpress, blogger, etc) and have a variety of looks, and writing styles.  Most importantly, there is not one central place where all of our blogs can be found.

Here are a few topics I have been pondering lately:

  • Search engine optimization
  • Ability for visitors to our website to easily find all of our blogs
  • Ease for a user to subscribe and follow our blogs
  • A URL that validates the blog as ‘official’ (blogs.chapman.edu/admission feels more official than chappenings.blogspot.com)
  • Branding (while we would want the blogs to have individuality, we would want to tie them together in at least some way
The “Web and Interactive Marketing” team (this is just Meghan and me right now) has met internally about this issue as well and come up with a recommendation.  In an ideal world, we would provide a local install of wordpress.org for the Chapman community so that it is easy to create blogs.  We should be able to help design the blogs and teach writers in various departments/colleges/etc to use it.  They would all be easy to find at either blogs.chapman.edu or www.chapman.edu/blogs so they would be organized and easy for our readers (or any potential readers) to find.
We are currently working out the logistics with IS&T to see if this local install is a possibility.  When we have more information, we will update people here at www.chapman.edu/smc/blog.

 

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-DM