Improving your online presence A programme of events delivered by Netskills for JISC/SCA
In 2009, Netskills successfully tendered for a project to produce an event for the JISC Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) on 'improving your online presence' with an emphasis on search engine optimisation.
Working with SCA partners at the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) and UKOLN, we developed an event to demonstrate techniques to improve the visibility of web content. This included how to structure web content, effective web writing, metadata, microformats and RDFa and the potential of the social web.
We ran four, two-day events in Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh and London. The events were attended by 125 delegates from universities, archives and museums, health services, schools and cultural heritage.
Amplification of the events through use of web services including blogs, Twitter, Flickr and Delicious enabled greater audience interaction and remote participation. The resources generated during these events are archived on the SCASEO project portal.
Extended Programme
Due to the popularity of last year's series of workshops, the SCA asked us to schedule an extra five events Autumn 2010. The updated workshop titled "Maximising the Effectiveness of your Online Resources" will be run at locations spanning the UK, as the team travels between London, Newcastle, Belfast, Glasgow and Manchester.
Demonstrating simple and inexpensive ways to improve the visibility of web content, the two-day workshops give a comprehensive overview on the latest tools and trends on the web - still with a focus on search engine optimisation. In addition to the topics covered in the first round of workshops, there will also be an exploration of the relevent parts of the new CSS3 and HTML5 standards.
The original workshops were extremely popular, attracting full audiences from a variety of different roles and backgrounds. Workshop material along with news, photos, opinions and videos from this year's workshops have been gathered in the project website: http://scamore.netskills.biz/
Feedback Video
Feedback Quotes
Feedback from these events was excellent, with an overall course rating of 88% (4.4 out of 5) and comments such as:
One of the best training events I have attended for some time. Strong on content, ideas and good tips on how to implement them.
This course has been the best training I have received. It has had a major impact on my knowledge and was structured in a way that I could simply go through my notes to create a new working plan.
Great course—great presenters—great job!