Short Links Now Available

• 17 November 2007
• David McKelvey

To those of you that have struggled with the promotion of an event, some news, or other material that offered additional information or registration available at some long or otherwise cryptic link, we now have a short link solution for you. They come in the form of:

www.lclark.edu/go/keyword
(where “keyword” is a specific action word related to your promotion)

To give you an example, we made the following one for New Media, which if used, will return you to New Media’s home page.

http://lclark.edu/go/media > http://media.lclark.edu/

If you’re interested in this new service, please keep the following criteria and conditions in mind (no specific order):

1. Generally-speaking, a short link is related to a specific promotion which is time-based — an expiration date of no more than a year is required.
2. There is an expectation that some of the traffic will be coming from presentation in a non-clickable vehicle (e.g. print, audio or video).
3. The destination for the short link is long, or non-sensical.
4. The keyword is a short action word(s), closely related to the theme of the promotion, and not likely to be used by another segment of the institution (e.g. “admission” is not specific enough).
5. Although we will try not to reuse keywords (hence some of #4 above), at the same time we cannot guarantee the same keyword from year-to-year for annual promotions.

Also, if you require click-thru data, please let us know when we setup the link. (If you are sending everyone to a promotion-specific page, then you don’t need it, but if they’re landing on your sub-site home page, you would. We can help you with this decision.)

All of these are created by hand on a case-by-case basis, so please give us at least a week’s notice so that we can work out all the details and agree on the keyword. Simply contact Noah or I to set them up.

Filed Under

• New Media Services