Website Policy
To adhere to Ohio State branding guidelines, The Ohio State Alumni Association is requiring all alumni clubs and societies to migrate their website to our WordPress platform. If the group’s current website is more sophisticated, as determined by the communications staff, the group can continue hosting their site on their current platform. Website sophistication will be re-evaluated annually.
If a society has a presence on their college/unit/department’s website, they may continue to host their content there or choose to have their own site hosted with the Alumni Association.
Benefits:
- It’s free!
- All sites are responsive so they can resize depending on what device is used, like a desktop, tablet, or mobile phone.
- All sites have prominent and easy to use donate and join buttons.
- The donate button can link directly to your scholarship fund eliminating the need for donors to search.
- Appeal codes can show how many people used the button to make a gift.
- Google Analytics track page views, clicks, and more. Analytics can be shared and decisions made can be based on that data.
- The group is still in control of content, but the communications staff will be doing all the behind the scenes work from creating the site to all the updates which allows time to be spent on important club/society duties.
- Sites are brand compliant. Special Ohio State branding for campaigns such as BuckeyeLove or BuckeyesGive will be available for use on hosted sites.
- Sites stay up-to-date RSS feeds make it easy to pull the latest news and info from Ohio State.
- The osu.edu domain name is easily recognized and trusted. It also tends to show up higher in a Google search than any .com, .org, etc. sites.
- FYI: We will allow clubs and societies to redirect their URL (ex: osula.org), but we don’t recommend it due to interference with analytics.
Note: At this present time, Ohio State has elected to use WordPress as the interface for website construction. If at any point, the university elects to change platforms, information will be shared with the alumni groups.