March 2024 Website Meeting

Notes

Updates and a look ahead

Shawn started off the meeting informing Lindsay that he doesn't have many updates for her. He and Tara are currently working through budget approvals for new tools that the web team can use. But once he has the go-ahead for Umbraco Cloud—the new version of our content management system that will unlock a lot more possibilities—both the School of Public Health and the main Health Sciences are at the top of the list to get a design refresh.

Rachel and Bill have been working hard on an audit of the current Public Health website, comparing it to other universities’ sites. As soon as they have something final put together and the budgets get approved, they will want to invite Lindsay to a meeting to go over their findings. The web team is doing a lot of stuff, but Shawn doesn’t want to meet with Lindsay to discuss those things only to not be able to move forward with anything and lose all momentum on these initiatives.

Content updates

Day of Giving and National Public Health Week

As for things that are upcoming, Shawn says that if Lindsay or the school needs anything concerning Day of Giving to please reach out. Lindsay is actually going to be unavailable for a few weeks beginning March 18. Jess will be filling in for her during this time, and will be getting help from Cheyenne. The plan right now is to utilize the announcement banner on the home page for Day of Giving.

Lindsay also mentioned National Public Health Week coming up. Jess and Cheyenne will look to handle that, and they will reference the existing NPHW page and its content and make any necessary changes for this year.

Department updates

Lindsay says that representatives from both the Biostatistics and the Health Policy, Management, and Leadership departments are looking to make content updates to their respective sections of the website. She is still waiting to hear back about the Master of Public Health program concerning their accreditation requirements that may affect the site.

One thing of note: Lindsay believes that the MHA program will need to have a page created for their student organization to comply with accreditation. She believes it can essentially be similar to what the school currently has for the student association. Lindsay seems to have most of the content ready for that page, and she will most likely want some help in getting it all set up.

The timeline for the student organization page is not urgent, and can probably wait until towards the end of the semester. The bigger priority is getting the program page updated. Lindsay is going to work on getting the content cleaned up and then will likely need help getting everything set up. Shawn let Lindsay know there are things that can be turned enabled on an as-needed basis that can improve the design and functionality of these pages.

Online programs

Lindsay pointed out that the Population Health and maybe the Biostatistics programs have online components. With that, WVU Online has their own semi-independent website. She was curious how other online Health Sciences programs handle web content and updates, and keeping that information in-sync between the two websites.

Shawn says we try not to replicate too much. At minimum, what we tend to do is to provide some context on our sites and then add whatever links to WVU Online that are warranted. Sometimes one link is enough, but other times two or three links to resources are needed. If it’s just one thing, we would probably want to provide some context before simply linking out. It all really boils down to what the specific needs are.

Lindsay says she’s been trying to find out how to communicate between the two sites. Shawn says in the past, we have taken a more hands-off approach. There were just too many differences in things like tuition, information availability, and platforms to try and make everything match up. He knows that there was at some point a university-level effort being made to make in-person and online resources match as much as possible. His advice seems to be to yield to Online and hope that they have all of their details covered. Nursing is in a similar situation with a few of their programs being offered online.

We also noted that Online seems to have their own marketing and advertising budgets and campaigns.

Next meeting

With Lindsay being unavailable for the scheduled April meeting, Shawn is still going to keep that meeting on the calendar and have Jessica fill in.