Presenting the second Mid Month Memo: a newsletter-style blog we’ll be publishing every second Wednesday of the month. In the Memo, you’ll find practical advice and best practices for using your uConnect platform, inspiration from other partner schools, news from the uConnect community, and more!
The team at C.T. Bauer College of Business’s Rockwell Career Center provides a robust and dynamic career portal for their students and community stakeholders. Bauer’s team also does an exceptional job featuring their employer partners on their uConnect platform. Partners, or Sponsors, are given heightened visibility in a scrolling ribbon beneath the homepage banner. And on their Sponsors page, partners are segmented into four distinct categories, based on a comprehensive partnership program. Says Jamie Belinne, Assistant Dean for Career Services at Bauer, “I like the sponsors banner and pages. The sponsors like them as well.”
Get inspired by Bauer’s partnership program:
Want to feature your own employer partners? Learn how to set up sponsorship categories, and how to highlight partners in the sponsorship ribbon. You also have the option to filter your homepage content so that only sponsors are featured, which you can learn more about here.
Check out the rest of Bauer’s platform here!
CHAPTER 1: MAKE YOUR SITE BEAUTIFUL EPISODE 1: CONSISTENCY
Consistency is of the utmost importance when creating a site that is visually competent. It is also vital to maintaining the quality of your brand. Keeping things consistent ensures that no matter what page a user is on, they feel they are in familiar, trustworthy territory free of unnecessary distractions. It can be jarring to be on the homepage of a website, click on a menu item, and then wind up somewhere that looks quite different. In creating a seamless user experience, consistency really is key.
The most important way to ensure consistency on your site is to create a consistency plan and make sure everyone with editing power on your uConnect platform is on the same page. Here are some of the areas you should consider:
Images
First and foremost, make sure all of your images are the right size. Otherwise they will look messy and, of course, inconsistent. Refer here for image sizing guidelines.
Next, decide what kind of images you will use in each type of image space. For example, for employer profiles will you use logos or a different kind of image? For header images on career communities, will you be using photographs or graphic designs? Our eyes tend to gravitate towards images before anything else. They are the first clue a user has about what they’re viewing, and consistent images will help get the user situated with the platform.
Text
Text must follow a consistent plan in terms of design (size, font, color, etc.) and also in language.
Decide on a font, size, and color to be used for the different kinds of titles, headers, and body text you plan to use, and stick to it. Define what kinds of text should be bolded or put into italics.
Make sure you stay consistent in the language you use to refer to things. For example, if you refer to career advising appointments, don’t call them career coaching appointments elsewhere. Leave no room for confusion!
Formatting
Will you be indenting paragraphs or putting space between them? Will titles be on the left or will they be centered? The decision is yours to make and adhere to.
Branding
This one is extra important. No doubt you have a school-wide branding guide to stick to, and it’s vital that you do so. Talk to your school’s marketing team if you have any questions about which logos you should use where or what fonts and colors to use on your pages.
Here are a few platforms we think have great consistency:
Welcome to the newest members of the uConnect community! Great things are ahead.
- Edinboro University: Read more about their platform and launch here!
- Mercy College
- We celebrated the launch of Wentworth Institute of Technology’s launch in the last Memo, but if you’re interested you can read more about their use case here.
The following partner schools are having their uConnect birthdays (aka anniversary of platform launch, but much more fun).
Happy 3rd Birthday to:
Smeal College of Business at Penn State
Check out articles published over the past month and get in the know!
- Set up sponsorship categories
- Highlight key employer partners with the sponsorship ribbon
- Feature sponsors as your primary homepage content
- Embed videos from CareerSpots
- Update your office's information
- Our latest CoffeeBreak Conversation with Dr. Marie Cini, President of the Council on Adult and Experiential Learning
- October Features and Updates
- The event-wide, and client-specific recaps of last week’s conference #CareerEverywhere
- This thought piece on the transition from a service to a community model of career services
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