November 2021 Website Meeting

Notes

Newsroom and other projects

Shawn began the meeting by stating that there’s not a lot going on right now from a school-specific perspective. The Web team is working on “Newsroom,” the next version of News on the school and campus websites. They are still in the very initial stages of the project, but are making good progress.

Alongside that project, the Web team is also developing an events module. The team was able to do a sort of trial run of this project for Diversity Week, and that went really well. Rachel is in the process of creating a simplified version of the code to distribute out to the school’s websites. The whole purpose of this project is to get the school teams the ability to highlight higher profile events. Shawn says we’ll have more discussions on the ins and outs of that.

Main website structure

Shawn also reported that he has been having discussions with Tara’s team about evaluating all of the schools’ top navigation for their websites. An idea that Tara had was, What if we took “About Us” and incorporated it with “Who We Are,” as a way of providing a warmer way to think about “About Us.” This would not be an immediate thing, and it would possibly be a thing to look at once we all return from the holiday break. Shawn says that “About Us” sections get very low traffic, and he thought it was an interesting way to go about elevating details from “About Us.” It’s important to point out that he doesn’t believe that “About Us” would go away entirely.

Further discussion around the Newsroom project

Nikky wanted to confirm that Public Health is going to end up being one of the “guinea pigs” for the Newsroom project, which Shawn confirmed. He says that the approach will be to make the Newsroom more article- and creative focused. He gave a brief overview of the process as it is now, and mentioned one of the big features of the new system that is planned is the ability to create drafts. Entering a news item into the system won’t require it to be published immediately. This will allow news editors time to develop articles and stories directly in the system without relying on another program, like Microsoft Word, only to copy and paste it into Newsroom. The whole process around Newsroom and its changes will make the whole system much more creator-focused, in contrast with the way the current system works.

We also briefly went over some of the other pieces of the school’s web presence and how they fit into the whole scheme of things. Shawn also mentioned that Bill is busy helping to get the Data Studio tool up and running, but once that is complete he will be working in and getting familiar with Hub, which should become a bigger tool for schools to use when it comes to needing a place to post more internal-facing material.

More flexible page types

We discussed a little more about plans for having additional “Discover”-like pages: pages that have a more campaign feel to them. Nikky mentioned that the school frequently has little things pop up that she believes a “Discover”-style page would be perfect for. However, she currently has no way of creating something like that. She doesn’t even have the ability to edit the “Discover” page and was wondering if she could be granted that ability. Shawn instead said that he would like to take the approach similar to what happened with the School of Medicine. He and Dan were able to create much more dynamic and flexible pages for things like their programs. He also wants to take a look at the team’s roadmap for rolling things like events out, but also set aside time to build out a page similar to a reusable campaign page. He says he will work that all out over the next week or so and will provide more of an update after that.

Nikky went on to provide everyone with a few examples of upcoming things. One of those things is wanting to create a page with holiday message, along with dressed-up News stories from the past year. She wants to be able to mail out postcards and provide social media posts with links to such a page. Shawn says in the short term, we can leverage some of the things we’ve been talking about. For the news highlight, we should be able to put something together. There’s a lot of things we’re thinking about with the Newsroom project and events. In the future, things like this should be possible with these new tools. Newsroom in particular is going to have news, announcements, podcasts, blogs, etc., and will allow for the development of new pathways for creating content. These new tools being developed should provide for more agile workflows as opposed to the rigid tools in use today.