Project 3 - Phase 1

E-portfolio

Create a site that will highlight your resume and professional accomplishments on the MIS community ( The new site will have a permanent URL and you will be able to include that URL in your paper resume. The goal of this site is twofold. 1. Create a presence online so that people interested in your particular set of skills can easily find you. 2. To serve as a professional “portfolio”. Think of this site as being more formal than your Facebook page but more creative and open than your printed resume or LinkedIn page.

To get started, you will create a personal “blog” on community.mis.temple.edu. Use the available studente-portfolio themes for this blog. You are required to use these themes. However, you can add any kind of content or available widget to your site.

At a minimum, you must include the following items in your e-portfolio:

  • a good photo of yourself
  • your academic information
  • Your career interests & aspirations
  • Your personal interests, service work, favorite links
  • Your current resume (if you don’t have one, it is time you created one)

Please see the “SAMPLES AND RESOURCES” tab for tips and informative videos to help you thought this project.

Here are some other suggestions for items you can include in your site and that leverage the online medium.

  • Include sample assignments. This is the “portfolio” concept. If you are very proud of some work you did in a class or some other forum – then make it available. For example, the final presentation of a class project.
  • If you did an internship at a firm – then include a hyperlink to that firm’s “about” page – so that prospective employers can easily learn more about the firm. Also include information about what you did during your internship.
  • If you participated in or contributed to an activity for a student organization – then include a hyperlink to that activity. This will provide more contextual information to prospective employers and allow them to judge the depth of your contribution.
  • If a famous professor or corporate executive has agreed to serve as your reference then include a link to their home page (on their professional site or on Linkedin). You may know how important and famous the professor or executive is, but your prospective employer may not. This allows the prospective employer to judge the value of your references.

The above list is a series of suggestions. You have to decide which suggestions work for you and come up with your own ideas. The only requirement is that you create a site as described above. What you put on that site is your decision.

If you are an MIS major or considering majoring in MIS, you are strongly encouraged to submit your e-Portfolio for registration with the main MIS Community site page. This will be important as employers often access the database to find potential employees and sort the e-portfolios by major, resumes, interests and skills. Make sure your e-portfolio is registered with the Temple MIS community site. You will find the link on the main page when you log in.

Specific Instructions

  1. Create a blog on the MIS Community site – click “My Blogs” on the top of the screen after you login and then click on “Create a Blog”.
  2. Use the following convention to name your blog so that it is easy for people to find you. Do not put in any punctuation such as dashes or underline characters:
  • First initial followed by last name (e.g., jmis for Joe Mis)
  • If that does not work, then full first name followed by last name (e.g., JoeMis)
  • If that does not work, then full first name, middle initial, and last name (e.g., JoeLMIS).
  1. After the Blog has been created, go to the “Dashboard” of that blog and scroll downand click on”Themes” on the left hand side.
  2. Select and “activate” one of the e-portfolio themes (click each link to see a sample of each design):
  • eportfolio simple
  • eportfolio metro
  • eportfolio sky
  • eportfolio beach
  1. Complete the eportfolio by following the instructions on the above sample sites.
  2. If you are an MIS major you are strongly encouraged to list the eportfolio on the MIS eportfolio site at Listing the eportfolio will allow employers to find you. Your e-portfolio will only be listed on the site if it meets our criteria (please see below for common mistakes)

Common Mistakes

The main purpose of ane-portfolio is to create a professional looking digital resume that will help you stand out from the typical stack of resumes when competing for industry internships and a job after graduation. Many of the largest employers use our database to identify and select students for internships and jobs.

But almost 50% of the e-portfolios never get entered into the database, as they are rejected because of a number of major issues or problems. The following is a list of the major reasons e-portfolios get rejected, and can give you a guide on how to build a professional, positive e-portfolio that will generate benefits and job leads for you.

