October 2019 Website Meeting

Notes

OLLI and OHSR website updates

We began the meeting with a brief discussion about the new OLLI website and the requests being made by their prof. tech., Michelle Klishis. Michelle is asking for a blog to be added to their website. Shawn has recommended that they just use the HSC News system, but the team there would prefer a system that supports a user comments. Shawn has floated the idea to them that they could use a custom Wordpress install for this particular feature of their site, but that's not something we nor the University Relations team would be likely willing to support. Shawn also noted that he will be meeting with Mike Esposito, the UR’s Executive Creative Director, in the near future to discuss things like this.

Beyond OLLI, the OHSR website is ready for launch. We are just waiting (still) for a go-ahead from that team to make the website live.

Tuition update

As was mentioned in our prior meeting, all HSC schools will be getting new, standardized tuition sections for their websites. Medicine, Pharmacy, and Nursing already have tuition information on their websites, but the information is not in any sort of uniform design and doesn’t match the official information we have received from the tuition office. Therefore, in the coming weeks the web team will be rolling out a new design for all five school sites.

The core data that is being designed is centered on the associated costs of tuition, but doesn’t account for financial aid. This will likely be custom additions to these pages according to what information is available for each individual school. The schools seem to have items like scholarship information in various places. Ideally, these should link to the new tuition sections, and vice versa.

The new design is nearly complete, but before we make these sections public we will be sure to forward them to the schools for a final review.

Tasks in Cabin

There are a few tasks in Cabin right now that are marked is being overdue, including the new sub-site redesigns for OHSR and PRC being 240+ days overdue. These sites are effectively ready for launch from a development perspective, but we’re waiting on content to be completed or for a green light to come in order to launch them. The third overdue item is the tuition launch outlined above.

We then went over some of the general procedures for tasks in Cabin. Right now, there’s nothing for the school to do in Cabin other than use it for a reference for how the web team sees the status of major projects. If there is ever a time when Nikky or Jessica feels like something needs added or updated, they are free to touch base with anyone in the web team to make the changes in the system. Going forward, the web team is considering making adjustments to the system so that school staff could have more of a hand in doing things in the system.

OHSR database solution

Another topic from last month’s meeting that we revisited was the OHSR data dictionary project. Shawn stated that he had a chance to sit down and comb through the NIS Description of Data Elements, the example solution that OHSR provided. In the past, when similar projects were approached, the solution often involved setting up something like a custom landing page or an HSC Themed website. While there was nothing inherently wrong with this approach, the purpose of both of those pieces come from a marketing perspective as opposed to something more resource-heavy. In the case of this data dictionary, it might be worth exploring something that will better suit a resource-heavy design. Depending on what kind of features that will ultimately be required for this dictionary—which seems to yet be determined—the web team may need to tap the programming team to do some of the more advanced functionality of doing things like comparing data sets, something that is a feature of the NIS project.

HPML symposium

Also discussed briefly during our prior meeting, the Health Policy, Management & Leadership department is hosting a policy and research symposium in late November. Nikky had attempted to add a section to the site for this symposium using the Dean’s Colloquium Series templates and document types, but these are limited in where they can be used on the website. In the past, editors from all the schools have used document types for the wrong purposes, causing all kinds of issues, hence their restrictions.

What the web team would like to do is have as much of the available information about the symposium forwarded to them, along with any guidance on how Nikky and Jessica think it should be structured. The web team will then create custom templates for this initiative. Nikky agreed to forward on the information she has, and the web team will begin developing these and potentially set up a placeholder page where information can begin to be entered.

Here are a few of the pieces of data Nikky thought would be part of this section:

• A short overview of the symposium
• A registration link
• A room block reservation link
• An agenda (though we are not yet sure if there will be any concurrent sessions)
• Speaker bios, possibly with headshots
  • Plus, the ability to highlight individual speakers, like a keynote speaker or one randomly chosen on each page load

The event information will end up living under the HPML department section, possibly under their Research page. However, if desired, a vanity URL (e.g., https://publichealth.wvu.edu/hpml-symposium) can be created for the page. This can be in addition to requesting a go.wvu.edu URL from University Relations.

