Most students demand bleeding edge design from university websites.  The good news is there are plenty of tools you can use to satiate that need without breaking your marketing budget or tying up your IT department.  In fact, many of these solutions, which can transform your web presence into a thriving social network brimming with interactivity and eye candy, are free, or nearly free.  Combining several digital applications to create a new, more robust application is referred to by techies as a “mashup.”

Before you do the make-over, you may want to click-through the Top 10 College Admissions Sites, as rated by the National Research Center for College & University Admissions.  Each year, the center sifts through thousands of college and university sites to come up with true magnets of enrollment.

“Today’s students are in the driver’s seat when it comes to investigating and choosing a college,” says Don Munce, NRCCUA’s president.  “They have become expert stealth shoppers.  So colleges must take every conceivable step to ensure that their websites are top notch.”

Once you’ve had a gander at la crème de la crème, here are some tools that can help put your site in contention for NRCCUA’s award next year:

Plug in a prefab website

While the first “prefab” web templates had all the design panache of a Ford Edsel, today’s offerings can literally give your higher ed site the look of Fortune 500 firm for under a hundred dollars.  The days when web designers wouldn’t return your calls for less than $10,000 are over.  It’s a buyers’ market now.

Other than an extremely slick feel and often arresting beauty, probably the greatest convenience of templates is that the sites can be downloaded, customized and published in as little as 24 hours by an experienced web designer.  Even non-technical people with a working knowledge of a web design program will have little problem customizing a template for their needs.

Entry level Web template sites, which often go for $50 or less, generally feature a home page, links page, about page, frequently asked questions page and email contact page, already pre-configured.   With more advanced packages, running $90-$150, you’ll get access to even more page templates, including credit card processing, live chat room support, and the like.  Solutions providers in this space include AllWebCoDesign and TemplateMonster.

Add video for a song

If your institution already has video up on YouTube, you’d like to showcase on your institution’s website or blog, the company offers a YouTube player you can embed there for free.  For more info, check out YouTube’s how-to video on how to do the quick embed (keywords: YouTube player), as well as a separate how-to video on how to customize your player at.  With either option, you’ll see a faint, YouTube watermark in the right-hand corner of the video.

The beauty of YouTube’s player is that the actual video footage is stored and streamed off YouTube’s servers – so your institution will not pay the web bandwidth transmission costs, no matter how many people view the video.  Google also offers tool to help you analyze who’s viewing your embedded video, called Insight.

Create an instant social network

If you’ve longed to experiment with a social network on their site, but have balked at the sometimes steep planning and costs involved, take heart.  Google now offers a way to add a social network to your website in minutes.  And it’s free.

Dubbed Google Friend Connect, the app can be added to any website by simply dropping in a few snippets of Google’s Friend Connect code.  The app offers features common to the most basic of social networks, such as a way for users to register, a members gallery, message posting and the ability for members to invite others to the party.

But Friend Connect takes the networking concept a step further by enabling its members to easily interact with people on some of the biggest social networks on the web, including Facebook, hi5, Plaxo, Orkut, Google Talk and others.

Plus, the software is deliberately designed as an open source solution.  This has enabled a cadre of independent developers to come up with a steadily growing selection of plug-ins for the solution that greatly enhance its capability.

Chat it up

Given that most new students at this point have grown up chatting on websites, it only makes sense to add the medium as an integral component to your web presence.  One of the most sophisticated packages, and most expensive, is LivePerson.  In addition to offering basic chat, LivePerson’s live chat solution can also be used to track student activity on your store site, and enable a college representative to invite a student to chat after he or she has spent some time on the site.  LivePerson can also embed a chatbox promotional e-newsletters and other email send by a store.  For other solutions, simply key “live chat” into any major search engine.

Give your wordpress blog a face-lift

Lots of blog design tools claim to be so simple, a six-year-old can use it.  At $129, Artisteer 2.1 delivers.  After fruitlessly searching for months for a WordPress blog template that was right for me, I finally came across this gem, which enabled me to design my own blog template in minutes.  Essentially, Artisteer enables you to start with a basic design of a WordPress blog, and then tweak it to your heart’s content with an easy-to-use dashboard.  There are options to change your WordPress blog’s shape, color, font, text size, columns and margin widths – and more.  And all are a point-and-click away. 

Once you’re absolutely satisfied with your custom blog design, a simple button-click exports it as a Wordpress theme that can be uploaded to your WordPress blog server – and you’re done.  Every aspect of the program is painstakingly designed for the non-techie.  Plus, Artisteer also allows the final design to be exported as a standard website, or in compatible formats for the web content management systems Drupal and Joomla.  Very cool.

Add a podcast in a snap

With Propaganda ($49), from Mixmeister Technology, you’ll be able to record, post and promote the audio podcast for your blog with a single program.  The easy-to-use software can import audio from almost any source.  And it can also help you create RSS feeds, ID3 tags and ITunes tags, which ensure your podcast is easily accessible.  After you’ve completed your recording, simply use the software’s “Publish” feature to format in .WMA, .MP3 or .WAV format, and then upload your podcast to your blog, or any podcasting hosting service.

Let’s add some video to that

 If you want some video with your audio podcast, Adobe Visual Communicator 3 ($399) could be your ticket.  The software essentially enables you to create a newscast-quality video for your university blog – or for any other location on your Web site.  The package comes complete with hundreds of customizable graphics, music clips and special effects that can turn a dowdy post into a daring one.

Joe Dysart is an Internet speaker and business consultant based in Manhattan.  Voice: (646) 233-4089.  Email: joe@joedysart.com.  Web: www.joedysart.com.