  1. Bad or inappropriate photos. Students should make an effort to create a professional headshot, in proper business attire. (These can be taken against a white wall by your roommate.)
  2. No actual resume or link to a resume posted to the site. In many cases the link doesn’t work, and/or the resume is poorly written and formatted. It is a good idea to have your resume critiqued by CSPD before posting it to a site. Also, resumes should be in PDF format, not word (which is true for any other documents posted to the site.)
  3. Believe it or not, many e-portfolios are submitted with no name on the site. Some students didn’t even bother to put their name on the main page of their site, much less provide any background info, year, major etc.
  4. Inappropriate content. This is not Facebook. Every semester we get e-portfolio’s filled with pages with you tube videos of the greatest song ever…the gang skateboarding last weekend, the latest kegger, and things of that nature. Your e-portfolio needs to be professional.
  5. The e-portfolio site link was bad or didn’t work. Sometimes students make them password protected (which defeats the purpose). Other times the link takes us to another page on their site (not the main page). It is up to you to send the right link, and make sure the reader gets to the correct landing page. Readers won’t spend the time to figure out what the main page URL should be.
  6. The site was not formatted correctly. Make sure you set up pages for the main assignment criteria (About Me, Resume, Career Interests, Photo/Bio, etc.) Don’t just use posts for all of your material. Also, messy formatting, typos, and bad grammar will cause your e-portfolio to be rejected.

As stated above, nearly 50% of e-portfolios are rejected and not entered into the database for one reason or another. If your e-portfolio is rejected by the department, you will be notified.

Project 3 – Phase 2

Google Analytics

Introduction

One key step in managing your digital identity is to understand web analytics – specifically the number of people who are visiting your site and their characteristics. Now that you have a cool new e-portfolio site – wouldn’t it be nice to know if people are actually visiting that site? Web analytics allows you to manage your and your firm’s digital identity by tracking and analyzing site visits.

In this assignment you will set up Google Analytics for your e-portfolio site. The assignment has two parts:

  1. Activate the Google Analyticator plug-in for your e-portfolio site.
  2. Activate and view Google Analytics.

Part 1: Activate Google Analyticator

  1. Navigate to the Dashboard of your Blog (your e-portfolio site).
  2. Navigate to the Plugin section (on the left hand side) and click on Plugins
  3. Locate and click on Activate under the plug-in called Google Analyticator (if you don’t see the plugin – make sure you are viewing all plug-ins – click on “All”)
  4. Once activated go to your Dashboard and navigate to Settings and click on Google Analytics.
  5. Set Google Analytics logging as Enabled.
  6. Enter the UA number that you will find in the next step (you may want to leave this window open and start a new tab to complete the next step).
  1. Click Save Changes on the bottom

Part 2: Google Analytics

Setting up the Google analytics account

  1. Create a Google account (If you already have a Google account, proceed to the next step). Please note, many of you know that your Temple e-mail account (i.e. ) is actually provided by Google on their gmail system. This account also gives you access to a variety of applications like Google Apps. Unfortunately, this account is not a standard Google account and you cannot use if for using Google analytics. If you do not have a free, standard, @gmail.com account, you will need to create one to complete this assignment. I don’t use my @gmail.com account for anything other than using Google analytics. I don’t use it for e-Mail or anything else.
  2. Browse to
  3. Click on Create an account now.
  4. Enter the required information, and then hit “I accept. Create my account.” button
  5. You will receive an email with a link to activate your account and once you click on the link your account is activated.
  6. Browse to
  7. Click on Access Analytics on right. Log in using your Google Accounts username/password.
  8. Click on Sign up
  9. Enter all the Required information

Website’s URL: “Your Blog name”

Account Name: “Name for your Account”

Hit Continue

  1. Last Name:

First Name:

Hit Continue

  1. Check the box

Click on Create New Account

  1. In the next page, You will see a portion that says “paste this code on you site”

From this page copy the “UA-xxxxxx-x” number that is highlighted (see the screen print on the right).

Copy that number and save it in a safe place.

Click Save and Finish.

  1. Go to the last step of Part 1 and paste in the code to activate Google Analytics for your site. In about 24 hours you will be able to see a report on your site.
  2. Take a screen shot of this page which includes the “UA-xxxxxx-x” number you just pasted above. Print this screen shot out and hand it in by the due date listed in the syllabus to earn credit for this part of this assignment. Remember, as described in the syllabus, late assignments will not be accepted.
  3. Wait about 1 week before starting phase 3 of this project.

Project 3 – Phase 3

Google Analytics Results

Within a week, your site should get some traffic. The report of this traffic will be found on the dashboard of your site as well as the Google site. Take your screen shot of the main analytics page (from the Google site) and paste it to a word document. In addition to this screen shot, include the following items:

  1. Visit the Google site and analyze the total visits, bounce rate, traffic sources, and page views on your site. Write a short paragraph summarizing the specific numbers and what they mean (not the definitions of these fields but what the data is telling you).
  2. List three specific changes you can make to your site to increase the total visits.
  3. Write a short paragraph which explains how you could use this tool in the future to help you distribute information or sell products/services on the web more effectively.

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