What Makes People Click: Appendices

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What Makes People Click:
Marketing an IEP Program on the Web
The following was prepared as part of a Demonstration held at TESOL 2003, Baltimore, MD, USA, in March. Go to the Main page to see the rest or take a look at work that has already been done for previous presentations:
[ Resources for Program Marketers ][ Program webpages (TESOL 2001) ] [ Bibliography ]

Appendices

Appendix A: Marketers, Directories, and searches

This survey ran a number of searches, listed below, and simply quantified the appearance of marketer/directories on each search. Searches could be accused of being biased toward the words that appear in the names of the marketer-directories themselves, but at first they were done with little knowledge of these. There were several surprising findings. First, some prominent marketer-directories didn't appear in any searches at all. Second, some single schools or groups of schools did very well, beating even the prominent marketer-directories, overall and in specific searches. Third, it is often difficult for even native speakers to determine what is a marketer, what is a directory, what is a school, or what someone is doing with a particular web page. And finally, marketer-directories are often no better than the rest of us at setting up pleasing, well-designed pages that are clear, intuitive, and accessible. Details of this study are still being processed and will appear below shortly.

Appendix B: Foreign language pages

This study encompassed 10 states: WA, UT, CO, WI, NC, NY, PA, MA, MO, and OK. The intention was that they would be relatively evenly distributed, though it would probably better to do all fifty.

The programs were found from the Global Study directory, which had been well-updated in 2001; one of the most surprising things was that almost 18% of clicks from that directory, in those ten states, came up 404, or out of business. This is a reflection of uncertain times and shrinking programs (when a program's enrollment goes below a certain level, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up its understructure), due to war, INS regulations, etc.

Wisconsin had the best ratio of foreign languages (6/10); Missouri had none (0/3). The pages found were as follows:

25 Spanish
24 Japanese
18 Korean
16 Portuguese
15 Chinese*
9 Turkish
7 French
5 Russian
5 German
4 Italian
4 Indonesian
4 Arabic
3 Thai
1 Polish
1 Bulgarian
1 Swedish
1 Hungarian
1 Czech
1 Dutch

*15 programs had pages in Chinese; two of those had pages in both kinds and marked them as such. One is referred to as "big 5;" the other as "simplified." The other 13 programs had a page in Chinese but didn't specify which kind it was.

Copyright Thomas Leverett, 2003

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Thomas Leverett, CESL, SIUC
Photo above (Spider Web) by Jim Leverett.

What Makes People Click:Marketing an IEP Program on the Web

Appendices

What Makes People Click:
Marketing an IEP Program on the Web