April 2023 Monthly Meeting

Notes

We kicked off our meeting with a brief discussion on movies, specifically the recently-released Cocaine Bear.

Industrial Hygiene partnership graphic

Earlier in the week, Nikky reached out to the web team on Slack to ask about adding a WATTCO widget to the MS in Industrial Hygiene page, similar to how other programs display details about their accreditation or affiliations. Jason added that capability, which is currently hidden until Nikky and the school receive approval on the solution from both WATTCO and the university’s legal team. Nikky says that she has not yet heard back from either of those groups but will follow up when she does.

Commencement preparations

Hard as it is to believe, but Commencement is only a few weeks away. Shawn let everyone know that while the school is of course free to create as many profiles on graduating students as they wish, the goal for this year’s version of the HSC Commencement website is to really only feature one or two graduating students per school. As soon as Nikky and Kayla have those profiles created in their site, they should let the web team know. The profiles will then be imported into the Commencement website.

Community partners resource

During our March meeting, we had a discussion about creating a resource for the tracking the various community partners that the School of Public Health has agreements with. The idea was to create a section of the website that resembled the Experts Database. Nikky touched upon on that again and said she was still in the process of gathering up all of the data points that will need to be tracked by such a system. She will follow up with us once she has little more detail to share with the group.

Centralized and standardized tuition

Shawn let everyone know that the web team will be rolling out a new tuition page design to all of the schools in the very near future. He has worked with Dixie Paletta and Paula Congelio of the Finance and Business office on a solution that will ensure that the correct tuition information is on our website in a standardized design. Some groups on the Health Sciences campus but outside the School of Public Health were mis-representing their tuition information in an effort to make their numbers seem more attractive to potential students, while others were just not keeping their information up-to-date. Going forward, the tuition figures will be maintained in a centralized place on the Health website. Then, that same information will be disbursed to the individual school websites and displayed in a standard design. Dixie’s office will handle communicating new figures to the web team following Board of Governor’s approval. Those figures will be fed into the system promptly by the web team, and then will be published everywhere they are needed. These will be updated on an annual basis, and this system ensures consistency across the entire campus.

Nikky had some concerns about a couple of their grad programs, and mentioned some back-and-forth on details when it came to some online programs. Shawn mentioned that there have been some concerns raised by groups about additional costs outside core tuition figures, and a desire to add additional information. He let Nikky and Kayla know that they will be notified with an email when these figures get published on their site. Nikky was appreciative of this, as she can use that email as a “crutch” for anybody who might have an issue with these new pages. If an error or inaccuracy is found, or a greater issue with a way the tuition information is being presented, we can work to remedy those problems, and when a change is necessitated the web team can make adjustments to the system and that will then be reflected universally.

Well-being website launched

Shawn informed the group that the new Well-being website had officially launched, including the “Paths to Well-being” page.

With this launch, schools will be getting a design change to all of the pages of their sites. Near the bottom of every page will be an informational bar that will include links back to the Well-being site, along with helpful links to related resources.

Going forward, Shawn says that the informational bar pattern will be suggested to Sharon Martin for inclusion on any university website, not just those of the Health Sciences campus.

Newsroom update

The web team shared a sneak peek at the new Newsroom system recently with Bill and Tara. Shawn says that development of the editor for this new system is roughly 90% completed. He says that it’s likely that a preview into that editor interface will be shared more widely in the next month or so. Following that, in June most likely, a testing period will begin.

Part of this new system that’s of interest to Nikky is a new method of cropping images for use in stories. This new cropping system features more flexible image dimensions and the addition of support for portrait images. This should reduce or, better yet, eliminate the need to place portrait photos over top of PowerPoint-like background patterns just to get them the right dimensions for a story’s image.

Also, Newsroom will make it easier to anticipate what a story will ultimately look like when it’s published on a site, as the editor interface will closely mirror how the story appears on the live website.

Nikky expressed some concern about how she likes to create news items: she will often write the text in Microsoft Word and then copy that content into the News editor directly, though she is aware of the issues that can cause. This will still be supported, though the new system has the ability to draft entries into the system before they are published to the live website.

Another feature request of Nikky’s was support for single-spaced line breaks, which Shawn was happy to say is included in Newsroom. There will also be support for decorative separators for stories, as well as styles for things like block quotes.

Newsroom will also have new features pertaining to the concept of story authors: Multiple authors can be credited to an entry, and a story can have a published author that is different than the person who entered the content into the system. Categories will also be improved, and include the ability to suggest a story be published to a secondary category not affiliated with the school publishing the story.