December 2019 Website Meeting
- Held on:
- Attended by:
Notes
OHSR projects
Website launch
Nikky believes that the new OHSR site is nearly complete and ready to launch. She will coordinate with Audrey Semel and expects to possibly launch the site next Friday.
Data dictionary update
Along with the website launch update, we discussed some materials that Nikky had forwarded to the web team earlier in the week related to the data dictionary project. The documents she provided gave a sense of the information that the project would need to be based off of.
In today’s meeting, she mentioned that the OHSR is planning an upcoming event to reintroduce the office and its programs to the community. With this scheduled for February, Nikky wondered if the data dictionary project could be ready to show off at that event. Shawn requested some additional time to further evaluate the documents, after which he could get back to Nikky so they may develop a plan for the project.
PDF follow-up
We briefly re-visited posting accessible PDF documents to the school website. Shawn gave us some background on why this is going to be a greater concern in the future. Earlier this year, the university’s websites were audited by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. While the scope of this particular audit focused on webpages, it made apparent the volume and condition of PDF documents being linked to from university’s sites. Since that audit has occurred, the focus will be shifting more and more towards ensuring our sites have accessible versions of those documents. Shawn stated that by sometime in late spring or early summer of next year he would like to begin sitting down with groups to make plans on addressing PDFs: either convert the documents into webpages or ensure that the documents are as accessible as possible.
Our discussion during and after the November meeting helped the web team to realize that PDFs were not covered very well in our Website Content Guide. Jason, with help from the rest of the web team, revised the content on the PDF page to better outline when and how to properly use accessible PDF documents on websites. As with anything on the Website Content Guide, if something isn’t clear or doesn’t make sense, be sure to alert the web team so we can look into revising that content further.
Scholarships and tuition updates
Nikky and Jessica updated us on their review of the scholarship information currently on the SPH website. They found a few items that need to be updated, but said that those should be easy to take care of. They expect to have those updates made as early as next Friday, December 13.
As far as the data for the new tuition section is concerned, after our meeting last month Shawn contacted the financial aid office to ask about some of the inconsistencies that were discovered. Unfortunately, outside of a confirmation that they received the email, Financial Aid have yet to give a response to the questions that were posed.
One positive update for tuition, though, came from Jessica: the residency program’s tuition seems to conform to the data we already have in the new section.
Diversity initiatives discussion
Nikky said that she met with the group who is spearheading the diversity initiatives for the campus. However, the topic of diversity information for the web was not brought up.
Shawn said that he has an upcoming meeting to discuss this topic and how it’ll be reflected on the web. He seems to be under the impression that the solution will be an smaller website that will discuss the associated topics at an HSC campus level, but will also accommodate information for each individual school.
OLLI’s request for a blog
We rounded out the meeting with a discussion about OLLI and their desire to have a blog as a part of their website. Blogs are certainly possible with Umbraco, and Dan and Shawn had developed a plan for implementing one on the OLLI site. However, one piece that was intentionally omitted from that plan was a commenting system for the blog’s readers. Such a system is much more complicated than it may seem on the surface: comment moderation, user accounts, and other tricky pieces of the system need a lot of serious consideration, not to mention cost of initial development and on-going maintenance. Not satisfied with this, OLLI has pushed for a separate, independent WordPress website that would handle this blog.