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website and social media

The goal of our online presence is to make Arkansas State a university that is easy to locate and with which to interact.  For the growing impact of search engines, having a unique identifier is important.  At the start of the internet era, Arkansas State took the domain name of “astate” as Arizona State claimed “asu.”  While we recognize that within the Arkansas State family we always will be ASU, in a global world it becomes important to emphasize the difference between us and our similarly named western colleague.

To be consistent with the guidelines for A-State, we ask that when referring to our main university website that we write AState.edu.  This is in prose or in design work.

According to the Associated Press Stylebook: “Website addresses are also known as Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs. Follow the spelling and capitalization of the website owner.” (our emphasis added).  As we have now expressed as the website owner that AState.edu is our form of spelling and capitalization, we ask that media as well as our university community utilize our style.

Since URLs and most social media services do not recognize a dash, do not add a dash as this will cause end users to be unable to locate the address (A-State.edu is NOT correct).  While capitalization will not matter to browsers, we also do not allow astAte.edu, ASTATE.EDU, ASTATE.edu or AState.EDU.

In variation from AP style, all website addresses in prose or design will not utilize “http://” or “www.”  These are legacy items from a time where they were necessary to locate the URL, and we want to put the focus on the location of our institution.  This is also for brevity.  Consider that “http://www.” is as many characters (11) as the domain level name of “AState.edu” (11).

For purposes of visual clarity, all social media should include similar constructions.  Since the majority of online services are not case sensitive, making our handles, hashtags and unique identifiers easier to read will increase the ability of our followers to remember us and differentiate from similar names.

The ability to help “visual search” is particularly apparent in longer social labels and those for individuals.

When written in prose, the social network’s preferred name and capitalization is followed by a slash and our designation.

When expressed visually, the preference is for the icon logo of the service followed by a slash and our designation.

As an institution, our default hash tag is:  #AState

All advertising and marketing materials for the university include social media references to promote our social media accounts.

weekdays

Spell out days of the week. Do NOT abbreviate.

winter semester

Do not use.  See semesters.

R.M. “Bob” Wood Sales Leadership Center

Center in the Neil Griffin College of Business.

 

 

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