July 2022 Website Meeting

Notes

For this meeting, Nikky was unavailable to meet with the group. With that in mind, we kept the discussion geared towards analytics and an overview of some of the functionality of Umbraco for Kayla’s benefit.

Reviewing analytics

Shawn mentioned at the start of the meeting that the team will be implementing a new suite of analytics tools for the school website in the coming week or so. Hopefully, with these new tools in place, by the time we meet in August we will have gathered some new types of data we can look over.

Bill has been getting into exploring some of the established analytics associated with the school’s website. He was able to put together an analytics report that he shared with the group (PDF). The report looked at the site’s traffic over the month of June, focusing on:

• What are visitors looking at in terms of page views?
  • Top 10 pages overall
  • Top 10 news stories
• How are visitors arriving to the website?
  • Sources of acquisition
  • Breakdown of traffic arriving via social media sites
  • Devices being used to view the site
• Where are the visitors to our site located geographically?
  • International breakdown
  • State-by-state breakdown

Looking at some of the data might lead the school communications team to better gauge where to spend advertising for the school going forward.

Editing things for the site in Umbraco Backoffice

While Kayla has gotten training on the basics of using Umbraco by the ITS Support team, Shawn wanted to use this meeting as an opportunity to do more of a deep-dive into the specifics that Kayla may want to get familiar with. Shawn also reminded everyone that in the coming months, the new Newsroom and Events modules will be finished and will be available for the communications team to use. These tools will certainly be beneficial from a marketing perspective.

With that said, Rachel then shared her screen with the group and gave a walk-through of some of the major areas of the website in Umbraco that we feel are important to know about and understand.

Features

We began our Umbraco overview by looking at the “feature” (or “hero”) areas of the site, specifically that of the home page. Currently, the Public Health home page has several features defined, but most are turned off or hidden. The way feature areas like this work—where multiple features can be defined at once in the “Feature” tab of the home page—is that each feature set can be turned on or off, depending on what is needed to be displayed at a particular time. When a visitor comes to a page with multiple features defined, they will be shown a randomly chosen feature set from those that are active. Noting the school’s high number of defined feature sets, the web team wanted to convey that it might not be a bad idea to audit and remove some of these inactive features. There is no downside from a technical perspective for keeping these older, inactive feature sets around. But it can be easier to digest what is currently available to run in a feature area if these are kept to a reasonable number.

Handling images

Part of defining feature sets is providing a large, high-quality photo to use as the background of the feature. Kayla has used Umbraco for creating profiles, and was not clear on the differences in adding media to a page; specifically, when is it necessary to add an image to the Media Library? In general, if you are wanting to add an image to a specific and defined area of a page (like the feature area), you’re most likely just going to add the image to a specific property (or field) of that page. On the other hand, if you are working on adding an image to a more generic content page, or a page without a defined structure, you’ll most likely be adding content to a larger Rich Text Editor area. In that case, you’ll need to add your photo to the Media Library before using it. There are two methods for doing this:

1. Either switch to the Media Library tab in Umbraco, or open the Media Library in a new tab.
2. In the Rich Text Editor, you can select the “Media Library” button and do everything directly from there.

Regardless of your method of getting your image into the Media Library, once you go to add the image, it’s important that you include alternative text describing the image that you are placing on the page. This allows visitors using assistive technology from getting the same benefit that the image conveys to other users of the site.

This also led us to a discussion around the differences between alternative text and image captions. Alternative text is used to describe what is visually present in an image, whereas captions should deal more with the why the image is present, and what information can help to reinforce the information the image is attempting to convey.

Macros

Images with captions can be included in a Rich Text Editor area of a page by way of a “Figure” macro. This macro allows editors the ability to upload or choose an image from the Media Library, and then also define the alternative text and caption text all in one interface. This then results in a well-formed and properly defined captioned image on your page.

Other macros are available for use in Rich Text areas that allow you to include a Wufoo form, embed a YouTube or Vimeo video, or display an employee’s details from the HSC Directory.

Cabin

The web team has put together some resources that the communications team can use to aid in the development of the content of their websites. The one you are currently browsing is called Cabin and is used to house project management tools and information for both the web and communications teams. Most meetings will be documented here, as we will publish our meeting notes and document any major tasks that need to be completed.

Additionally, links to other tools are provided directly from a school’s section in Cabin, including Hub, the Audit tool, the current News system, the new Calendar system, as well as support resources like Website Content Guide and Website Access Request Form.

Tip: A quick and easy way to access the School of Public Health section of Cabin is to simply go to publichealth.wvu.edu/cabin.

Looking at profiles

Finally, we took a deeper look at how profiles are set up and work in the “Who We Are” section of Umbraco. The main page has areas to define the content that appears on the main “Who We Are” page. Some of the content on that main page, though, comes from the selected profiles that have been chosen to be featured. A profile is considered featured when all of the needed content is filled out in the “Featured” tab in Umbraco.

We ended the meeting with a brief discussion on the role of “Who We Are” and how it aligns with the overarching diversity and inclusion initiatives of both the campus and the university as a whole.