"We intend to make information about the University of Tartu available to our English-speaking audiences in the medium that is the most convenient for them, one which they are accustomed to using on a daily basis", explained Ms Inga Külmoja, the University's senior specialist for international communication. "Naturally, we welcome everyone interested in the University to our refurbished website, yet we have also decided to meet our audience half-way and to be present in environments that are a virtual home to many of them", she added.

According to Mr Illari Lään, Head of the UT Office of Communication, it is crucial for an international university to be visible to English-speaking audiences. For international students, Facebook, in particular, is the world's most popular communication and information portal. "By creating its own Facebook page, the University has joined a community that already counts more than 250 million users and is growing every day. The contemporary network society is characterised by a multiplicity of various information portals."

In addition to joining the above-mentioned communication environments, the University has taken a series of steps to make its website more user-friendly. In February this year, the Estonian-language version of the website was refurbished, and in July, a new version of the English-language website was released.

It was also in July that the cybermetrics laboratory of the Spanish Ministry of Education published its rankings of websites of the world's universities, providing UT with feedback about its new communication effort. Among the 17,000 sites analysed, the University of Tartu web ranked 282nd, the highest of rankings achieved by the universities of Estonia and the Baltic Sea region.