New imagery and review of best practices

Nikky pointed out that she updated the photo in the feature area of the Occupation Medicine landing page with a photo of several Morgantown public safety personnel standing in front of a fire engine. Typically, we try to encourage avoiding the use of posed group shots like this in these areas. The university brand photography guidelines instead encourages the use of in-the-moment photos where possible. In the HSC Content Guide, we also warn against using photography in the feature that isn’t properly framed  to account for the left-aligned text in this area; subjects should instead be positioned as close as possible to the right third of the photo.

Reviewing the “Discover” landing page

Next, we discussed marketing landing pages and, specifically, the school’s “Discover” page. In looking over the content of this page, Nikky pointed out that Lauren Devine’s job title is incorrect and needs updating. She wondered if that was something she was able to do. In instances of marketing landing pages like this, editing the content via Umbraco isn’t supported. Shawn explained that since these are very unique pages, we typically leave them as “static” content, meaning they aren’t editable. If the landing page’s subject is something that is recurring, like “Discover” or even the “Welcome Week” page, we will use the first couple occurrences of the page to get a feel for a common structure that is required. Once that is establish, then we may return to the page setup and make the content editable for future revisions. In the meantime, if there are ever any updates that need to be made to these pages, the school is encouraged to let the web team know and the necessary updates will be made.

Refreshes of home page and higher-level landing pages, and analytics

One thing Shawn wanted to emphasize as a long-term goal for all school sites is refreshing home pages and higher-level landing pages. Some of these pages on the school websites have become stale, with out-of-date content like old profiles and stats that are no longer relevant. Shawn would like the school to think about anything that they think these pages aren’t doing well for them currently, and any content that’s not represented that could be added to these pages.

Along those lines, Nikky asked if there were any ways of telling how effective some of the sections of the home and landing pages are. All school sites are set up with Google Analytics accounts, so we do have data about user behavior. Along with that, we did have automated reports that were being sent out to communicators and select editors. However, recently that functionality has stopped working. Instead, the web team will work on getting Nikky and Jessica set up with their own accounts so that they can log in and access some of this data.

Data from Google Analytics and Site Search were what initiated the push to have tuition information easily accessible on the school sites. Search logs frequently had tuition-related queries high on the list, so it only made sense to gather this information and present it in an accessible way.

Creating internal announcements

Nikky alerted us to some issues she has been having when creating new stories in the HSC News system, specifically when they are tagged as internal announcements. These don’t appear to be showing up anywhere she expects them to, like the Employee Hub website. Shawn asked Nikky to report to the web team the next time this happens so that a fix can be made.

Media Library management

Finally, we touched on how the Media Library in Umbraco works. Nikky pointed out that, despite her uploading a photo to the media library, she was unable to use it in the image cropper that is a part of the feature area of the home and landing pages. Unfortunately, this is just a weird quirk of Umbraco: the two tools don’t share where their images are stored. In order to use the image cropping tool, you have to upload the images to it separately.

We then briefly discussed organization strategies for the Media Library that—despite our optimism when launching a brand new website with a clean, empty library—never seem to be followed through on. But there are ways to organize the library going forward. Creating sub-directories for your media in your site’s library can really help. The process of moving existing media around is identical to moving content pages around. And there should be no hesitation to do this if you are worried about breaking images that are already in use on your site. Umbraco is smart enough to update references to images when they are placed in new or different locations in the library.

One thing Dan noted (that he also brought up in our prior meeting): if there is an image in a feature area’s cropping tool that you wish to back up or archive to your computer, right-clicking on the image in the editor and either opening that image in a new tab or saving it directly from the context menu will give you the original, full-sized image.