People often find things on the website that the person in charge of a given page has missed – outdated content, broken links, spelling and grammatical errors, etc. With nearly 25,000 pages on umw.edu, it’s hard for our site managers to keep up. Now, they have some help.

Introducing the Report a Problem web feature! Quietly released last fall, this small link on the bottom of each umw.edu page allows anyone on the site to report (anonymously or not) issues to the Digital Communications office.

Already, more than 80 reports have been submitted by faculty, staff, students, and outsiders. These efforts have resulted in dozens of corrections and the removal of large chunks of outdated and unmanaged web content.

With a site this large, it certainly takes a village. All villagers now have a means of quickly and easily reporting problems anywhere on the site. We look forward to working together to continuously improve the public face of UMW.

In April of 2013, I first contemplated picking up my entire life and moving across the country for an opportunity to genuinely make a difference in the direction and outcomes of web strategies at a small, public, liberal arts school on the East Coast.  Now, a year after stepping into my office at UMW for the first time, I’m in a position to assess the past 12 months, during which I helped transition the UMW website from a service model to a strategic resource. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but here are some of my first-year observations:

We have resources

Incredibly engaged faculty & staff – It’s an absolute pleasure to work with site managers and content contributors who genuinely care about the success of not only their programs or departments, but also the institution as a whole. You guys want to do it better and smarter, and for that I’m truly thankful. I can’t wait to see what we can accomplish together.

Better data collection – UMW has consistently collected data on how users interact with the website, but now we’re collecting very specific, actionable data about exactly what they’re doing on various parts of the website. A very simple example of this is being able to tell which link on the homepage they clicked to visit a specific page. There are always at least 3 links to Admissions on the homepage. We’ve always been able to show how many users went to Admissions from the homepage. Now we can tell you which one of those links actually sends traffic to the Admissions site, and what percentage from each link continues into the Common App. It’s very helpful to us as we revisit our information architecture going forward.

WordPress – Since migration in 2011, the WordPress platform has continued to be a resounding success. There are now nearly 250 people managing some portion of the UMW website. I’m regularly told it’s “so much better” than our previous content management tool, Contribute.

Improved mobile interface – In April 2014 we launched a huge, but quiet, mobile initiative. The site used to default to an icon-based pseudo-app interface that most people spent energy trying to get out of. Now the entire site is available in a responsive format, which means it adapts to the device on which it is being viewed. The important part here is that it’s the whole website, not just some portion of the site we thought might be useful to people using mobile devices.

We have…opportunities

Accessibility – Accessibility is a big deal. A really big deal. It’s the law that our website can be accessed by disabled users. Compliance is a challenge that’s difficult to achieve given our distributed publishing model. We’ve purchased and implemented a software tool called Siteimprove to help identify and classify accessibility issues. Efforts are being made to simplify and streamline certain areas, and to produce training and offer support for creating accessible content.

Broken links & spelling errors – This is another area where Siteimprove is proving invaluable. It’s able to give us detailed reports and issue-tracking for broken links and spelling errors on over 13,000 pages throughout the umw.edu website. We’ve identified 72 site managers University-wide to receive reports customized to their portion of the website. As of this writing there are 1273 broken links and 971 misspellings, down from 2804 broken links and over 6,000 potential misspellings. We are moving the quality needle in the right direction by drawing on the talents and efforts of the entire University community.

Content – The good news is that we have 250 content managers. The bad news is that we have 250 different writing styles, tones of voice, levels of experience, and ways of organizing information. Establishing a level of consistency is crucial to transitioning the site into a truly successful strategic resource. We have engaged a consultant to help us kick off this process.

We have a plan!

The first year has been spent identifying the big picture issues and starting improvements with low-hanging fruit. We have been talking to stakeholders, implementing tools like Siteimprove, and undertaking a critical review of our processes and policies. We’ve made moves to improve the mobile experience, improve our data, and understand our opportunities. We’re working diligently to help content managers and stakeholders utilize the website and user data to the maximum benefit of their departments, programs, initiatives, and the University as a whole.

