Characteristics of an Effective Community College Web Site

Are Community Colleges “Home-School Friendly?”: An Exploration of Community College Web Sites as an Indicator of “Friendliness”

“…Research, as well as Web site best practices, suggests that community college Web sites should provide customized information that meets the needs of the individual audiences visiting the site (Bradley, 2007;Poock & Bishop, 2006). Adding a clearly defined ''doorway'' (Adelman, 2006) or landing page (14 Steps to a great admission site, 2006) leading visitors to information specific to home-schooled applicants would increase the likelihood of this population applying.…”

“…This is despite research showing home-schooled students performing equally, if not better, than their more traditionally-schooled counterparts (Ray, 2004b). As students often use the internet to access information about colleges, college Web sites are becoming an increasingly important component of recruitment and admission efforts (Olsen, 2007;Poock & Bishop, 2006). Home-schooling families are early adopters of new computer technologies and, according to Ray (2004a), 99.6% know how to use the Internet, 74% use the Internet for school research or courses, and 91% use the Internet for information searches.…”

“…This becomes even more important as admissions policies for home-schooled students often differ from those of their more traditionally-schooled counterparts, and home-schooled students look to college Web sites to discern how to apply to their college of choice. College websites, then, become more than a content providerwell-organized Web sites with easily accessible content become a recruitment tool (Goff, Patino, & Jackson, 2004;Poock & Bishop, 2006). The purpose of this content analysis study was to examine this new recruitment tool-the community college Web site-and describe the ''home-school friendliness'' in an 11-state accreditation region.…”

Organizational Influences and Constraints on Community College Web-based Media Relations

“…Similarly, although Poock and Andrews Bishop (2006) and Hegeman et al (2007) offer recommendations for community colleges to build and maintain relationships via the Internet with key stakeholders, they neglect to consider the information needs of the media. This study seeks to fill the voids in the literature by posing the following research question: RQ1: How do community college practitioners view the role of the Internet in the creation and formation of relationships with the media?…”

Connecting to Community: Best Practices for Designing a Digital Branch

“…Although there is agreement that Websites are a valuable and necessary resource, there is also consensus that they are not used effectively for public relations purposes (Kent, Taylor, and White 2003;Ryan 2003;Welch 2005). Recommendations include making sure sites are clearly navigable (Pook and Bishop 2006) and customizing sites to make them competitive with more popular research resources such as Google Scholar (Detlor and Lewis 2006).…”