December 2022 Website Meeting

Notes

Current happenings

Nikky mentioned that the school is holding the next Dean’s Colloquium event tomorrow, which she has busy coordinating the details for. Other than that, she doesn’t have a lot for the meeting, and neither does Shawn.

New patterns and rethinking key pages

Shawn shared with the group that the university has updated a few things with their website style guide. We will be looking to incorporate some of those changes in our websites to match. One major piece of that is redoing the feature areas of our sites. Downtown’s web team has implemented this pattern on the main WVU home page already. The new pattern features a shaded box that holds the text of the feature (or hero unit) instead of applying the text directly over the full-bleed photo. This pattern also allows for a little more flexibility in how the photo and text of this area can be aligned, and the web team will look to add customizable options for changing how these look on our sites.

To go along with this change to the feature areas, around mid- to late January Shawn is planning to start thinking about ways to update the Public Health home page. All of the school website home pages don’t seem to get a lot of activity. So, the plan is to elevate things that make sense to feature on these pages, and demote things that don’t.

Additionally, Shawn wants to move to feature single profiles on the home and student pages. Profiles are massively engaging, as they allow for people to see themselves at the school. Nikky wondered if that is the case, wouldn’t it make sense to feature multiple profiles? Shawn doesn’t disagree with that, but thinks we can set up profiles to either act as a carousel—where site visitors can cycle through a selection of profiles to browse—or simply have a different profile show up each time the page is loaded. Shawn also wants to move profiles higher up on key pages, as people go look for that kind of information. He says it’s important to make good use of strong marketing materials, and to guide people to make choices about the school and the university.

Shawn wants to think about “reshuffling the deck,” as well as consolidating things on key pages by combining different types of content into singular blocks. There will be guidelines put together about tightening up content on our websites, and that we should really look to focus on one key concept on each page. The ultimate goal is to streamline all of this information and make it marketing-focused and direct.

Nikky then asked about engagement with other profile types. If student profiles are so important, what about faculty and staff profiles? Should we focus on those as well? Shawn says that while those types of profiles shouldn’t be neglected, they don't deliver quite the same traffic and interaction as student profiles.

Shawn also brought up the memo sent out from leadership about limiting budgets. Analytics are still driving a lot of decisions about content on our sites, but streamlining these things will help with managing everything.

Analytics report from Bill

Bill put together his analytics report for the month of November. Surprisingly, the mask story is still at the top of the rankings. We weren’t able to determine whether the source of all the traffic to this story is internal or not, or whether it is in-state or not. Beyond that particular story, though, the report really doesn’t hold many surprises. The average time on page for the site is very high, though, and Facebook is a high driver for traffic coming from the school’s social media accounts.

Nikky was curious about how Linktree performs and wondered if that information could be obtained. Bill did a bit of digging, and it seems as though the site received 25 hits from Linktree last month.

Turning back to the K95 mask story, the time on that particular story was very high, and the traffic to the story included a high number of unique visitors. They arrive, spend a long time on the story, then seem to leave the site. This led Nikky to speculate that perhaps this indicates the importance of developing more guidance type of content for the site.

Involvement of students

Nikky spoke about her belief and approach to having students be the drivers of content for the site. She sees having the school’s students—particularly the school’s student ambassadors—act as public health influencers, who take what they’re learning and using that to come up with topics that are worth talking about on our sites and social media accounts.

Shawn sees a real need to repurpose some of the content we create for things like profiles on social media. The current generation needs to hear from others telling them that this is where I need to be. Nikky says that this is an opportunity to utilize those who are in the health communications course, as they are the ones learning about this type of engagement. It’s important to make sure these students get something out of doing this though, and that there is no free labor expected. It could be a huge endeavor for everybody.

Shawn mentioned his wife and the pediatric department she was working with in the School of Medicine. The students in that department took it upon themselves to create a reel highlighting the new WVU Medicine Children’s Hospital. Nikky then asked if Shawn though that video is still the king of getting engaging content. Shawn says it is, and it is only getting stronger. He mentioned his nephew who will watch YouTube with captions on. He also mentions the importance Instagram has put on Reels instead of the traditional image posts on the site.

Immediate needs?

Nikky wanted to know if the web team needed anything from her in the short term. Shawn says no, and instead for her to go take care of herself. In January, though, he thinks it might be beneficial to start thinking about commencement: who to feature, and how to coordinate getting content for that.

Thoughts on “Who We Are”

This led us to a discussion about the “Who We Are” section of the website. Nikky expressed that she feels it is an underutilized area of the site, and was curious about options to promote it more. Should she incorporate it more into the hero/feature area? Or maybe link to it from the “About” section? Right now, there is no immediate and direct route to get to it from, say, the home page. Shawn says that “About” is so foundational and people come to expect to find an “About” section on most websites. It’s unfortunately a chicken and egg situation. Swapping that section with “Who We Are” outright or emphasizing “Who We Are” in “About” are options to consider. What Shawn proposes, though, is possibly developing a block of content that can appear on the “About” page/section that contains information from and directs people to the “Who We Are” content. This is something the web team can develop, as well as creating a more designed page for “About.”

Nikky also proposed including a direct link to “Who We Are” in the sub-navigation for “About,” possibly above the first item in that navigation menu: “What is Public Health?”