November 2019 Website Meeting

Notes

OHSR resource

As we discussed in the last couple of monthly meetings, the Office of Health Services Research is wanting to have a solution built for them to be able to share research data with others. Nikky has been talking with Adam Baus and Divya Gadde about the requirements for this project. Essentially, the tool they would like built is a lot simpler than we had originally assumed, which was based on the impressions we got by looking at an example website that was provided to the group. What OHSR is seeking is to improve the process of receiving requests for certain research data sets that they maintain in an already existing system. These requests for data would then be manually screened by staff and then the proper steps to fulfill that request would be taken, if appropriate. The requests would be mainly from other entities within the HSC and WVU as a whole, although partnerships with outside institutions are likely.

In the end, this project will end up resembling something like a Wufoo form: the visitor to the site would provide details describing the information needed, which when submitted would fire off an email to alert staff to the request. Shawn is suggesting that an early step in this project should be to acquire a vanity email address specific to the project. Having a vanity email address would allow for flexibility in who manages processing the requests, while also providing flexibility if and when staff members on this project change.

Hub was considered as a possible home of this new system, but because of this potential for the use of this system outside of HSC that idea is less appealing. With Hub ruled out, a discussion followed concerning where it should ultimately live. The group weighed two major options:

• On the new, yet-to-be-relaunched OHSR website
• Under the school’s “Research & Services” landing page

Regardless, this new tool should have some kind of presence in both places, as well as other places throughout the site.

This spurred another conversation about the “Research & Services” page. Ideally, in all HSC schools the research sections could be doing a better job of putting research on the map. Content should be less stagnant and focus on active research projects. Getting information about those on-going projects is not easy, with many faculty members reluctant to share details about projects that aren’t yet completed or have ended up producing unexpected results. But by taking an approach that encourages exposing current research initiatives, it helps to emphasize WVU’s R1 status which can ultimately be used as a recruitment tool. In Public Health’s case specifically, content on “Research & Services” could be pivoted to focus more on the initiatives being led by the school and less about general information about each of the research centers the school operates. Having content about on-going research projects is believed to be far more appealing than the general overview blurbs that exist on the page presently.

Additionally, we’re all hoping that maybe the idea of this project being completed might push OHSR to finally launch their new website.

Experiential Learning Program

Nikky has been working with Audra Hamrick to get more content on the website for the Experiential Learning Program. A lot of what Audra has for the website consists of fill-able PDF forms, which Nikky and the web team both point out isn’t the most accessible way of gathering information on the web. Instead, she could be using Wufoo. She also has a handbook in PDF format that will need added to the website. This is pretty common across all of the HSC schools: most programs have a handbook PDF that they need to have available online. Shawn told us about some Medicine programs that have had years-old, out-of-date handbooks present on their sites. More current versions of these documents would be uploaded to Umbraco, but no one would bother to update the links to point to these newer documents. Not only do these documents need to be replaced and re-linked to yearly, they also need to be made accessible, which isn’t an easy thing to do. This got Shawn thinking about ways to make these handbooks in other formats for the websites. As for verifying the handbook that Audra wants to place on the site, Shawn suggested that Nikky forward it to the web team to review before posting to the site.

Diversity and inclusion resource

Nikky gave us a heads up that a new resource focused on diversity and inclusion within the school will need to be added to the site. This seems to be a point of emphasis for all of the schools. With that being said, each school is going to have statistics about their student populations and those are obviously going to be unique to each school. But much of the remaining content will probably be very policy-centered. Because of this, there’s likely going to be a lot of overlap in content between all of the schools. It may be worth having something in a central location on an HSC level that the schools can then point to.

Using Google Analytics

Following last month’s meeting, Nikky and Jessica were granted access to our Google Analytics account. During one of our prior discussions of Analytics, it was mentioned that dashboards could be created that surfaced certain details in a more accessible way. Nikky was wondering if there were any plans of adding that for Public Health. This led to more discussion about using Google Analytics, both from technical and strategic angles.

Analytics isn’t necessarily a difficult tool, but it can take some getting used to and navigating it can certainly be challenging at times. No one on the web team can claim that they are an expert in it, so we are often just clicking around until we arrive at a solution to the task we’re trying to perform. With that being said, it has been discussed that we might want to provide a quick, roughly half-hour-long crash course on how we typically use the system, and ideally we would maybe do that with a large group of school communicators and editors.

Strategically, Google Analytics can be an invaluable tool for making decisions as far as the effectiveness of your content strategy. We discussed multiple times when a faculty member from certain schools make unsubstantiated claims that were eventually proven wrong by pulling up data in GA.

New “Tuition” section review

The web team presented the preliminary “Tuition” section. The design is a standardized design that is being rolled out to all five schools in the very near future. The data displayed is information obtained via spreadsheets that were provided to us directly from the Office of Financial Aid.

Nikky was quick to point out that while this does paint a pretty clear picture of what the default costs are for both the undergraduate and graduate programs at the school, it might be beneficial to also include a more average view of what a typical student ends up paying. We discussed the possibility of adding aid details to this page to give a sense of how the cost of attending could be lower. The first step in making this happen is to do a thorough review of the scholarship information that already exists on the website. Once we have that squared away, we can begin to think about how to best integrate that additional information into the tuition designs.

Jessica wondered how summer programs will be reflected in these new pages. The data that we received from Financial Aid didn’t include any summer semester information for Public Health programs, despite some of the other schools’ information having explicit summer numbers. The web team will investigate this, as well as some other inconsistencies and peculiarities we found while doing the data entry for this section.