June 2022 Website Meeting

Notes

Introduction to Kayla

We started our meeting by being introduced to the newest member of the School of Public Health communications team, Kayla Gagnon. Kayla comes to the school by way of Reed College, and she will primarily be helping Nikky and the school with multimedia production.

Updates on various projects

We got a brief update on some of the bigger web initiatives currently underway at Health Sciences.

Obviously, Commencement was a big focus for everyone the last few weeks, and it’s good to get past that and start to refocus on other projects for the summer.

Work continues to progress on the Newsroom project.

Rachel is working on completing the new Events module, which will be different in purpose and scope compared to WVU Calendar. Our Events solution looks to make more marketing-focused content for the various types of events that occur on the Health Sciences campus, and it’ll be built in our CMS.

The big goal with these projects is to make the Health Sciences communications teams’ lives better by building systems and resources that are easy to maintain in the back-end. We also want setups where it will be easier to adapt as needs evolve and change.

If anyone is ever looking at the Public Health website and you realize that something isn’t easy or possible to accomplish, reach out to the web team. We are always there for anyone to come to with new ideas for how to make the website better.

Grants and research content

We also revisited the topic of hosting a toolkit for the domestic violence screening in healthcare grant project that we discussed during our last meeting. Shawn says that if the University of Wisconsin wants to run point on that project, as was one option proposed, they can. However, we can fully accommodate this. One of the sticking points for this project seems to be who will update the content once everything is set up. It didn’t seem as though Nikky would be responsible for this, and with some of the security around our websites tightening up in the more recent months, getting additional editors into the back-end of our websites is going to be harder to justify. Regardless, Nikky says she is going to get back to Danielle—the person who has been requesting this—with the information that we’ve all discussed to see about what the next might be.

This transitioned into a broader discussion once again on the new “Grants” section being developed as part of the “Research” section of the main Health Sciences website. Instead of putting grant information in awkward places on the Public Health site, we will be putting as many qualifying grant projects in this new section of Health Sciences site as we can. If it does need to also be present on the Public Health website, we will pull that information and effectively syndicate it to the Public Health website, similar in fashion to how profiles were handled for the Commencement website. All of the grants that we know about will end up living in this new web project, and any of the grant information that has relevance to the individual schools will be shared out to those schools’ research sections. As this new area grows out more, we can do things like build out functionality that total grant funding together, for example, and provide quick reference statistics for communication and other materials. The information being gathered on these grants are effectively the same that is present on the seemingly-ubiquitous and established green sheets that are associated with research and grant projects.

It was also stressed again that if any other teams or grant projects come forward or have information available, to be sure to send that information along so that it gets included in the new site. Nikky says that she anticipates having another project that could be included: a new R1 grant that will span multiple years is expected to launch later this summer.

All in all, one of the big benefits to having this new database of research and grant projects is for other researchers, and to demonstrate that we are actually doing research on our campus. Nikky asked about the possibility to link to this new database from Directory profiles, and Shawn pointed out that right now we are accommodating links to related news stories on the details view of the individual grants. Bill let us know that a new Wufoo form is being created that will be used to collect the information for this site.

Nikky also wanted to know about the possibility for tags or categories in this new system. Shawn said that the priority right now is to get the information populated into the system first, and then once that’s near completion we can begin to look at methods to filter through everything and further expand that kind of functionality going forward.

Shawn expects this project to officially launch within the next couple of weeks.

Training for the Public Health site

Kayla has completed her training in Umbraco that’s offered by our support team. Shawn wanted to point out that that training is fairly broad and really just focuses on the fundamentals around the basic capabilities of Umbraco, and not necessarily how we use Umbraco for the Public Health site. If Kayla would want some more specific training from the web team more relevant to the Public Health website , she is welcome to let us know and we’ll set something up.

What to focus on

Nikky was curious about anything that other schools have done with their websites that maybe Public Health hasn’t bothered with. She’s interested in finding out if there’s anything that the school might be behind the curve on.

One item that Dan and Shawn have been working on for a very long time on the School of Medicine website is getting their Centers and Institutions page a proper redesign. It took a lot of thinking on and convincing at the school level to get something better built, and it’s still not launched just yet. But this is an example of a page that we want to constantly be looking over and trying to figure out if there’s a better way to present the necessary information.

One other area that Shawn really wants to focus on in the coming months is re-evaluating the designs of our home and landing pages. Most of the schools have barely touched their home pages in the years since their websites were last redesigned. They are plagued with out-of-date statistics and stale content that really doesn’t serve anybody. Plus, the importance of home pages have declined a bit over the years. People are much more likely to come across our websites via web search, which will usually get the visitors deep within the site, skipping the home page altogether. That’s not to say that home pages should be ignored. We just need to rethink how we approach them. Shawn proposed approach is to get to a place where the home pages focus on one particular timely topic that the school is pushing hard from a marketing perspective. Examples would be things like Public Health Week, Commencement, or Welcome Week. Instead of making the home page a place where the various parts of the school must have a presence on, we should instead have it represent this one topic for a few weeks, but then routinely switch it all up. This is very similar to how the home page of the main Health Sciences site operates now.

Tuition changes

Tuition was once a very frequent high-ranking item on our sites’ search logs, and so in response to that we added tuition information to each of the school websites. But ever since that happened, we’ve had several problems with that information and how it is handled by each school. It’s been tough to keep it all current, and schools will often try to misrepresent the information that is presented there.

In order to address this, we will be transitioning over the summer to a more centralized model for managing tuition data. Dixie Paletta, who is the senior director of budget and planning for the campus, will be frequently providing us with an updated spreadsheet that has exact, up-to-date data which will then get updated on the Health Sciences website. That information can then be sent out to the individual school websites.

In the interim, Nikky wanted to alert us to some changes coming to the Biostatistics program. Nikky met with the person who heads up that program, which is being shifted to WVU Online.

Ideally, these changes to tuition on the school sites will take place over the summer.