As the new academic year gets underway, there are several items the Web team would like to draw your attention to. Below is a summary of issues and developments discussed during our Ingeniux Users’ Group meeting on Sept. 2, 2010.
Opportunities for Students: While the site officially launched last year, Associate Dean Alison Bell would like to make better use of our Student Opportunities site to promote grants, fellowships, internships and study abroad options for current students. If your department has information about a related opportunity and you’d like to get the word out beyond your website and a poster on a bulletin board, this is a resource you should consider. Details can be emailed to Michelle Rothenberger in the Dean’s Office. Your opportunity will be added to the database and you can simply link to it from your site in Ingeniux.
Academic Overview Pages: You may have seen the new Admissions site, which launched late last week. To complement the website your department already has and to drive more visitor traffic to it, we are creating a single page for each academic department or program that will be hosted on this new site. These pages will have a consistent look across all departments at W&L, and each will introduce a department and its salient points to prospective students and their parents in a scannable, at-a-glance format. This is in no way intended to replace the detailed content on your department website, but instead to provide an overview of the department geared specifically toward Admissions visitors.
See an example of the Philosophy Department overview page.
We have asked department and program heads to provide us with a short list of content for these pages, including:
- A brief dept. overview/mission statement
- A list of program highlights (Bulleted list of 5-10 highlights)
- Common Careers/Outcomes for graduates (6-10 broad post-graduate fields)
- A list of related programs
The Web team will fill in all of the other information on the page, and going forward, you will be able to edit your department’s page in Ingeniux as necessary. We appreciate your help and support of this new initiative.
SiteCheck: Frustrated with spelling errors and broken links on your website? Never fear. We have recently signed up for a service called SiteCheck, which will help us to locate and correct these errors. Each department web editor will have an account to check their own pages, and we’ll have one of our Web Team work studies doing regular audits, as well.
Watch a quick (really–3 minutes) demo of the SiteCheck service. Training to come later this month.
Localist: Just when you were finally used to the new calendar, there’s a newer one coming down the pike, and quickly. We have contracted with Localist, an online event promotion service, to host and manage our online event promotion calendar beginning this academic year. We will do our best to keep the event entry process as similar to the old one as possible, and to integrate all of the features that you’re used to in our current calendar. More details and training to come later this month. Meanwhile, check out events.jhu.edu to see how Localist ties events to social media and shows calendar users what events are most popular on campus.
Publish Schedule: We have recently moved to a less frequent publish schedule, to allow windows where important content can be published off-cycle. The new publishes will take place at 10 am and 3 pm daily, as well as 3 am. If you need content published and can’t wait for the next scheduled publish, please contact David, Eric or Jessica.
Training: With a new academic year comes new Ingeniux users. If you are a new user or need a refresher in Faculty/Staff profiles, basic Ingeniux or image editing, please fill out a training request using our Web Tracking Form: http://go.wlu.edu/webtrack
We will let you know of upcoming training opportunities for Localist, SiteCheck and Ingeniux. Look forward to seeing you at one of them.
