August 2021 Website Meeting

Notes

Welcome Week

Shawn was able to talk to Tara about Welcome Week resources. He says that the Public Health page requires some updating and asked if there were any further developments regarding this. Nikky says that some adjustments were needed, most of which have already been addressed. Largely, the page can stay as-is for this year.

Transitioning profiles

As it has been highlighted in more recently monthly meetings, the school would like a method or procedure in order to convert or transition already-existing student profiles to alumni profiles. Shawn says that the web team is in the early stages of thinking about a healthier and better way to build the pages, with an ultimate goal of making them more adaptable. As the team explores these updates, he sees using Public Health’s profiles as “guinea pigs” to test out some of the updates.

News system: issues with categories and looking ahead

When it comes to sharing News stories amongst major areas of the campus, this remains one of the biggest problems with the current system. For example, Public Health is a main category in the News system. Health Affairs is listed as a sub-category under Health Sciences. This makes it difficult to share stories between the two categories. Optimistically, this will be fixed by the next version of News that will launch by the end of this year. In the meantime, for the example scenarios, the best way to get stories shared amongst Public Health and Health Affairs is to work with Wendy Holdren. Fingers crossed, by the end of 2021 the process will be a lot easier to share stories amongst different scopes where one party may not have any control over.

Another improvement planned for News is different types of content. We’ve seen many news “stories” that are only a couple of sentences in length and have no media associated with them. They weren’t truly full news stories, but more along the lines of announcements. These stories would flood news feeds, particularly in the case of the main Health Sciences feed. With the revamp of the News system, the team is looking into having different types of content possible, one being appropriate for these announcement stories. They would have simpler templates, with a reduced number of fields to fill out, and without a lot of bells and whistles that come with the stories we are used to now. This would appear along other content types for the News system, including podcasts and blogs. Currently, blogs do exist on a few sites. BeWell is an example of this. The blog is managed in Umbraco, but because of the limitations of Umbraco accounts, it’s not trivial to have someone from outside the BeWell team come and contribute to their blog. Moving this functionality to the central News system is a way to remedy this.

We are going to be strongly encouraging all schools and many of the groups on campus for feedback on this project. Public Health is certainly welcome to look over what is being developed and share any thoughts that come to mind. Probably most importantly, the web team wants to know if there is anything that the current system isn’t doing well so that it can potentially be addressed in this update.

Other groups on campus have had a hard time with the current system, including Health Affairs. The Research and Graduate Education office get “bamboozled” over this, according to Shawn, as no one really “owns” their category. These are the fractured instances in News that we want to improve.

A mini brainstorm for Admissions information on the site

One of the needs of the school’s student affairs team has identified is that they would like to have a sort of FAQ to serve their internal needs. It’s difficult for them to consistently deal with the various admissions process flows for the different programs, and this can lead to misinformation being shared with prospective students. They would like to develop resources to prevent this. Nikky says she will be receiving a list related to this in the near future. She thinks that some type of visual element might go well with this. She says that depending on the program, there are different paths a prospective student might need to take to apply. Ultimately, this could be used to develop resources for external audiences as well. She was wondering if it was worth reaching out to Aira to get her involvement with something like this.

Shawn was curious about the internal side of this concept, particularly how it’s structured. How internal should it be? Nikky wants to make both sets of information easily accessible, whether that is through technologies like Go links or QR codes. One approach may be to start with some external-facing pieces, and then take those and add more information geared towards internal audiences.

Shawn says that from a visual flow perspective, it might be worth taking a look at a couple of areas on both the Coronavirus and Diversity websites. He definitely thinks it would be beneficial to get Aira involved with something like this early in the process. She could develop some graphical elements that could be not only used in any print material but also on the web. He also mentions the Website Content Guide, and how it is mostly internal-facing. He has been discussing an idea with Tara about essentially duplicating the structure of that site to create an internal resource guide for housing resources for things like on-boarding. It might be beneficial to think about this type of content for that project. It’s also important to still build out a rich graphical experience for anything external. Shawn will discuss these things with Tara.

Nikky says she will take the next step and reach out to Aira, and she says she needs to get the content to start this project.

New programs, and ways to promote programs

Nikky wanted to point out that the school has introduced new programs as well as sub-levels for a few of the other, already-established programs. Their Population Health program is now federally-funded. This should be a big selling point for the school. With that in mind, she is interested in developing campaign pages similar to the school’s “Discover” page. She would like to see something more flashier that would compliment print pieces.

Shawn asked to talk these ideas over with the rest of the web team. They recently did some program page updates for the School of Medicine, that we could try to replicate on Public Health. This would result in a more rigid type of page to help the school promote this kind of campaign. With these new style of program pages, there is a less emphasis on things like large feature images, include more areas to discuss things like culture, and allow Nikky and Jess to grab different pieces already established in the site and repurpose them for something like this.

Nikky just looks at pages like “Discover” and “Who We Are” and says they really pull you in and feel more engaged. Shawn says this exactly the types of opinions that led to the changes with Medicine. With the pandemic, everything became virtual, and that meant making things like websites being more engaging that much more important.

Bill Fry’s role

Nikky noted that in the meeting invitation, Dave Ryan is still listed as a participant. Shawn says that’s simply because he hasn’t gotten the chance to modify what he needs to in Outlook to remove him.

Focusing on Bill Fry and his role with the marketing team, his job is going to be thinking about content for Health Sciences as a whole. He will work with the schools on bigger things like Commencement, Diversity, Addiction, etc, as well as larger institutional goals. Shawn wants him involved in some the next couple of rounds of school communicator meetings, and he would have been a part of this one if he were a little more established. Even after he participates in these initial meetings, he’ll come back around for meetings at different parts of the year, like April and May to begin hashing out things like Commencement.

Internal resources on Hub

Nikky was wondering if we were any closer to being ready to push forward on adding internal resources to Hub. The templates are ready, but Shawn is hoping Bill and Tara will begin testing those out in the near future. Then, around October is when the schools will hopefully be able to begin putting content into that site.

CTSI on lab pages

Finally, Jessica mentioned that Brian would like to have the option of specifying WVCTSI as an affiliation in the box at the top of their lab page. Jason will look into adding that capability.

Note: This meeting was originally scheduled for August 5, 2021.