September 2019 Website Meeting

Notes

Update on OLLI

We began the meeting discussing some of the issues surrounding the OLLI website relaunch.

Recap of tasks from Jessica’s email

Back in early August, Jessica sent out an email with a list of issues and tasks for everyone to think about going forward. We recapped some of those topics.

Welcome Week

Overall, the Welcome Week pages on each of the HSC school websites seemed to receive a fair amount of traffic during the event. Shawn mentioned that the typical follow-up on these pages is to leave them published and accessible for the couple of months just in case students who may have bookmarked the pages and may want to continue to use the links to the resources listed on them. Going forward, we would like to make plans to migrate some of the items on the “Welcome Week” page to a more permanent home, say on the “Student Resources” page.

OSHR Medicaid database

Adam Baus from the OSHR Department has expressed interest in having a Medicaid database set up on the website. Before anything can be developed, though, we have to know what kind of information would be contained in this proposed system, specifically if anything that may be regulated by HIPPA. This project might also involve SOLE as the managing piece depending on what all is involved.

Including videos in profiles

Rachel has made adjustments to the different types of profiles on the website, including the ability to add videos. The location of the profiles has also changed: all profile types live in a central area at the root of the website, which allows for profiles to be utilized in various places and different page types. Rachel would like to meet with the school in the near future to go over these changes.

Online event registration and promo pages

The subject of online registration for events held by the school was discussed. Jessica’s email mentioned a public health policy day coming in November. We don’t have systems in place to handle things like registration and payment processing for events. Our recommendation for that is to look to something like WVU Foundation for those services. However, we recommend maintaining marketing pages on the website to house general information for these events, and then include links to whatever registration or payment handling solutions you choose.

To get a feel for what we can do for the informational pages, we recommend taking a look at the structure of landing pages on the school website and the setup of the Dean’s Colloquium Series section. Custom solutions can be developed to allow for things like speaker bios and event agendas to be displayed. Annual events can start out with basic web content and evolve with each occurrence, which has been the case with the HSC Commencement website the team has developed over the last three years.

Social and Behavioral Sciences changes

To accommodate Social & Behavioral Sciences’ ​request to have their mission statement present on their department page, and since all of their allotted buttons in the recruitment area of the page have been filled, the web team recommended adding a button to the page’s feature area. (The ability to add buttons to that area hadn’t existed prior to the meeting, but Rachel was able to enable it shortly after.)

Strategic Plan changes

We briefly reviewed the changes that were made to the Strategic Plan section of the site. Nikky indicated that additional changes to this page are likely in the near future.

Review of feature areas

Nikky informed everyone that she was given a quick intro training on using Umbraco earlier in the week. That said, those trainings are usually fairly broad and—because of their short nature—can’t cover some of the specifics when it comes to maintaining the school websites. So we spent some time looking at a few key areas of the Umbraco editor.

The feature area ended up being our main focus. Kim had made extensive use of feature photos, at least on the home page. Feature photos can be disabled at any point, meaning they still exist within Umbraco but do not end up being shown on the actual website. This was the approach Kim chose instead of removing old and out-of-date photos. As such, there are many feature sets for the home page. Nikky is free to review and clean up those photos as she desires.

Shawn did a walk-through of using the image cropping tool that is a part of the feature area, including some tips about framing subjects for different screen sizes. Dan also mentioned that in the process of reviewing these older feature sets that if any photography sticks out as something that could be re-used, the original version of those photos can be exported from the editor by right-clicking on the large preview of the image and saving it to your computer.

Online resources for maintaining the website

Shawn then gave a tour of some of the online tools and resources that have been made available for communicators and editors.

• Cabin (what you are currently viewing) is an internal project management tool that acts as a central repository of meeting notes and tasks for all HSC web projects. It is maintained by the web team, but feedback and corrections from anyone involved is always welcome. Cabin also contains convenient links to several of the following utilities.
• Hub is essentially an intranet for the campus, providing a place for resources that are more faculty- and staff-oriented. The main page has things like the weather forecast for the campus locations, a link to WV511 for traffic, the status of the PRT, on-campus dining menus, upcoming events, and recent internal announcements. Each school has their own section, to which they can post internal memos and resources.
• The Website Content Guide is a documentation website about working with content in Umbraco. How-tos, best practices, tips, and tricks can all be found here.
• Audit is a tool where editors or the web team can leave notes about the status of pages and items that need to be reviewed. Any page in the school websites can be found here, and their Audit details can be updated via the “Audit” tab in the Umbraco editor for that page.
• The Page Count is a similar tool that will tell you how many pages exist in your site and how long it has been since those pages have been edited.
• Direct links to Public Health’s section in the News system as well as WVU Calendar are also available.
• Also, Slack is a communication tool that the web team uses internally. You are welcome to ask questions and have discussions with the web team there, especially for quick things that don’t really necessitate an email.

Student email addresses

Jessica pointed out that there are instances of student email addresses appearing on the website, specifically on the Delta Omega “Leadership” page. In this case, we’d recommend setting up a vanity email address for the honorary instead of listing contact information for each student. ITS Help Desk should be able to set this up.

“Contact Us” page

We briefly reviewed the changes to the contact links present in the site’s footer. Previously, only a “Questions or Comments?” link existed that sent emails to the ITS Support team. The majority of the emails that came from that link were questions that related to the school itself and not the website. The solution was to add “Contact Us” links and forms that would go directly to communicators, and reword the existing link to “Website Feedback”.

Tuition and aid

Due to the lack of updates to the main, university-wide Admissions website and an analysis of search logs on school websites, the web team has been leading an initiative to get accurate and up-to-date tuition and information on our websites. Last week, Shawn and Tara met with a representative from the tuition and financial aid office to discuss the right approach to accomplishing this. Previous attempts at adding this information was met with some resistance, with communicators and recruiters expressing a desire to do things like combine charges when displaying itemized costs. However, this can lead to confusion on the students’ end when planning for things like financial aid and scholarships, as some of these forms of aid only apply to certain items of a tuition bill. To remedy this, the tuition office has provided standard details for all schools that will be used to design a pattern to be put in place on all of the sites in the next couple of weeks.