Notre Dame Blogs for Faculty & Students

I’m so proud that we are launching blogs (http://blogs.nd.edu) for the University of Notre Dame faculty, students and staff*.

This was a big push for me when I first got here (six months in now) and I’m really appreciative to AgencyND designers, developers for getting it up and running.  We also received a lot of help from Paul Turner’s group at Academic Technologies.  What a great bunch of people.

I believe in blogs for two reasons:

1. They make it really easy to publish.  WordPress MU, which is what this was built with, is one of the easiest pushing tools I’ve used.  The plugins and templates make it easy to add the features you want (like publishing video from YouTube) or change your layout with the click of a button.
2. They are highly effective in search.  Google and the other search engines love the content and index it quickly.  The more content you have, the better your digital footprint.  (Digital footprint – search for yourself and what comes up is your digital footprint but I’ll talk more about that later).

The other cool thing is that the blog doesn’t have to be your homepage.  You can make any page your homepage so it makes creating a website on our nd.edu platform really, really easy and cheap (if you use one of the basic templates, it’s free!)

BTW, if you decide to move your blog outside of Notre Dame (maybe you change jobs or graduate), WordPress has one click tools that allow you to download and move your entire site to another blogging platform).  How cool is that?  And I’ve done it before so I know it works.

If you need help, you always have us here at AgencyND or you can check out WordPress’ Support Page.  It’s got lots of answers for your questions.

*Currently, faculty can get as many blogs as they need.  Students need a faculty sponsor for a blog.  Staff need to request a blog and be approved.  We are working on making the process streamlined but it’s still new.

I hope you can join me in our wonderful world of blogging here at Notre Dame.