In addition to training for a ½ marathon, which she’ll be running on Sunday 6/28/09 locally, my fiancé has also been taking an online Master’s Certificate program in Internet Marketing since April. This program will make her more marketable (pun intended!) in her current job, but also will be a nice thing to add to her resume in the event that she finds herself in the unfortunate position of job searching. In this day of job insecurity, it’s not a bad thing to do.
Anyway, as part of her coursework, the program encourages their students to either create a website or find a website where they can apply the things being learned. “Hands on” learning, especially with this type of material, can be more beneficial.
As you know, I’ve been involved in my Temple for a few years and recently finished my first year as a member of the Board. My project for the past year was to get that youth group reunion put together, but after that, I was just kind of there hearing all about the financial woes and brain-storming ideas for getting more congregants ‘connected’ and more involved with the Temple.
So when Linda was looking around for a site, she thought that she could use the Temple website as her case study.
It’s been eye-opening to go thru this process with Linda. First of all, it’s kind of fun.
The Temple's website is well meaning and has an abundance of information, but it's not as effective or organized as it should be. Some things are outdated and other pages are in need of a make-over.
Once ‘tags’ are put on the various pages within the site, all kinds of reports can be generated showing all kinds of tracking information like where people are coming from geographically, as well as how long they stayed, where they went, and what search criteria got them there.
What it comes down to, is that our Temple website could use a little make-over. Both from a functional stand-point and it’s appearance. I decided to take it one step further and asked the Temple President if we could get together with her and some other board members to see about making this a project. She was thrilled and and we’ve been given a green flag!
Linda has been driving all the behind the scenes techy stuff that has to do with tagging things as I mentioned before, and I’ve been focusing on doing descriptive write-ups for the descriptive tags and also working on a ‘pitch’ to present to the board members when we meet with them in July. This pitch will contain what the reports have shown us (with the 3 months of data that we’ll have in the reports as well as some contructive suggestions for improvements for the near future and some long-range plans, as well.
In addition to all of this, Linda e-mailed the Instructor about our Temple’s website last week, asking for some advice. She told him all that she had done so far, what she was planning on doing in the future, and asked him if she was on the right track and if he had any suggestions for her.
She didn’t hear back from him right away and thought that perhaps with all the mail that he must get, who knows when she'd hear back from him.
Each week, there is an online class, where they go over various topics to do with the chapters being discussed. And at times, they’ll take a look at a specific website as a case study exercise for the class.
The Instructor replied back to Linda yesterday. It seems that our Temple website will be the case study for tonight’s class! So I’ll be sitting in with Linda to hear what is being said. How cool is that?!!!
This whole Internet Marketing is turning out to be a win-win for Linda and our Temple!
In the meantime, there’s a lot of work to be done, but it’s all for a good cause.
Nice job, honey.
Cool!
Posted by: Tina-cious.com | 06/24/2009 at 16:14
Good grief!!! That is a lot of work!
It must nice to have such a good techie in the family.
Posted by: KMae | 06/24/2009 at 20:53
Way to go! You two are a great team, making a wonderful contribution!
Posted by: Delmar Bogner | 06/25/2009 at 10:16
Tina... it is! and fun!
Kmae - it is - just one of her many talents!!
Dad... thanks, we really are! ;)
Posted by: val | 06/25/2009 at 10:53