August 2022 Website Meeting

Notes

Events on the website and 10 year anniversary

Prior to our meeting, Nikky reached out to the group with some topics she wanted to discuss with everyone:

• Creating something for the website to highlight the school’s 10 year anniversary.
• Adding more to the Health Sciences “Research” and the Public Health “Labs” sections.

With that, Shawn began the meeting by informing the group that the new Events functionality that has been in development for the past few months is in a “happy” place. The web team has been working on getting that set up at the broader Health Sciences level first. From there, once the kinks are worked out, Events will be slowly added to the schools’ and other campus websites.

With Nikky’s request to set something up on the school’s website for the 10 year anniversary, she confirmed that she sees the new content being largely event-based, but with a place for relevant news stories of note from the past decade. She sees the site having plenty of features celebrating the anniversary, and other content that will focus on related anniversaries that are not specifically the whole school’s.

Nikky brought up the idea of possibly having a timeline of some sort that would show significant milestones and dates of importance from the school’s history, and linking them to old announcements. She admitted she has not yet pitched this particular idea with anyone in the school. The web team developed a timeline component for the School of Medicine website a few years back that could serve as a starting point for something similar for this project.

Nikky also mentioned that some of the content that will potentially be included in the anniversary piece she would like to see live on in more permanent ways. She feels there’s not a lot of sense in investing in a project like this only to have it be a temporary thing.

Shawn pointed out how the broader understanding of what “public health” actually represents has changed since the school initially started. So much of the marketing around the school early on dealt with, in one way or another, answering the question what is public health? Of course, Covid-19 changed a lot of that, as public health was at the forefront of so many people’s minds as the pandemic went on. This, along with other foundational initiatives that the school has been involved with—like the Naloxone kit distribution drives, for example—are things to think about as this anniversary highlight comes together.

Going forward, the web team will try to gather some more examples of things that could be a part of this project and send them along in Slack for everyone to consider. Then, we will hop on Zoom for a meeting in a couple of weeks to do some more brainstorming.

Nikky asked, and Shawn confirmed, that this will most definitely go hand-in-hand with the roll-out of the Events module in the school website. Bill and Jessica will be testing and using Events for the Health Sciences site in the next week and a half or so. Nikky will be out towards the end of the month, and the hope is that Events will be ready on the Public Health site by the time she returns. Then, the anniversary celebration is going to coincide with Homecoming, which will occur the week of October 24. With that being said, Shawn wanted to know if the first week of October would be a good deadline to set for this, but Nikky felt that trying to get this in a near-finished place before the end of September would be more ideal.

Finally, Shawn asked if Nikky had a URL for this project in mind, and if publichealth.wvu.edu/10-years would be okay with her. She asked to think about that some more, as she hadn’t considered that aspect. She wondered what other schools have done for similar projects, but there really hasn’t been much precedence for something similar. This is something that doesn’t require an urgent decision, so we can revisit it once Nikky has had some time to ponder over it.

Grants to be added

With that all addressed, we moved to the topic of adding some more research projects to both the school website and the new Research Grants section of the main Health Sciences site. The school has a new chair for the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics—Dr. Bethany Barone Gibbs—who has secured a new roughly-$3 million grant to study pregnant individuals and positive health outcomes related to pregnancy. Nikky wanted to see about getting this grant added to the Health Sciences site, so Shawn directed Nikky to get in touch with Bill, who can help her with that.

There is also a good bit of research going on in the school, both with this grant and a second similar one, so Nikky thought it might be appropriate for a lab page to be added to the site. She was thinking this could be handled in a similar way to what we set up for Brian Hendricks about a year ago. Nikky says there is a clinical trial associated with the research, and there are students and other collaborators that she wants to feature for their work on this. Ideally, she would like to have something on the website for this by early September in order to use it for recruitment and to coincide with the launch of the study. Shawn said that it would be good for Nikky to send along some of the preliminary information she has to the web team, and that could be populated into a new lab page. From there, the page can then be edited and iterated upon by the school as they see fit. This is essentially the same approach we took for Brian’s section.

It was then mentioned that there is another grant that is related to the HSTA program that Jessica Wilmouth is writing a story about, and that Nikky would like to see it also listed on the Research Grants database.

Confetti

Finally, we discussed a little bit about some of the details that have appeared on the school website in the past, including a very complicated but fun confetti feature Rachel developed for the home page to celebrate the first undergrad class graduating back in 2017. We all wondered if this or something similar could be included in the anniversary project. 🤔