So it really is part of my job to play around on Facebook and YouTube and explore other universities' websites, all in quest of ideas and inspiration to improve the SLU.edu site. And there's some added pressure these days since the school basketball team apparently has a real chance at getting a berth in the NCAA tournament. If that happens, we can expect to suddenly hit the radar of a lot of new prospective students who just might pay a visit to our website to see what the deal is with SLU. It is unfortunate that we aren't more commonly known as St. Louis, since there really aren't many words starting with the letters SLU that have a positive connotation. Slum, slut, slug, slur, slurp....okay, I can't think of any!
One of the problems with our current website is that it features a bunch of really slick, professionally produced videos that no one really bothers to sit through.
Additionally, almost every page features snazzy photos based banners that rotate every time the page is loaded, except 1. who bothers to load a page over and over again and 2. a lot of the photos are old, old, old and not particularly relevant to the rest of the content on the page.
And last, we have this odd little mascot that looks like an albino version of Shrek and it takes some pretty serious electronic digging to find the pages (and there are a few) on the website that explain what the hell a Billiken even is.
So these are some of the things that I'm going to have to address over the next couple of weeks in the face of Selection Sunday, now only about three weeks away. Maybe SLU won't make the tournament after all and even if they do, maybe it won't make much of a difference in our web traffic, but, just in case they do and it does....we need to be ready.
A couple of fun things I've found:
BYU came up with a fun and very watchable behind-the-scenes video for a photoshoot that involved pouring buckets of water on scantily clad young women. Oh, those Mormons...
I have plans to put together my own fun video about SLU's student- built, solar-powered golf cart (golf carts are a thing here), but it probably won't be as fun as wet gymnasts.
And I'm pretty sure this campaign stems from last year's sad disappearance of a female Indiana undergrad last summer, but nonetheless, it is entertaining and compelling and likely to hold the elusive attentions of those teenage eyeballs we so covet.
