The CoE homepage needs fresh spotlights, but it isn't for everything - it's intended to be a clean, limited set of hilights. We don't want it to be so cluttered with an overwhelming number of stories that nothing can stand out and be noticed. The number of items posted at one time is limited, and they should stay up for at least a day or two to give them time to be noticed.

Whether a particular story gets posted will depend on a lot of factors, including how many spotlights are up at the moment, how long they've been up, how significant your story is (student best-poster awards aren't going to make the cut), how broad its appeal might be, and so on. Preference will be given to stories that are more than just a headline and a couple lines of intro text - the story should include a longer body or a link to a page that gives more detail.

Candidate stories might include:

• Major awards or honors
• Exciting research
• Special events
• Significant gifts

If you think you've got something for us, start by emailing Purdue Marketing and Media's Online division to see if it's suitable and if we might have room for it any time soon - you don't want to waste your time pulling it all together only to find out that it's not going to be used. At the time of this writing, the people to contact would be Hilary Mark Nelson (hmnelson@purdue.edu) or Martin Sickafoose (mart@purdue.edu).

If we think we can use it, the time between contacting us, approval,  and posting the story will vary unpredictably, so the sooner you talk to us, the better. If the story is about an upcoming event, then you should be thinking weeks ahead, so we can aim to get it up in time to get people to the event. Same-day or next-day submissions are not likely to have a high success rate.

Once you've got the go-ahead, there are 2 ways to get it up. If you've already created a Purdue Event Document for it, we could simply add a Purdue Event Reference pointing to your story, and we're done. Otherwise we'll need all the standard information for a Purdue Event Document:

Event date (optional)
If this is for an event that happens on a specific day, what day is that?

Show date (suggested - we try to even the flow of new items on the home page)
When would you prefer to publish this on the home page?

Hide date (optional)
When would this no longer be current? If there's an event date, the hide date would typically be the following day. Otherwise it may be whenever we need to rotate in a new item.

Headline
7 - 15 words, as detailed and to-the-point as possible. Cute teasers don't work well on the web - they tend to be ignored as people are trying to get the information they want as quickly as possible.

Intro
1 - 2 sentence abstract that summarizes the story, or provides enough opening detail to hook the reader. Again, cute and oblique doesn't work.

Body (optional, if a redirect URL is supplied)
The full story, ideally written in newspaper "inverted-pyramid" style, with the conclusion at the beginning, additional information following, and the full gory details after that, for those that are really interested.

Redirect URL (optional if a body is supplied)
If you already have a page set up, and just want to send readers to it from our home page, you can skip the body and just give us the URL of your page.

Photos
We'll need at least one photo for the thumbnail that appears on the home page, and preferably to go with the body copy, if a body is supplied. They don't need to be huge, but shouldn't be thumbnail size to begin with - say 200 - 400 pixels in the longest dimension.

Attachments (optional)
If there are PDFs or other documents that you want to make available along with the story, include those.