This month is packed full of workshop goodness at Weigle! To help you build your web presence and take control of your digital footprint, graduate interns Chava Spivak-Birndorf and Jaime Marie Estrada are teaching a series of complementary workshops on social media, digital fluencies, and web design.
Here’s are some quick tips to give you a small preview of the topics we’ll discuss:
1. Use consistent branding.
Name and image recognition is very important online when you’re competing with so many millions of other people and brands for milliseconds of attention. For personal branding, pick a variation of your name and stick with it across your social media accounts and/or personal website. If you’re building a web presence for a professional brand, create a recognizable logo and choose one name to use across platforms. Learn more about how to do this in Jaime’s series of Digital Literacy workshops, which starts on April 8th with personal websites and LinkedIn.
2. Keep things up-to-date.
Nothing gives away that you’re not committed to your brand or that you don’t have time to maintain it like an old copyright date or an “updated date” that’s months or years old.
3. If you have a blog, keep it active.
If you’re going to have your blog showing up on your personal website, it will immediately alienate your visitors if they see your blog is not regularly updated. It’s better to have a more static personal website with no blog than a static personal website and a static, old blog that’s not kept up.
4. Watch out for broken links.
Broken links kill your credibility and drive your visitors to set out in search of better resources, which can hurt your ranking in Google and other search engines. Search engines want to deliver relevant results to their users, and when people don’t stick around on your site, it looks like your site isn’t one of them. Chava will teach you how to keep your “bounce rate” low in her web design and search engine optimization (SEO) workshops.
5. Don’t overwhelm yourself.
You don’t need to establish active profiles across every platform immediately. Pick the platform you feel most comfortable with (e.g. Instagram, LinkedIn, WordPress, etc.) and develop your skills and quality content there. You can always broaden your reach after you get going.
Ready to get started? Register at the links below!
- Wednesday, April 5th – Get Google to Notice Your Website
- Saturday, April 8th – Social Media Necessities, Session I: LinkedIn and Personal Websites
- Tuesday, April 11th – Web Development for Personal Websites and Blogs
- Saturday, April 15th – Social Media Necessities, Session II: Facebook and Instagram
- Saturday, April 22nd – Social Media Necessities, Session III: Twitter Networks
Feature image: “The Art of Social Media” (CC BY 2.0) by mkhmarketing
ve in a time where you no longer have to know everything about how to code your own website scripting with HTML, CSS, PHP, etc. You can use a content management platform! Content management platforms allow you to build a full website, directly in your browser without any prior knowledge of website development. Even better, there are free content management platforms (which allow you to do a lot, without having to bump up to the premium packages with additional features), such as WIX and Weebly.
PennWIC 