NASA GRC WordPress Users Guide Gets a Spotlight
The NASA Glenn Research Center WordPress Users Guide I maintain during my day job received attention the other day on the WordPress Publisher Blog. The timing was appropriate: Though Josh Glemza and I had been maintaining the site for about two years to support ourselves and the early adopters of our NASA-themed WordPress set-up, I’d recently revamped the site for a growing base of users here at NASA Glenn.
It’s interesting, and humbling, regarding the attention — even clout — one receives when “NASA” and “WordPress” are used in the same sentence. See a search on Twitter for those two terms. But the persistence in using WordPress continues to pay off in terms of resource and budget management, overall maintenance time, Section 508 accessibility, and ease of use by clients with any knowledge of HTML. I expound upon the benefits here at the GRC WordPress site.
However, another caveat I discover is that the sites I maintain at NASA using WordPress get ranked well in the search engine pages, sometimes even compared to other NASA sites with similar focus, even in NASA’s own search engine.
Here are a couple search examples, concerning recent public announcements:
- Researcher Kim de Groh’s recent induction into the 2009 Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame
- A NASA team winning an award from the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer
At the time of writing, in Google, the NASA Glenn Research & Technology Directorate web site was the only NASA site to appear in the top 10 search engine result page, while in the NASA Search engine, the results were #1.
Though the search engine results will change with time, and though this is a rather unscientific search study, the search results do highlight a more accurate generalization that the Directorate’s activities are effectively being made more widely available, very quickly.
Popularity: 20% [?]
