July 2021 Website Meeting
Notes
Migrating content to Hub
There is a push campus-wide to begin migrating any content that is geared towards an internal audience to our Hub website. This will help better establish Hub as a resource for current faculty, staff, and (to a lesser extent) students, while the main school sites as the resource for anyone external: prospective students, staff, faculty, etc.
This initiative is just getting off the ground. Nikky was wondering, though, if it was okay for Crystal—who is going to be managing the Hub content for Public Health—to continue to update the content for internal audiences currently on the Public Health website. Shawn says that this is fine, because whatever changes are made between now and when the content is migrated will make that transition.
Shawn mentions that a major driver for this change being made is because a large chunk of the content in question is in PDF form and is less accessible than webpages. This is still an issue, but by moving it to an internal-facing site it becomes less of a risk for someone to stumble upon it and turn the university in for accessibility violations. Our approach to this is to get as much of the internal documentation off of the public site. Then, we go back in and do a “phase 2” and convert any remaining PDF content to webpages.
A significant portion of PDF content on all school websites right now is curriculum documents. These are not easy to translate into normal content pages. So, as part of phase 2, we may look to create a curriculum content type in Umbraco to make entry and maintenance of this information as web content a little bit easier.
Nikky wanted a little more clarification about this: if the content in question is taken off the external, public site and moved to an internal one, does that take the burden off of us? Hub is going to be something faculty, staff, and students will reference, but that number is going to be significantly smaller than the volume of people accessing our public sites, as some of our sites see as much as 2.5 million monthly hits.
This is not currently a fire for us right now, but it has been in the past and has the potential to be in the future. The university was hit with an accessibility complaint a few years ago, and because of that there is a five year window where federal authorities can come back and check our sites for compliance. PDFs weren’t a focus of this complaint, but the university has been worried that it could become one in the future. Our learning management systems (LMSs) are also a concern. So, the university is trying to get ahead of the web part as much as possible, and then take some of the things we learn from addressing the public web content, and applying those techniques and more to the LMS side of things.
As far as a timeline for getting this internal content onto Hub goes, the web team has been working on getting things ready for this process for a while now. Shawn will have Tara take a look at the plan and design of the new Hub pages by the end of the month, with the goal of possibly moving things in August. This migration process will require access to the Hub website, which is on a different Umbraco server, but the process for creating and maintaining the content on that site will be nearly identical to the school site.
Virtual tours
We revisited the topic of virtual tours on the school sites and how they still filled with many glitches and issues. Nikky was wondering if Shawn got the chance to revisit the topic with Tara. He says that there really isn’t a firm answer on any of that right now. The relationship with the contractor involved with gathering and creating the media for the tours is non-existent at this point, and there’s no person available to fix the issues we have with the tours. This is made even more of a mess because we technically don’t have the copyright to the media that was created thus far for the project. Shawn says that the thinking right now is Tara, Sharon Martin, and Mike Esposito are going to eventually have a conversation about whether or not it would be beneficial to have a university person who is responsible for this type of work. It would require a lot of effort up front, but then the maintenance on this initiative would not be as much. That is the most viable future for this, but the whole thing is and will be slow moving, and it requires more than just a Health Sciences scope. It is a conversation that many groups on campus have had and are having. Ultimately though, virtual tours are not going away. The effect of WVU being a part of the Big 12 Conference and trying to recruit people from the footprint of that conference is going to escalate this conversation.
For now though, for the current incarnation of our virtual tours, if a space is not functional or straight-up broken, we should probably just remove it from the tour.
The current form of our tours are that they are in a page to themselves, not necessarily something that can be embedded into another page. They are not a part of any global navigation or will appear automatically in any menu on the sites. They’re not technically “hidden”, but because of where they exist within the site they aren’t being linked to anywhere. And, partially because of their current state, Shawn says we aren’t making them super public at the moment. However, if the school is comfortable using it, possibly after making any necessary tweaks to the tours, they can be linked to. It just boils down to whether the school wants to use it, and where Nikky and Jessica would want it to appear.
This year’s Welcome Week
Nikky informed us all that there are teams already planning and coordinating things for this year’s Welcome Week. She noted that the last page we had on the site for this event was used for Welcome Week 2019, and so she was wondering for this year’s version would it be best to copy and then update that already existing page. Shawn said that he talked with Tara and the plan is to do smaller-type events, instead of one bigger event. The university as a whole is working to put together a page to highlight all of those events. Typically, Health Sciences doesn’t follow the same format as the rest of the university. Our schools all seem to have varying start dates, almost making it a Welcome Month more-so than a Welcome Week. But Shawn says that the pieces are still being put together, however it’ll likely be wildly different this year.
Nikky says that Public Health is definitely going to be doing something this year, most likely on the Monday of Welcome Week, and that this was the impetus. Shawn is thinking that most of the common resources that apply to all of the schools will be put somewhere on the main Health website. Once that is set up, a URL to those resources could be linked to from the Public Health page. Nikky pointed out that their school’s welcome festivities will be a day and not really a week. She says that she is meeting with the people coordinating this on Monday or Tuesday of next week, and that Jessica has already met with them.
Spatial Epidemiology and Statistics Lab page updates
Jessica has been working with Brian on the new Spatial Epidemiology and Statistics Lab page. She says that she has sent a request for Brian to have access to the site to the CMS Desk team. Shawn says that they should follow up with her in the next day or two, but he does mention that with the fall semester right around the corner this tends to be one of their busier parts of the year. Nikky was wondering once CMS Desk gets back to them, should they then sign Brian up for training, which they should.
Related, Nikky was wondering if it’s possible to tell what access Crystal currently has in the system. Shawn checked, and she has access to pretty much anything on the Public Health site. What can be done going forward is to reduce her access to just things under the “School of Public Health” section for now, then get her access to Hub. Once she’s set up in there and after she has done the necessary migration, then we can adjust or eliminate her access to the Public Health site.
(Note: This meeting was originally scheduled for July 1.)