December 2023 Website Meeting

Notes

Introducing Lindsay

Lindsay Wiles joined us for our first School of Public Health website meeting as the new school communicator.

With a last name of Wiles, we of course had to ask her if she was in any way related to Sunshine, the School of Dentistry communicator. To her knowledge, she is not related to Sunshine.

In getting to know Lindsay, we found out her husband had a claim to fame as the chubby boy in the movie Major Payne.

Updating the school website in the new year

Shawn explained that the web team’s goal for the spring is to do a major update on the school’s website. We will be slowly transitioning all Health Sciences schools to a new, cloud-based version of Umbraco. He notes that the Public Health website is the second largest website at Health Sciences, so a big goal for this revamp will be reducing the footprint of the site while also making it better.

Lindsay says she has been reviewing the site and making some minor edits as she goes. Shawn would like her to record her thoughts as she’s doing this and for her to think of suggestions on how to change things. Shawn also notes that the school was once under the School of Medicine, and as a possible side effect of this, the faculty tends to over-inform.

As Lindsay is getting more comfortable in her new role, Shawn would like her to utilize the Public Health Website channel in Slack to share her thoughts and ideas, and to ask the web team any questions that might come up.

Lindsay was curious about ownership: who has permissions to change or make edits the website? Shawn believes that less than 10 people outside of the web team have access.

Currently, the site is at roughly 4,000 pages. Shawn would like to get that number down to somewhere near 1,300.

He notes that tuition information is now centralized at the Health level. The web team manages that data and has procedures in place to update that annually as they get the information from the appropriate sources. Along those lines, he would like to identify items that are repetitive across the site and centralize them, and then from there point back to those central places and streamline where possible.

As part of this revamp, Bill will be key in helping us analyze the performance of the site compared to our expectations of what it can become. He will set up goals, like applying to the school and helping perspective students seeing themselves here. There will be a large focus on recruitment metrics going forward.

January meeting date changed

Our monthly meetings will typically fall on the first Tuesday of the month. However, that would mean our January meeting would occur on the 2nd, which will be the first work day of the New Year. As such, Shawn is going to push our meeting back a week, so our January date will be the 9th.