Our next year will be spent working and/or continuing to

1. Build a strong Web Advisory Council to represent the University community in discussions relating to the website (implemented, in process)
2. Establish quality baselines using Siteimprove (implemented, in process)
3. Improve the mobile user experience (phase 1 implemented, monitoring user data)
4. Provide guidelines and support to help content managers build positive, goal driven user experiences (consultant engaged, in process)
5. Rebrand the website to match approved University styles (phase 1 discovery in process)
6. Create an efficient and effective training process for WordPress, accessibility basics, and web content development best practices (phase 1 – Fall 2014)

It’s been an exciting and productive year. I’m looking forward to seeing what we accomplish together in 2014/2015.

On Monday, July 21, the web team launched the first of many upcoming theme changes to the .edu site designed to better align the website with the approved visual branding for the University.

An updated set of color palettes was rolled out sitewide. For the most part, the different palettes just affect the flag widgets. Other changes include changing the background color of the whole site, changing the margins between many of the sidebar features, and the removal of backgrounds, watermarks, and rounded edges on widgets.

Following is a map of the color schemes available through our Genesis -> Theme Settings area, and how they map to the palettes in the style guide:

• University – Undergraduate Admissions palette
• Admissions BLS – Graduate Admissions palette
• Admissions Grad – Graduate Admissions palette
• Admissions Undergrad – Undergraduate Admissions palette
• College of Arts & Sciences – Undergraduate Admissions palette
• College of Business – Graduate Admissions palette
• College of Education – Graduate Admissions palette
• Regional Engagement – Alumni palette
• Giving network (regardless of “Color Scheme” selection) – Donor palette
• Magazine network (regardless of “Color Scheme” selection) – Alumni palette

If you have any questions about this, or any other web initiatives, please email webmaster@umw.edu.

If you’ve seen me present to any of the faculty, staff, or administrative groups on campus you’ve probably seen the graphic below depicting broken links and spelling errors throughout the UMW website.

This image is from an August 2013 demo of a tool called SiteImprove.

I’m happy to announce that as of April 1, UMW has the full-fledged version of this amazing tool. As it does its job and finds website problems, we will send automated reports out to site managers campus wide. Some of you will start seeing these reports as early as May 1.

You will then have precise pinpointed information about problem areas of your website (see example). SiteImprove will highlight in bold visual detail any spelling errors that may exist. Yellow highlighting for potential misspellings, red highlights for confirmed misspellings.

What’s next?

The system has built a dictionary for UMW that allows us to indicate false-positives, such as acronyms, user names, and proper names. We are slowly working through upwards of 4,000 potentially misspelled words in the dictionary and will continue to hone those results.

Feel free to email webmaster@umw.edu with any false positives you encounter so we can be sure to address them in a timely manner.

As users are added to the system and we start to see progress toward correcting these “low hanging fruit” issues, we will begin sending out other reports:

• search engine optimization opportunities
• accessibility compliance issues
• deeper user behavior analysis
• and more.

What does this mean to me?

If you’re managing a website on umw.edu, it means you will start receiving automated reports with actionable improvements you can (and should) be making on your site. And you won’t have to go this alone! Starting in the fall, we will hold brown-bag lunches in order to provide group training and discussion sessions for site managers. But don’t wait till fall to start improving your site. Whenever you need assistance, drop us a line at webmaster@umw.edu.

How often will I get a report?

At first, once a month. If you prefer, we can increase frequency to weekly. Just email webmaster@umw.edu and we’ll make the change.

What if the report is going to the wrong person?

Just email us at webmaster@umw.edu. We’ll be happy to straighten things out.

I’m committed to making the UMW web site more viable and accessible. Remember that we’re here to provide support as you work to enhance your presence on the University’s largest public facing communications and recruiting resource.