How to create and manage your eCampus community

How to create and manage your academic or community website

Or some essential tips to learn and have fun with classmates and friends.

Have you ever thought to make a website that would help your classmates and professors keep track of lectures, homework and curriculum activities? If this sounds boring to you let me explain how to turn your web page into the coolest and most visited site your school has ever had.

First and most important element about your community website is your content. Web content consists of all documents, data, applications, images, audio and video files that you publish on your web page. It is crucial that you update regularly your website content and publish information that is interesting to your readers. For example, if you are building an academic website you can speak to your teacher about his/hers lectures and ask permission to publish them online, where everyone can read them at home. You can also find out which are your classmates’ favorite books, games, and movies and ask them to write short reviews. Or you can start up a competition and publish the best school essays so everyone can log in, read them and vote. The best ideas about your website content you will find around yourself by asking friends what they like to read and learn more about. Your content is also a key element of your web page because search engines can index text easily and if the information is close to what a searcher is seeking it can be delivered as a site for the seeker of information. This will eventually result into growing number of visits to your site and high search engine ranking.

Secondly, you can place a news page. In order to do that you have to be an excellent reporter. A professional reporter is someone who splits his/her time between working in a newsroom – writing news – and going out to witness events and interview people. Imagine yourself writing news about upcoming events, interviews with professors and school mates, small articles about your community, life at school or in the city where your school is. This type of information you will find from your school’s administration, in the local newspaper or simply by talking to your friends at school. Once you start a news column, however, you have to update it regularly. Soon you will find out that your schoolmates read the news section frequently and you cannot afford to stop publishing more and more interesting news. Later on you can even offer your readers the option to subscribe to your website and receive newsletters by email. A newsletter is an extremely powerful tool when you need to spread the word instantly to a large number of people.

Thirdly, you can include a calendar of events on your community website. In this section you can write about exam schedule, mid-term test, or school program. Most importantly, you have to include all sorts of extra curriculum activities such as day trips, holidays, sport events, city concerts, school carnivals, music festivals, art exhibitions, science meetings, and anything else that takes place in your community and is of interest to your audience. If you spend enough time on this section and update it often it will soon become the most trusted event calendar your school has ever published.

Furthermore, you can create a web forum on your site. An Internet forum is a web application for holding discussions and posting user generated content. Internet forums are also commonly referred to as web forums, message boards, discussion boards, discussion groups, discussion forums, bulletin boards or simply forums. Web forums have become so popular among online communities that nowadays it is impossible to imagine a community website without a forum. If you manage to gather enough readers to your website soon your forum will become its most visited and read section. As an administrator of your forum you can invite friends to comment on different subjects, discuss interesting topics and share personal views about school life or anything else. Web forum is a lot of fun because it gives everyone the opportunity to give an opinion in a friendly and real-time environment.

Finally, on your community website you can upload your favored photo albums, videos and images so everyone can see them. You can divide your images into different categories: let’s say summer holidays, school trips, sport events, city landscapes, favorite images and many more. Do not forget to write captions to your images. A caption is a short and descriptive piece of text that labels your picture. You can also include the date and place where the image was taken. By doing this everyone who visits your gallery will know when and where the picture was taken. Very often people like to comment on pictures and soon your web gallery will turn into a mini-forum with funny comments.

If you read everything and think that you can launch your own academic website, the most natural question you ask yourself is “Where do I start then”? In order to publish your website on the Internet so everyone can see it, you need to find a web hosting company. A web hosting company provides server resources for the use of their clients.

Nytka.org has created a special eCampus web hosting package that offers an easy-to-set up and pre-built features so you can create and maintain your web site. This package has been designed especially for academic and community purposes with all of the above mentioned features and applications for the ultimate online experience. With this eCampus package you will be able to create your tailored gallery, forum and blog as well as users’ personalized profiles. The package also includes spam protection, control panel and unlimited e-mail accounts. Moreover, the eCampus package comes with a free top level domain name for 1 year sign up,10,000MB disc space, 200,000MB bandwidth, application auto installer, 24/7 technical support and tips how to optimize your website and make it easier to read and navigate.

Do you want to give it a try?

Write to sales[@]nytka.org by including the following coupon code in your subject “eCampus” for additional information and special discounted offer.

May Avenay

Head of PR