Three easy features that add value to your site
April 13, 2009 in ideas
1. Crime map
Estimated time to produce: 30 minutes a week #
If your campus puts out a regular police log — which most college police departments do — setting up a crime map like this one is easy and your readers will love it. Go to Google Maps and under the “my maps” feature, set up your new map. Plot each crime from the police log onto the location in which the crime took place and spice it up using relevant icons and colors. #
Why your readers will love it: It’s a digestible way to read about crime on campus. It’s also more personal because they can see where crimes happened in relation to their own locations. #
Update the map once or twice a week. #
2. “Trending topics” pages
Estimated time to produce: 1 hour initially, 15 minutes for each additional update #
I stole this idea from Twitter. Much like Twitter lists “trending topics” on their home page, you can maintain go-to pages for the trending topics and issues on your campus. After the initial setup, maintaining the pages is simple. #
For example, at Cal Poly, a big issue is a possible college-based fee increase. It’s something students care about and want to read more about. On our “trending topics page” (which we call “hot topics” but you can come up with a catchier title than that) we link to recent articles about the topic, letters to the editor and columns, as well as all relevant multimedia. #
Students can find everything they need to know, and it’s accessible from our homepage (our brand new homepage on our brand new web site, might I add). #
3. Event calendar using Google Calendars
Estimate time to produce: 1 hour a month #
Although I couldn’t find an example of a college publication doing this (if you have one, let me know in the comments and I’ll add it to the post), a Google Calendar of campus/community events could easily become a popular feature for college students. UPDATE: Batmoo from the comments informed me of a gCal system on The Boar (a student-run magazine for the Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo) and adds some insight:Â #
 The flexibility of gCal allows us to embed a small version in our sidebar on the home page, and full-scale version on its own page. It’s super easy to use, and changes propagate instantly, plus it has built-in support for RSS and iCal, which is a nice bonus. Downside is that it’s not searchable. #At the start of each month, editors can compile a list of events — which they’re probably doing anyway for story ideas — and throw them onto a calendar. #
It’s a win-win situation: reporters can use it as a resource for staying on schedule, and readers can use it as a resource when planning their weekends. #
Now comes the bonus: Spend the time to develop these pages and promote them (in print if possible) so they gain a steady flow of traffic. After that happens, throw a few ads on each of these three pages and you’ve got yourself an extra flow of money every month. Not bad, eh? #
The advantage of generating your own list of popular topics (as opposed to using an auto-generated) is that, rather than basing it on which articles have the most views/comments, you can use your editorial discretion to generate "topic pages" that deal with issues you know students are talking about on campus. Also, I should note that my idea of a "trending topic" page is more than just listing a popular issue, but really building a page around an issue. You can see our preliminary example here. It's still in the rough, but it has the potential of being a useful resource for students who hear about these topics in class and in passing, but don't know much about them. Thanks for the tip about the gCal, I didn't realize you could generate events automatically. I can see how that'd get out of hand, though. Good work with Connect 2 Mason, btw.
A good set of ideas!
Something cool to look at – http://ucrime.com/ is a website that automatically generates crime maps and lists of crimes from a number of sources. I'm not sure how up to date it stays and it doesn't appear to be embeddable, but it is a decent resource. In addition, you can take the RSS stream and use it to generate your own crime map (using Yahoo Pipes) automatically, though it won't look as nice.
Also, we have been running a Google Calendar of events for a while at http://connect2mason.com by searching out Google Calendars for most of the University's departments and many of the Clubs, along with Facebook events (which are importable into gCal) and we can then run them through Yahoo Pipes (which processes the ical files) and export them into one large combined gCal with all the events. We've taken it down for now though, the calendar had almost all the events going on around campus and it was just too large to be manageable or usable by readers.
I think for the gCal, what we need to do is edit it down after we import everything in. We're playing around with it.
I like the trending topics idea. Do you think building your own list has an advantage over CMS (like Drupal) that generate popular and recent comment blocks?
Wonderful! Thanks. I added your link to the post. What does your traffic look like for that events page? Is it significantly more traffic than other parts of your site? Have you ever considered selling an ad just for that page, if it does get significantly more views?
[...] multimedia. With full control of the site, you can also expect to see more web-only content (see my earlier post about features I’m working [...]
[...] Three easy features that add value to your site – Innovation in College Media suggests a crime map, trending topics and a calendar. Help, advice and a time per week is all very helpful [...]
We've been using gCal for our events listing (http://theboar.ca/events/) and it's worked really well so far. We weren't able to find any suitable plugins for WordPress, and any 3rd party services (e.g. upcoming.org) didn't have proper embedding support.
The flexibility of gCal allows us to embed a small version in our sidebar on the home page, and full-scale version on its own page. It's super easy to use, and changes propagate instantly, plus it has built-in support for RSS and iCal, which is a nice bonus. Downside is that it's not searchable.
We also highlight key events through blog posts and draw attention to the event listings pages, which is very important for driving traffic.
The State News has been using gCal for a while on our entertainment site, http://www.lansinglowdown.com/calendar/ . We built a plugin to import/sync the data so we could wrap it in our own design.The crime maps are a snap to set up and with a little javascript sugar you can easily create color coded markers. We have ours here: http://www.statenews.com/crime/ . Next step is to make it digest a date range and crime type from the URL so we can link it directly from police briefs and crime reports.
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