Digital Communications

The College Relations and Communications team oversees the college’s main online presence, including smith.edu, eDigest, Smith Today, and Smith’s official social media channels. We collaborate with partners all across campus on strategizing and executing marketing and communications collateral such as webpage creation and maintenance, college news, large-scale college event promotion, and more. Drop us a line—we’re excited to work with you!

About Our Work

What We Do

  • Strategize and create content on smith.edu, including webpages for academic departments and programs, Smith administrative offices, alum relations and development, and Smith Today
  • Execute online promotion and livestreaming for major college-wide events (such as Commencement)
  • Maintain Smith’s official social media channels and strategize various campaigns

What We Don’t Do

  • Develop personal sites for faculty or sites for class or academic projects (contact ITS)
  • Create sites for events sponsored by academic departments (add a page to your department site or create a Facebook page instead)
  • Produce complex database projects or forms (contact ITS)
  • Help with server or software issues (contact ITS)

Website Guidelines

When you require a new webpage or need to revise or enhance an existing one, contact us at webteam@smith.edu. We will collaborate with you to ensure that your webpage meets your goals by strategizing on content and layout, ensuring it has a visually appealing look, clear and concise information, proper usability and structure, and more.

It’s best to have content ready for us to review before reaching out—it helps keep things moving smoothly! If your edits are extensive or your project is large in scope, we may set up a time to meet with you to discuss next steps.

Your Content

While we review all submitted content for spelling, grammar, and clarity before we add it to the website, here are a few tips to keep in mind when drafting your content to expedite the process and reduce the risk of mistakes.

  • Follow the Smith Style Guide for general rules of punctuation, spelling, capitalization and usage.
  • Watch verb tenses. Keep in mind what information will become dated and submit content changes to the webteam as needed.
  • Keep content short and scannable—users take in a lot of information online and their attention spans are often limited. Use bulleted lists where appropriate, and keep headlines and subheads concise and descriptive. 
  • Be specific and offer useful information. Avoid institutional language and jargon.
  • The website is not used as an archive of outdated information or events.
  • Content must not include personal or political statements, opinions, or potentially inflammatory remarks. For more information, please read the Website & Content Management User Policy.

On Accessibility

When drafting content to send us, it’s crucial to keep accessibility in mind. We comply with WCAG AA 2.1 digital accessibility guidelines—a legal requirement that entails vetting content for the website on several key tenets:

  • Avoid relying on infographics as the primary method of conveying information. Even with alt-text, these images are often not accessible to users using screen-readers to access information.
  • Create descriptive hyperlinks. Instead of saying “click here,” hyperlink the part of the text that describes what you are linking to. Additionally, avoid using multiple hyperlinks in a single line when possible.
  • Videos embedded on the website need to be hosted on either YouTube or Vimeo and be fully closed-captioned.
  • Except for specific exceptions, PDFs should be used only when the document is intended to be downloaded and printed (for example, a form that requires signatures). If you have questions or want more information about document accessibility best practices, please contact Ashavan Doyon at adoyon@smith.edu.

Contact Us

The College Relations team resides at 30 Belmont Avenue.

Questions About Smith Today

Email Barbara Solow, Assistant Director of Media Relations, at bsolow@smith.edu

Questions About Notes from Paradise, the email newsletter

Email Megan Tkacy, associate editor, Smith Quarterly, at mtkacy@smith.edu

Software Issues, Passwords, or Server Permissions

Please contact the User Support Center in ITS.