Student Author: Erik Kuznetsov ’21
This past week, Ms. Crystal D’Angelo, MICDS Content Marketing Specialist, gave an informational presentation on the marketing perspective of the website creation process and website management. She provided an intriguing glimpse into the world of WordPress and Google Analytics to Upper School Marketing Club students.
Ms. D’Angelo’s path to becoming a marketer began with her time at UCLA where she studied Communications. She then moved to Boston where she was able to gain experience marketing conferences all over the world. This included marketing virtually as well! In addition to her marketing opportunities, Ms. D’Angelo has spent part of her career planning weddings, other smaller events, and marketing wedding planning companies. Eventually, she moved to St. Louis for personal reasons where she first worked virtually for her Boston employer in continuing to market conferences, but she would soon come to MICDS, where she saw a new opportunity and an exciting chance to meet new people!
One of my biggest takeaways from Ms. D’Angelo’s presentation was about her insight on website management. She mentioned that the key to understanding a website is that it is always changing as a “living, breathing” thing. In the case of the MICDS.org website, most edits can be made in-house, where you don’t need to hire outside of your company to update a website. For new functionality on a website, she often works with developers to build new features for the site. In creating a new website, Ms. D’Angelo worked with an advanced designer while project managing the detailed plan for building the site from start to finish.
A platform used for website creation and management is WordPress which is a popular CMS (content management system). In WordPress, there is a very organized format in the dashboard for managing content such as pages, posts, and news stories. This allows for endless possibilities when creating or updating a website.
When asked about the best format for a website in terms of visuals and writing, Ms. D’Angelo said, “I think it’s best to have excellent graphics, photos, and videos that tell a lot of the story coupled with a little bit of powerful writing rather than a lot of text on a page. Our prior MICDS website, for example, was really text-heavy. Now, when many people access websites on their phones or aren’t able to dedicate much time to reading through a lot of text, we let the visuals do much of the talking and are more succinct with text on our informational pages. Think about it…if you see a social media post or are visiting different websites and the pages/posts have a lot of text, do you read the whole piece or do you glance through it? How much time do you spend reading it before you get interrupted or jump off of the page?”
The exception to this is the MICDS Weekly News, the weekly newsletter sent out by the school, which contains community stories that often have more text. These stories are mostly written for parents and students who want to read into the full details about an experience that took place at School, so when websites contain blogs or storytelling, the text can be lengthier. Still, trying to create an enticing combination of text and visuals is exactly the thought process that goes into website creation.
Lastly, we took a dive into Google Analytics, which showed the data points of website traffic and visitor behavior. This included what pages users visit, when they do so, and how those trends change over time.
All in all, Ms. D’Angelo’s presentation was very informative. I learned several new strategies and felt as though the entire group took a deep dive into the early stages of marketing regarding websites.