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As promised in yesterday’s post about potential changes to PACE in St. Johns County, we’ll provide an analysis of our efforts to communicate and promote gifted education in St. Johns County.

First, you will notice a pretty big change in the website - we decided to do an overhaul to bring to the home page the information and links visitors formerly had to navigate deeper into the site to find. Please let us know what you think.

Second, we believe in what in industry is called Integrated Market Communications, meaning the utilization of multiple communications channels working in support of a common objective. We regard this website as one piece of this strategy, and we try to support other channels by providing linkage and helping to spread the word about gifted education in St. Johns County. No two people access information in the same way, so it is important to have diverse channels such as brochures, fliers, message boards, word-of-mouth, teacher and school websites, and the district’s website. This is why we provide links to those sites we consider to be valuable, as well as re-publish the header and links for the CCE Yahoo Group messages - if you click through any message in the category “Asides”, you will find it takes you to the source at Yahoo. If other parent groups would like their message traffic available through this website, you will have to make an RSS feed available by making your group public.

Since publicly launching St. Johns Gifted in early October, we’ve seen the following traffic:

Unique Visitors: 415

Visits: 1688

Pageviews: 5933

Google was responsible for 133 of these visitors, a bit more than 30%, with the remainder coming from other search engines, incoming links, and referrals from emails. Given that the nature of the site has such a narrow audience (stakeholders in gifted education in St. Johns County), we’re surprised at the number of hits from search engines.

Digging deeper, we find stjohnsgifted.org ranked for some fairly predictable search terms, as follows:

st johns county pace resource - 1

st johns pace program - 1

st johns gifted information - 1

st johns gifted info - 1

florida st johns gifted programs - 1

cunningham creek pace - 1

cunningham creek gifted - 1

pace program st johns county schools - 2

st johns school district gifted - 2

st johns school district pace - 2

It appears that stjohnsgifted.org ranks ahead of the District and school websites unless the words “district” or “school” are included in the search query. While it is satisfying to see we’ve built a site that that is gaining in authority in the eyes of the search engines, the fact is that the District and each school’s websites SHOULD be the authority sites for all of these search terms. We are independent; while we are supportive of the district’s communication efforts with regard to gifted education, this will probably not be the case in every issue related to PACE. Fortunately for us, and unfortunately for the district and the schools, stjohnsgifted.org is likely to be the first stop of parents searching for information.

We are not web professionals; we are hobbyists, and this site receives a microscopic share of our attention. We did this because we worked smarter, not harder, and if the district is serious about its communication efforts, it will need to do the same. In examining the district site, we find a number of simple optimization techniques that are being ignored as well as a lack of regular updates, a key to maintaining a leading position in the search engines.

Parents are obviously looking for this information, as our analysis shows. Hopefully, the district will examine its communications strategy and make the necessary adjustments to provide the same leadership in promotion of PACE that it provides in the classroom. In the meantime, we’ll continue our efforts to communicate and promote gifted education in St. Johns County and urge you to promote gifted education to your neighbors and friends.

Posted: 12|1|07 at 4:41 pm. Filed under: News. New here? Follow this entry via RSS 2.0. Comment | Trackback