Dear Webmaster 

• Remove all obsolete information, references and data from your site and make sure your 2013 information is up. 

• The UP language policy states that all webpages (excluding Veterinary Science) should be available in both English and Afrikaans. Please make sure your pages are available in both languages. Contact the Language Unit if you need help doing this. 

• We have found that most lay-out and 'look and feel' issues are due to the non-use of the Paste from Word or clean-up tool functions. ALWAYS use the “Paste from Word” icon  to paste text that you have copied from Word. This ensures that the correct fonts and sizes are used. If your font is still not correct, use the clean-up  tool. Contact the web office if you struggle with the lay-out of your webpages.

• Your faculty, department or unit’s welcome page is usually a visitor’s first point of contact with you and should entice them to browse further through your site. Make sure that this page is colourful, relevant and interesting. Remember, first impressions last!

• Show the world that exciting stuff is happening in your unit/department by adding news articles on a regular basis. This is one of the best ways to ensure that your site’s content remains fresh and attractive for Google and other search engines. Remember that you can recommend your news article to display on the UP front page, Intranet and Student Web as well – this implies added publicity and a definite increase in the number of page hits of your site! Your news articles can also been shared to social platforms like Facebook or Twitter.

• Make use of multimedia such as galleries, sound clips and videos – it is easy to take them with your cell phone: web users are interested in images and events happening in your faculty or department!

• Another way to increase web traffic to your site is through inbound links from external sites. Therefore, if your unit/department has any partnerships or agreements with associations or companies, remember to ask them to place a link to your webpages on their websites.. Subpages tend to change more regularly than front pages.

• Carefully check all the pages on your site and make sure that all the links are working correctly. When replacing dead links, it is always a good idea to point the link to the landing page of the site you want to link to (for example  http://www.csir.co.za/) rather than a subpage (for example  http://www.csir.co.za/msm/index.html)

Dear Webmaster

The year is quickly winding down and I'm sure you have just as much to get through still as we do!

Media workshop presented by the Department of University Relations

During a previous meeting of UP’s Marketing and Communication Forum the current media footprint of the University was discussed. For those who missed the session, it basically boiled down to the fact that we do get a lot of publicity, but that the impact of the publicity is limited, partly because of the fact that it isn’t the result of well-coordinated and communicated media, marketing and publicity efforts.
It was also stressed that the development of a media decent strategy that aligns itself with goals and values contained in, for example UP2025, will require continuous communication about media-related matters.
DUR is having a series of discussions/workshops starting with a media training workshop on the 14th of November 2012. The sessions will be presented by Alan Arquile from Credence Consulting which forms part of the larger communication group Meropa.
Alan is a former senior journalist, advertising copywriter, editor and editorial director for Group Editors. He has worked as communications manager for BMW South Africa, was managing director at a PR firm which was the largest in the country at the time. His scope of writing work has included anything from speeches for state presidents to water and sanitation messages printed on media releases, video scripts, speeches for State Presidents and Bafana Bafana coaches. Alan has also presented more than 500 media training sessions to date and has worked with half the JSE Top 40 companies and 18 national government departments.

Date: 14 November
Time: 13:30 - 15:30, with a finger lunch at 13:00
Venue: Post Grad L2-67

Please confirm your attendance of both the workshop and the finger lunch with Isabel de Necker at isabel.denecker@up.ac.za before Friday, 9 November.

Data cleanup

You are all probably well versed in this by now, but with the end of the year coming up all webmasters should:

• Remove obsolete information and data
• Start getting the 2013 information ready and up

Remember, help is just a click away if you require assistance or support with your website. Go to http://web.up.ac.za/support and log a ticket and we'll be ready to help.

Happy summer cleaning

The Web Office team

!Social Media Workshop reminder!

We are still picking up many broken links, especially those pointing to UP Space and urge you to please check your minisite for any of these links, and to either remove or fix them.

• Incorrect link structure: https://repository.up.ac.za/upspace/handle/####/####
• Correct link structure: http://repository.up.ac.za/handle/####/####