January 2020 Website Meeting

Held on:: Held on Tuesday, January 7, 2020 at 10:00 AM
Attended by:: Dan Edmonds; Shawn King; Jason Neel; Rachel Neel; Jessica Wilmoth; Add member

Notes

Utilizing video throughout the site

Dave began the meeting by praising the videos that Jessica and the school have been producing lately. He would like to see more promotion of those videos in different ways throughout the site.

Background videos

This led to a discussion about how other websites are utilizing video in their designs. Medicine has been incorporating background videos in some of their landing page feature areas, like what is being done on their "Residents" page. Additionally, all schools incorporated a similar style of background video for the "Welcome to your new neighborhood" sections of their "Welcome Week" pages, including Public Health's. The WV STEPS lab also uses this type of background video on their homepage. And the new HSC website, scheduled to launch in the next couple of weeks, will include videos and other rich media throughout the site's design.

These all illustrate one particular type of video that can be used on our websites. But it's important to highlight the aspects of these video backgrounds and how they are able to work in those spots:

They are brief, typically only lasting 10-15 seconds.
They have no audio playing.
They loop indefinitely.
They blend into the background, with a color overlay, and are highly compressed to save download time.

These types of videos can be incorporated into landing pages and specific page designs. Nikky and Jessica are free to evaluate any page on the site that they feel could benefit from this style of video, and the web team will work to figure out if and how such videos would work. It should only take 3-4 days to implement this where desired.

Embedded videos

When it comes to more interview- and overview-style videos like the ones found on the school's YouTube channel, these videos would obviously not work well as a background video. But they can be included on nearly any page of the website. This is done via the "Embedded Video" macro. Instructions for how to include videos from the macro are outlined on the Website Content Guide.

YouTube link on home page

A note: Following the meeting, Jason noticed that the YouTube link found in the "Connect With Us" bar on the school's home page was pointing to the main HSC YouTube channel. He has since updated that button to instead point to the Public Health channel.

Circling back to diversity and profiles on sites

We touched once again on a campus-wide push to incorporate diversity messaging and class statistics that include a focus on demographics on our sites. Shawn is meeting with an HSC-level group to discuss these topics and to continue planning out this initiative during the third week of January.

On the school sites, we will look to develop a new "Who We Are" section that will contain the profiles on students, faculty and staff, and alumni. The plan is to have these profiles live on the school websites, but also develop the ability to pull the profiles' information in order to display them on HSC-level sites, like Commencement or the new HSC site.

Website launch updates

We noted that the new OHSR website was launched in the middle of December.

Nikky mentioned that she was meeting with the team responsible for the new PRC website after our meeting. She will help them with any remaining issues that may be having and hopefully get them ready to launch the site in the near future.

More discussion on the OHSR data dictionary project

We discussed the OHSR data dictionary project that has been in the conversation for the last few months. Shawn proposed that we limit the scope of this section of the site to a single page that would list all of the pieces of information related to the data dictionary, rather than try to build out a whole structure of pages like some of the examples that were provided. This will help keep page counts low, which is always a concern for our sites.

When it comes to the mechanism for requesting the data, Shawn wants to start out with some generic questions or fields that can be included, and then proceed by further refining these. To start this, we'll need sample data sets of what is expected to be requested. We can then base the request fields off of that sample data. Essentially, we need to find out what are people going to want to search on, and what kind of information that can be then provided.

Financial aid and tuition updates

In December, the Office of Financial Aid sent updates and corrections to the web team concerning the tuition information they had previously provided. Public Health's data needed no modifications, however.

That said, the plan is for the new tuition sections to launch campus-wide soon. Before that happens, the web team will notify the schools so that they can have one last review of the final dataset.

Following the launch of the tuition section, it may be worth thinking about how to incorporate the data in other areas of the site. For example: on an earlier iteration of the tuition information on the School of Nursing website, we included informational boxes on program pages that pulled figures specific to that program right onto the page. Solutions similar to this could be added as needed or desired.