Optimizing the website

The Rubicon Contest-Website was always a matter of discussion in the organizational team. When I joined the team of 2009 and became in charge of communications, the first thing that I have changed was the website for several reasons. The change was a good idea.

But the website is still a big issue, due to the fact that it is often the first impression a potential participant, sponsor, university official or a journalist gets. If you blew it in the first place, it is hard to get this person back. It is a never ending process of finding minor problems and errors and fix them.

What is a good website without visitors? Everybody in the team spread the address through his personal network but this is obviously not enough. There was the need of giving the search engines the ability of finding us. People looking for a business simulation game, a case competition, sustainability or student run initiatives with a international character must find Rubicon Contest 2010.

In the first instance it meant a technical change and switch our Joomla CMS to search-engine friendly page names. There is a native support for this option, but running a bilingual page with German and English can cause a lot of problems.

Solving this issue was all in all less time consuming than include so called META-tags to all the pages. These information are not visible for the visitor but used by search engines to identify the content of the page. Two team members, Malin and Aline, are still spending time to add META-informations to our website. With more than 100 pages in German and English it is a lot of work.

The more visitors we hope to get should get a more unique web page bringing us to the third project ahead concerning the web page. We are about to have a complete make over of the page. The design we are using right now is a slightly changed design of a joomla-Standard. It is alright, but is sadly nothing special. In the next days be ready for a complete make over of the Rubicon Contest 2010 website. If you have suggestions you may write me a mail.