10 Year School Anniversary Discussion

Notes

During our August meeting, Nikky informed the group of the need to create a marketing section of the website for the school’s 10 year anniversary. This meeting was set up to further discuss the project: what will be included, how it will look, etc.

Project updates and content discussion

Nikky informed us that the schedule for the week of events and celebrations by the school is coming together. She anticipates being able to make use of the new Events module and functionality as part of this project.

As we get underway, Nikky wants to establish where the project will ultimately live on the website, but she’s got concerns about where those details will live and if that would happen to change at some point. She wants to be able to produce promotional materials for the anniversary that contain a URL and QR Codes that will direct people to the details that will be put together. This shouldn’t be too big of a concern. As discussed in our monthly meeting, the web team will set up something along the lines of publichealth.wvu.edu/10-years for where this project will live.

Nikky says that many of the events and details dealing with the school’s administration have been largely figured out, but other details surrounding current students and alumni are still being worked on.

Shawn mentioned that Rachel has been making a bunch of inroads on getting the Events module ready and into school sites. He says that Jess and Bill will be doing some initial testing on Events at the Health Sciences level next week.

For now, Shawn is proposing that a simple, placeholder content page be put in place to establish a URL as the home for the project. The page at this URL will serve as the overarching page and contain the events details themselves as well as a timeline component of some sorts. While that is being set up, Nikky and Kayla can begin the process of tagging relevant news stories that they would like included in this project. He suggested using a tag like “phtenyear” or something similar. Regardless of what tag is ultimately used, as long as it is consistent when applied to the stories that will need to be highlighted, we should be able to pull those into this project. The web team will then make this page be able to collect and display those tagged news stories. We will begin to set this all up starting early next week, and should have the placeholder page ready to go on Monday.

Design discussion and brainstorming

For how the page/section looks, Nikky reiterated that she feels like its going to be largely events-driven. She likes some of the concepts that are present in the Dean’s Colloquium page and thinks that some of that design could be used to shape the anniversary pages. She also mentioned the design of the main “Who We Are” page, and how that feels very unique.

Last week, Nikky was able to collaborate with Aira and finalize a graphic for the anniversary celebration. Aira was working on packaging that graphic up, and Nikky wanted to know if the web team would need it saved in a particular format for it to be used in the web page design. Typically, if available, we like to have graphics such as this to be in a vector SVG or Illustrator format, which allows us to work with the file and resize it as need be without losing any quality.

Shawn was curious to know if any alumni pop up regularly or are active with the school. If so, it would be great to have a few of those people provide quotes or testimonials that speak to the school’s anniversary. He says that from analyzing traffic on our school websites, profiles are super good from an engagement perspective. Having some profiles of alumni as part of this project could really help with engagement. Nikky asked if we could expand that to include any type of profile, not just those of alumni, but also include current students, faculty, and staff.

Shawn also mentioned the possibility of getting sound clips to include, much like we’ve done with profiles in the past. These could be pulled from already-recorded interviews.

Nikky also would like to see some stats have a place in the project’s design. She referenced the Covid-19 on-campus mask study project, and thought we could do something similar by pulling out statistics describing highlights of the school’s history. These could potentially live in a “By the Numbers” infographic sidebar.

The group sees this project needing to live on well past the length of the actual celebrations. With that being said, we came to a consensus that for now the project will live at the publichealh.wvu.edu/10-year URL. Also, Nikky wanted to make sure that we understood that a message from Dean Coben will need to be included somewhere prominent.

Other business

Microsoft Clarity

Shawn let everyone know that Microsoft Clarity was added to the school’s site about a week ago. The system has collected some initial data, but Shawn wants to let it continue to populate with even more data before diving in and trying to make some sense of it all. He demonstrated some heat map and click tracking views in the tool. A big data point that has surfaced thus far in Clarity’s data collection is how few people seem to scroll down past the fold on most web pages.

Research content

Nikky let everyone know that for the new research grant and lab information, Kayla is going to serve as a liaison for getting that content ready for the website. For the new lab information, they will use Brian Hendrick’s Spatial Epidemiology and Statistics Lab information as a template for how to organize and structure the content for the new lab page. Kayla has an outline all ready to go for this new lab page. As for the grant details which need to be added to the Health Sciences Research Grants section, the group has already spoken to Bill about getting the new details added.