Tyndale’s offerings continue to grow – starting May 2009 Tyndale will be offering a Doctor of Ministry through our Seminary. This degree – like all of Tyndale Seminary programs – is approved by the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada (ATS).
[see press release]

I have been busy preparing a micro-site for the DMin outlining the program information, admissions requirements, frequently asked questions etc. This site launched on schedule yesterday (March 25, 2008) and has already been drawing in visitors!

As usual this has been a team effort – special thanks to Janet, Karina, Kim, Paul and Phil.

Check out the web site!

Overall Web Site Facts

• We had over 37,000 visits
• We had an average of 1199 visits per day with our highest day (18th) having 1546 visits
• We had 310,850 pages viewed by those visitors
• Visitors came from 108 different countries covering every continent
• The top 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) hit our web site to index our pages over 49,000 times
• 7.1% of our traffic came directly from search engines with Google alone accounting for almost 10,000 hits

University College Future Student Micro-Site Facts

• We had over 2,900 visits
• We had an average of 93.61 visits per day
• We had 13,288 pages viewed by those visitors
• Visitors came from 67 different countries covering every continent
• 71.81% of the visitors were new visits
• Visitors used 6 different operating systems ranging from Windows and Mac to Nintendo Wii (gaming system)
• 97 people completed an inquiry form online
• 37 people registered for campus visits online

Seminary Future Student Micro-Site Facts

• We had about 1,800 visits
• We had an average of 58.03 visits per day
• We had 5,519 pages viewed by those visitors
• Visitors came from 63 different countries covering every continent
• 71.26% of the visitors were new visits
• 36 people completed an inquiry form online
• 29 people registered for campus visits online

For a number of months now Tyndale University College & Seminary has placed number one on a Google search of the word “Tyndale” – actually we place number one and two – the number one spot is what I am really excited about.

In the number one spot is our main site with a list of sub sections to our site. Our Library takes the number two spot followed closely by tyndale.com – the web site for Tyndale House Publishers. Fourth spot is taken with the Wikipedia article about William Tyndale – the person our school was named after.

We have worked hard to accomplish this goal and are very pleased with the results. Here are some of the things (in no particular order) I think have contributed to this success.

» Continue reading “Google says We are number 1″

In the world of web development there is an endless supply of how-to articles describing what the author thinks is the best way to accomplish some amazing look or function on a web site. Quite often the resort to wacky hacks that break once a new version of Internet Explorer comes out.

This tutorial has to be one of the most amuzing I have read – possible not the most useful but definately amzuing.

Well here is a top ten list that I am happy to not see my name on.

The 10 worst web pages features on WebPagesThatSuck.com in 2006

This is an enjoyable site for we to look through every once in a while – The premise is that you can learn good design by looking at bad – if nothing else it is a good laugh. The author – Vincent Flanders – only picks on organizations that should know better – not on teenagers trying to create the perfect virtual them on their MySpace site – <cringe>

Tyndale is far from the top ten worst web sites – we are not perfect – but not in that bad of shape either. There is one University that made the list – Brown University. I will let you read Vincent’s comments on the subject if you are interested – in summary:

…their home page is both poorly designed and overwhelmingly difficult to use…

Sidenote: #4 on his list is an embarasment to the Christian faith – a web site called – Acept Jesus, Forever Forgiven! – if you see it you will understand…

In October Tyndale’s Web Steering Committee gave me the mandate to rebuild the Tyndale front entry page as well as create more robust front entry pages for the University College and The Seminary. The goal was to have these 3 pages launched before Christmas break.

We started from scratch – with input from the committee, Academic Deans, Communication department and others, we developed a new look and feel for theses pages. I realized quickly we could not just do these pages alone as some of the new content on these pages required other pages for support. There was no point in creating these sub-pages in the old look so content templates were also created.

I am proud to announce on behalf of the Web Steering Committee that this project launched at 7:15 this morning!
Swing by and have a look:

http://www.tyndale.ca

http://www.tyndale.ca/universitycollege
http://www.tyndale.ca/seminary

In addition we have added some new great content to support these pages – I will speak on these soon – for now have a look at the new interactive map/location page:

http://www.tyndale.ca/about/map.php

I have also had time to port the Foundation and About sections into the new look and feel. I am not sure at what point we will be able to port the rest of the site to this new look – the Web Steering Committee will have to look at this in the near future.

If you would like to leave comments please do below!

Tyndale’s Internet presence began in 1996 with less than a dozen static web pages.

Today the tyndale.ca domain hosts over 5,300 static and dynamically created public web pages.

To generate these pages it takes over 28,000 files (code, graphics, pdf etc.) which collectively consist of over 700mb of data.

The www.tyndale.ca domain has over 70 “top-level� folders in the file structure.

In September 2006 we had 15, 306 unique visitors to tyndale.ca consisting of 33,016 visits and 822, 834 pages viewed.

The majority of content within the main web site is managed by our custom Content Management System (CMS) based on Dynamic Publishing Architecture (DPA).

There are 33 user accounts on the main www.tyndale.ca domain used for user and department generated content.

Since September 28, 2006 we have had over 9,140 attempts to post spam in the Alumni News/comments section of our web site. These have been stoped.

The tyndale.ca Internet ventures span over 6 servers with this number continuing to grow.
Domains hosted on our servers include:
www.tyndale.ca, students.tyndale.ca, cat.tyndale.ca, secure.tyndale.ca, gw.tyndale.ca, main.tyndale.ca, www.brianstiller.com, www.christiancareerscanada.com, www.hudsontaylorcentre.com, www.timcentre.com, www.designed4life.org