Aha! :: Elliance Blog
About a year ago, I took the plunge in to grid-based web layouts. For a long time, I felt that grids were too restricting for creative design and limited your choices and direction for development. Oh how wrong I was. The use of the grids is quickly becoming a standard for rapid template generation. Designers […]
Facebook announced on Tuesday morning that it’s testing such ads in the News Feed with a handful of advertisers. USA Today is calling this “…a move that takes aim at massive spending budgets for television ads.” Rather than having to click or tap to play, videos will begin to play as they appear onscreen – […]
On many of the nearly 5,000 colleges and universities across America, Admissions and Marketing staff often share a building and sometimes an office. Regardless of where the two teams sit, they always share an institutional charge — enhance the product/experience, engage a wide community of prospects, parents, alumni and partners, and build reputation. What’s much […]
Digital (i.e. web+search+social+mobile) has changed everything in the world of marketing. Digital is doing to marketing what quantum mechanics did to newtonian mechanics. Let me share five indicators of a tectonic shift taking place right under our feet: 1. Communications models are now based on themes, not on THE BIG IDEA. The evidence of this […]
In my experience, if you want to put your higher education brand to a quick and dirty reality check — what engineers call “stress and failure” analysis — there are two places to look. First, review any and all content that’s scored high enough to be placed in the feature area of your home page […]
With the holiday season in full swing and 2014 right around the corner, many of our clients and prospective clients are thinking about enrollment for the coming fall. Although your incoming students for 2014 may (and should!) be a top priority, I’m going to suggest that you look a little bit further. It’s not too […]
With Thanksgiving just behind us, like many nonprofits, colleges and universities, you’re probably getting ready to publish the annual “year-end giving” information on your website or send out an email appeal to prospective donors. If so, that’s great. If not… you’re missing a huge opportunity. Consider the following statistics: “The average person makes 24% of […]
Colleges, and those charged with articulating why institutions matter, seldom lack for words… yet rarely learn to speak their school’s one true voice. Why so? In my experience, it has to do with how comfortable any of us can be in that stage before sudden insight arrives — in sitting with “not knowing.” I like […]
Search is one of the most frequently used online tools among US adults. A 2012 Pew Internet Survey found that 91% of adults use search engines to find information on the Web. This survey also revealed that younger and more educated people, meaning current or prospective college students, are most likely to use search engines. […]
If you read our blog, read articles like this, or have a ton of mobile traffic coming to your site, you already know that making your website responsive is a good idea. In my last post, I even went through some of the other benefits of responsive design for your site. But what you might not […]