Beginning next month, Temple’s web site at www.temple.edu will include a redesigned section featuring news about university academic achievements, research findings, community service and arts and cultural activities.
The new news center is a contemporary, user-friendly site that will serve as the university’s primary online home for news on a range of topics, grouped by strategic themes such as Student Success, Faculty, Research, Temple 20/20, Global Temple and Community Engagement.
The new online news center is a place to showcase the great things our students, faculty and staff are doing that make the university a dynamic educational community."
-- Kenneth Lawrence, Jr., senior vice president for Government, Community and Public Affairs.
Produced by the Office of University Communications, the new site will be available at news.temple.edu, and is designed to inform a wide-ranging audience that includes faculty, staff, students, prospective students, parents, alumni, journalists and members of the general public. While parts of the project are still being finalized, members of the Temple community can preview the site before the new link is publicized to the broader community.
“Temple continues to grow its influence in Greater Philadelphia, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and around the world,” said Kenneth Lawrence, Jr., senior vice president for Government, Community and Public Affairs. “The new online news center is a place to showcase the great things our students, faculty and staff are doing that make the university a dynamic educational community.”
News stories, including videos, are developed by University Communications staff, with photographs supplied largely by University Photography. News is updated daily throughout the academic year and promoted through a variety of channels, such as social media, e-newsletters, print publications and other Temple web sites.
Multimedia content figures prominently in the new design, with three video clips viewable in the upper section of the news.temple.edu main page.
The news center is built on a customized content management system developed by Rock River Star, a Philadelphia-based web development firm that worked collaboratively with University Communications to marry the technology with a graphical scheme designed in-house. The site uses Drupal, a free, open-source back-end administrative system used world-wide for corporate, political and government sites, including whitehouse.gov. The database-driven technology will enable automatic syndication of news stories to other university web sites.
An archive of stories on the new site dates back to 2006, when the university’s previous online newsroom was first implemented. News.temple.edu also features direct connections to the university’s social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and YouTube.
The redesigned site is just one of several new internal communications developments at Temple over the past year, including a redesigned Temple Today e-newsletter sent daily to more than 60,000 faculty, staff and students, improved social media channels and a reconstituted monthly Temple Times newspaper. Plans call for the expansion of Temple’s mobile news capabilities in the coming months.