April 2021 Website Meeting

Notes

I.C.R.C. site migration update

The meeting began with Shawn giving a brief update on the I.C.R.C. website migration process. He has nearly migrated the bulk of the site into the new design. However, in performing the migration, he noted that much of the special, custom pages on the current I.C.R.C. site have not been touched since the Web Team created them. As such, these special pages are not going to be re-created in the new website, at least not initially. Shawn wanted to warn Nikky of this in case there is any sort of reaction from the I.C.R.C. team.

Shawn will look to follow-up on this migration process next week.

New Lab page discussion

The Epidemiology Department is seeking to have a special page set up on the website for one of their labs. They indicated that they would like to have something ready in a two-week time span because of a grant application. That sort of turnaround isn’t exactly feasible, but the web team will look to create a solution.

Shawn was initially looking to set something up similar to the what was developed for the P.R.C. In the past, there was resistance to having pages on websites specifically for labs. This meant that those groups looking for a lab page often would go to outside, third-party services to host something separate from the school site.

Lab pages need to be very restrictive in what information they contain, and the focus of such pages should really be on the purpose and the outcomes that the lab is tasked with performing. Too often in the past, these pages devolved into a dumping ground for information that had little relevance to the research that was to be conducted in the lab. This is something that will need to be avoided in any design implemented for Public Health.

Labs have been requested and do have a small presence on the School of Medicine website. It is the Web Team’s intention to use Medicine’s pre-existing setup as a starting point for such pages on the Public Health site, but then expand and iterate on those designs to better reflect the needs of Public Health’s labs. These pages would be allowed to have limited sub-pages where necessary, effectively creating sub-sites, while still holding the look and feel of the parent department’s section of the site.

One perceived benefit to adding lab pages to the schools’ sites would be that they could be used to bolster the content found in the “research” sections of school sites, Public Health included. These site sections have consistently lacked in content, and if the lab pages can remain focused on true research goals and outcomes, that could significantly help.

Nikky mentioned that Brian Hendricks, a research assistant professor in the Epidemiology Department, would likely be interested in meeting with the Web team to discuss some of his ideas on what he would like a lab page should address. Shawn thinks that would be hugely beneficial to the design process for these pages.

The plan then will be to set up an initial design based on what’s been done on the Medicine site and tweaked slightly to fit what the Web team perceives to be the needs of the Public Health labs, and then iterate on it. With that said, the proposed timeline for this project is to have that initial baseline “shell” design created by the end of next week, and then the following week the team will meet with Brian to further discuss the additional goals for the lab page type.

A huge source of information for such pages will likely be Directory, as it has fields related to research that should be referenced to avoid duplicate data entry. That said, it was pointed out that there are labs with teams of multiple people, and teams that are comprised of both WVU and non-WVU individuals, and those requirements will need to be addressed in the design.

Merging the Epidemiology and Biostatistics department pages

Nikky gave us an update on the merging of the Epidemiology and Biostatistics pages. She said she’s mainly doing content work in Word at the moment. She has submitted a work order to have the Directory feeds for the two departments combined into one.

She did have questions about how the process will work going forward: once the content is in place, what would the next steps look like? Shawn said that that once the web team got the go-ahead, a special “culture and hostname” setting would be configured for the new department page and the two existing department pages would be unpublished. All told, this process would only take about 15–20 minutes to complete.

Nikky then asked about redirects for the old pages to the new. Shawn says that the I.T.S. Systems Team can set up natural redirects that should work for this situation.

Mask study updates

Nikky wanted to shout out Rachel for her help in getting the mask study page up and running. There are still some inconsistencies for a couple of the more recent weeks’ data that need to be investigated.

Working with profiles

Finally, a couple of issues surrounding profiles were brought up. Jessica was wondering if there was a way to have profiles published and viewable, but not appear in profile listings. One solution for this is to switch on the “Hidden From Navigation” toggle found on the profile’s “SEO & Navigation” tab in Umbraco. That said, even with taking this step, if a specific profile has been chosen via a content picker (a field that lets you explicitly choose a profile to display in an area of a page), marking the profile as hidden from navigation may have no effect.

Jessica also wondered about changing a profile from on type to another. More specifically, when a student who has a profile on the site graduates, she would like to transform the student profile into an alumni one. Presently, there isn’t much of a defined workflow to make this happen. However, the Web Team will look into this idea further and determine if a solution could be developed.