October 2021 Website Meeting

Notes

Following up on tutoring information on the website

In the time since our last meeting, Nikky forwarded to the web team an email from Hannah Meeks and Sarah Opatz. Here’s Hannah explaining their request:

I was hoping you would be able to help Sarah and me out with setting up an inquiry form somewhere on the SPH website. We are working on developing a tutoring program within the School of Public Health and were thinking the easiest way to do that would be a form on our website that the students could fill out and request help.

The form would need to ask them for their name, email, the class they need help with, and a box for them to write in any additional info they think is necessary. The inquiry notification would need to go to Sarah.

After initially considering putting something in SOLE for this purpose, the approach shifted to instead putting a web form on the school’s “Student Resources” page. Shawn was wondering if the form to request the tutoring program could be put into Wufoo, and it turns out that this has already happened.

There was then a brief discussion on how to design this feature for the “Student Resources” page, ensuring that it stood out but only in the right amount. The consensus seems to be adding a bar before the handbook resources on that page. Also, it was discussed that this could not only be a resource for those looking for tutoring, but also those who were interested in helping out with tutoring, and Nikky mentioned that it could serve as a resource for those looking to be a “tutoring buddy” of sorts. Shawn pointed out that the language on the page or pages could be written to emphasize that there is no shame in seeking out tutoring assistance. Nikky will discuss these ideas more with both Hannah and Sarah and let the web team know what they decide.

News and Events project outlines and updates

Nikky asked the group if there was any update on the changes coming to the News system, and Shawn pointed out that there have been a few delays in getting that project rolling. However, next week, there should be a shift in focus to both the News system and a new initiative to bring event information to Health Sciences websites. Shawn doesn’t want to “crap on” WVU Calendar, but he thinks there is a way to leverage that existing system and augment it in a way that will allow for greater accessibility of event information on our websites.

The web team has been working on this for a while now, and are planning on testing their progress with Diversity Week, which runs next week (October 10–16). This new system will provide a much richer place to put event information, and right now the team has the system about 80% hashed out. Following Diversity Week, the team plans to evaluate how the process went, while also working with the School of Medicine to conduct further testing and dry-runs of the new system. Medicine has a lot of events, which makes them the ideal candidate to evaluate this new system early on.

The plan is to have this new event system available to all of the schools and entities on campus in early 2022. As for the News system changes, the team will focus on that for the remainder of 2021, and ideally have things ready mid-November for testing.

Nikky provided some areas where she thought the current state of the News system could use some attention. She says the results from the system’s search functionality isn’t always consistent or reliable. But the greatest source of frustration for her is the way the system handles images. She says she spends a large amount of her time trying to get proper cropping of photos, and even still ends up with images that contain blank regions on one side. Shawn says that will be one area that the team will want to revisit, and that the goal of the new version will be to try and offer healthier defaults for handling news images. Nikky re-iterated that the current workflow just eats up too much of her time.

Shawn indicated that he would want to get feedback from a lot of different groups on campus—especially Public Health—throughout the duration of this project. Feedback won’t be limited to certain windows during this time, but the team will encourage editors in the News system to constantly be testing the changes and providing whatever relevant feedback they can.

“Who We Are” and home page designs

Nikky then brought up the role of the “Who We Are” section of the site. She says that they are constantly using the profiles that they have on their site, but she seemed unsure about the section as a whole and whether it is being utilized to its fullest. She expressed concern about how buried this section seems to be, as it is not directly accessible from the home page, and even wondered if she should be devoting more feature area to highlighting some of her school’s profiles.

Shawn says that he has been in the early stages of forming some ideas about the schools’ home pages. The role of home pages is certainly still an important one, but not as important as it once was. So much of the traffic to websites is via other means. Visitors might eventually end up on the home page, but is often after already looking at other pages on the site. Direct traffic from search engines and social media land people deep within websites, and that puts less emphasis on home pages to act as that first interaction point.

That all said, Shawn thinks it might be worth considering how to reshape what our school home pages look like and how they function. He was in discussion with the School of Medicine, who realized they needed to add an additional link to their school’s main navigation, which is already pretty full. Evaluating what was already there, he noted their “About” link and wondered why this section is always seen as something different than the home page. In reality, your home page should be all about the school (or whatever is the subject of the site). The home page should house the most relevant information that can introduce a user to the mission or broadest details about the school. It’s with this in mind that Shawn hopes to look at potentially re-designing these home pages in the near future, and as a part of these refreshes bring more “Who We Are” details to the home page.

Discussion about program pages

The discussion then turned to other marketing-focused pages for the site. Nikky was pondering over campaign-style pages, and was curious to know if she may ever be able to edit something like the “Discover” page herself, instead of needing to get someone from the web team to make the changes for her.

She also wanted to ask about the school’s program pages, and how these can be improved in their design to make them more marketable. This is something that the School of Medicine has recently been tackling. They have redesigned both their program pages and fellowships pages. Unlike Public Health, the School of Medicine has dozens of editors. When it came to the old way of creating and maintaining these pages, those editors had a lot of leeway in how the pages were laid out and what kinds of content was presented. With this new system that they are rolling out, more control is given to the marketing people. Editors are still able to add details that get surfaced on these page types, but the design and presentation of the information is under more control by the marketing team. When the web team proposed some of the changes to remedy some of the issues with the old way of doing things, they were met with a lot of resistance.  But once this new system was in play and was able to presented to those stakeholders, they received a lot more buy-in and cooperation. Having a finished product that could be seen really changed a lot of minds.

But this new style of pages is something Shawn wants to roll out to the other schools and groups on campus. These new designs are better able to incorporate engaging things like rich videos and photography. Nikky was wondering about the video aspect in the shared designs, but Shawn reassured her that there can always be fallbacks when things like video aren’t available. The bottom line is that these changes in designs really allows for a shift in thinking to something more aligned with a marketing point-of-view. And just because the Medicine solution looks and works the way it does, doesn’t mean that other implementations for the other schools will necessarily be identical. They can and should be adapted to the needs of the school or organization. But ultimately, this is the direction we want to go in across the whole campus.