Category: Online & social media

Week 12 (14/5): Creating an awesome portfolio (redux)

Street art in Reykjavik. Photo: Gerd Eichmann/ CC-BY-SA-4.0/Wikimedia Commons

There are two main reasons we ask you to build a WordPress site.

  1. WordPress is the CMS (content management system) used by most media companies – think Goat, Junkee, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian Financial Review … and more. Knowing how to use WordPress means you have a big advantage over graduates that don’t know how
  2. When you fly the nest (leave us 😭) you will have an amazing portfolio of work to shop around to potential employers (or just to look back over and reminisce about how awesome it was and how good you are).
    TASK
  1. Make a list of the things you need to post on your WordPress site. Think about the stories you have written, audio stuff you’ve made, and any scripts, graphics, audiograms, videos, photos … anything! This list can also contain things you have made outside TAFE 😉
  2. Post your stuff. Videos and audio need to be hosted somewhere before you embed them in a post (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud)
  3. Do you have widgets on your WP?
  4. Do you have an About page?
  5. Have you changed your header image, or are you still using the photo WP gave you? (Change it, or remove it entirely)
  6. Have another look at the Categories in your menu. Are there any that are empty? Do you want to rethink your menu and categories?
  7. Are your social accounts (Twitter, Instagram in particular) linked to your WordPress site, and do they fit with your WordPress theme and design?
  8. Do you love your theme? If you don’t, you can change it without losing any of your work 😃

Remember: anything you do can be undone if you don’t like it. And ask me for help if you need it.

WHAT TO DO IF YOU’VE DONE ALL OF THE ABOVE
  1. Make something for radio – for either Reconciliation Week (important!); The Space Show; or Food (#hungry)
  2. Try one of the Quarantine Challenges – they’re fast and fun, and will fit your portfolio
  3. Journalism students: if you have stuff missing from your News Conference portfolio, get onto them. We also need a Good News bulletin (again!) this week, so if you haven’t done one, please do 🤗

 

Week 10 O&S (30/4): Choose your exercise

Today you will have another opportunity to choose what you do. In all three cases, it would be great to have the work completed by the end of class. So here goes:

  1. First priority: WordPress. If you don’t yet have content or widgets on your site, you will spend this morning in a workshop with me. You can also choose this option if you want to work on your WordPress, or need advice or help. Check the assessment brief to make sure you’re on track.
  2. Make a story that is timely (i.e. something happening in the world that is relevant to our audience’s interests), or that fits this week’s show theme, “home”. Your story can be written, audio, video, photos, or graphics (or something else you come up with!) It can be for any platform (Off Campus, TAFE Radio, our socials)
  3. Make something to promote the show. This will be for one (or all) of our social media platforms.

Whichever you choose, you must write a quick outline of what you plan to do before you do it, and be specific.

I will be creating some quiet rooms for people to break into so I can work with them on their ideas. As always, we value collaboration, so if you want to work with someone else, let me know.

We will stay in Zoom, in rooms. It makes it easier for me to facilitate if anyone needs advice, or if you want to show me what you’re doing.

UPLOADING:

Audio stories should be uploaded to the Future Shows folder in the Google Drive

Written stories can be submitted for Off Campus to the Stories folder

Socials stories will be by negotiation with me 🙂

Week 8 Online & Social (2/4): Promo Off Campus

The awesome C4 #teamTAFE … apologies to anyone absent on this day! We see you ❤

Our show is scheduled for 11am tomorrow – congratulations #teamTAFE! Thanks so much for your work 🙂

Continue reading “Week 8 Online & Social (2/4): Promo Off Campus”

Thursday March 19

online writing SEO
Use keywords to optimise SEO when writing online

SEO and Writing for online

Ways to make your writing clearer and more accessible

  • Write so people can scan
  • Keep your writing simple
  • Use “chunking” to group pieces of content – it helps to give readers relief from intimidating walls of text
  • Keep sentences short
  • Keep paragraphs short – a one-sentence paragraph is ok! Two sentences are fine too
  • Break up paragraphs with white space
  • Use subheadings to lead your reader through your story (also makes the story more scannable)
  • Think visual: use photos, videos, infographics, and maps to break up text
  • Use bullet points to summarise information

Write in 3D

Think about your stories not as two-dimensional pages, but as spaces your readers can move around, dive into, and navigate in the ways they choose.

  • Use links to related articles (on your site, or someone else’s)
  • Use links to original sources (documents, data, people you quote in your story)
  • Use links to credit visual material
  • Embed your links in key-word phrases – don’t use the full URL

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

The most popular search engine by a long way is Google, though there are others. Search engines look for a few key things when they’re ranking a page:
  • the page HTML header
  • the headline
  • body text
  • keyword tags

TIP: When you’re writing your story, think about the keywords you might use if you were looking for the story

Good things to read for more online writing tips:

BASIC Principles: B is for Brevity (on the really good Online Journalism Blog)
Writing Style for Print vs Web

Exercise:

  1. Find an example of a good online article that uses all the techniques for good online writing and SEO
  2. Rewrite one of your own stories or pieces of content using the techniques above and optimise it for reading and SEO. Post on WordPress, and be ready to show us at 12 noon!