7-26-2012
7.26.2012 Meeting
Facilitator: Nina Modi
Presenting: Anthony Kirchmeier, Charles Kellom
Note Takers: Jill Brazel/Nina Modi
Attendees
| Attendee | Department |
|---|---|
| Jessica Watson |
DOS |
| Charles Kellom |
MSA |
| Tony Kirchmeier | Off Campus |
| Mark D'Arienzo |
Housing |
| Chris Walker |
SAIT |
| Jill Brazel |
SAIT |
| Nina Modi |
SAIT |
| Lopa Patel | Graduate Housing |
| Eric Budinski |
Religious Life |
| Bernard Foster |
Safe Ride |
| Courtney Albinson | CAPS |
| Candice Marie Gant | CAPS |
| Alison May | Students With Disabilities |
| Jeremy Hopkins | University Career Services |
| James McHaley | Norris |
| Susan Cushman | NUHS-HPaW |
Introduction of Attendees
Attendees were asked to:
- Introduce themselves, including department and role
- Provide expectations of the group meeting
| Agenda | Presenters |
|---|---|
| Introduction | Nina Modi |
| Updates | Nina Modi |
| Overview of Priorities from Breakout Sessions | Nina Modi |
| Accessibility Forms & Search |
Nina Modi |
| Google Analytics | Anthony Kirchmeier-Off Campus |
| Google Analytics | Charles Kellom-MSA |
| Q & A | Nina Modi |
Introduction to Meeting
Welcome to the group and we appreciate the participation. Our goal for these monthly group meetings is to provide training, resources, information and guidance so that each department will have all the support to maintain and enhance their websites. We encourage everyone to attend as many meetings as possible.
WCUG Updates
- The minutes from each our WCUG meetings are posted as a resource to you to review our discussions.
- Cascade will be upgrading soon and we will schedule a special meeting early August to cover these changes.
- Provide feedback to Nina Modi, email address n-modi@northwestern.edu
Priorities Discussion from June Breakout Sessions
The breakout sessions were a great way of gaining feedback from all of you. We do need to move forward more quickly when we need to make changes. We will continue to contact each of you for feedback and bring things to the group, but going forward we will let you all know what we are working on and solicit feedback and then it will be launched according to schedule with any changes.
James from Norris asked about Student feedback since they are the ones using the sites and we welcome any feedback you want to get from your users (rest of department, students, employers, etc)to make sure we are using the right language and they understand the flow of the site. We discussed possibly implementing an in screen survey to provide the user while using the site in the future.
It is important that your content be, concise, timely and accurate. We can help, but it is up to you and your department to make sure your content is as it should be.
Priorities-Overview
- Navigation-This will take come time. We will gather the requirements, put together a design, discuss with WCUG and create a project plan timeline for completion.
- Training-Nina will begin a more extensive training process, begining with the initial 'beginner' level and then schedule 2 follow up sessions for 'Intermediate and Advanced levels. This would be separate from the group training and include accessibility and design elements. We will continue to provide these meetings for you to show each other your best practices.
- General Template-We are constantly adding and upgrading features like fonts and headers, Chris provided an example of font differences on PC and Mac.
- Search-Implemented on all sites now, Tommy found it accessible
- Centralized Calendar-Everyone should be using Planit Purple, but we discussed creating a calendar for Student Affairs and Nina said she had started creating it and would continue to work on that. This would help ensure departments were not overlapping events. there was also a reccomendation to ask your users how they find out about events.
- Interactive Maps-Some departments have a map to their offices under the 'About US' tab of thier sites. We do need a solution that will work for everyone. Nina will continue to research solutions.
- Social Media- Most feedback has been positive and we are implementing it throughout all sites. The only issue is the departments with 2 or less social media platforms, need to come up with a solution. It was asked to offer the group training for Social Media and we feel that each of you are the best trainers of each other. We have been working on Best Practices and Policies to provide to the division and will continue to keep up with new technologies and we ask that any of you keep us informed of new platforms, success stories, etc.
- Staff Member Profile-Many departments have found this to be useful to the users. It gives a friendly approach to the student or parent about who they are dealing with. We would like to have a consistent front of a photo and short bio with contact info for all departments.
Accessibility Updates/Presentation
Nina presetned that we did some testing with our forms and search tool with Tommy and he went through the CAPS site and with his screenreader, he found everything to be labelled well, the forms read well, and it only took him about 2minutes to find and fill out the form. Google forms are accessible and we recommend that if you need to use a form you use Google forms. It is alwasy important to test them in different browsers to make sure.
Courtney agreed that it was working well and it was easy to use. Her only downside was the inability to know when requests were going to that email and Nina informed everyone there is a notification feature that should be working and she would look into why Courtney was not getting those.
Google Analytics-Presentations
Charles Kellom-MSA
Google Anaytics is a great tool with a lot of information. Charles recommended starting with small goals, "what do you want to track?" and using keyword searches. Don't get overwhelmed by all of the information. Nina will provide baseline training to all who are interested in learning more.
Get familiar with the terminology:
- page views
- bounce rate
- visitor (new/returning)
He briefly went over the Google Analytics interface to point out some useful tools. On the left sidebar, under 'Content', click 'In Page Analytics' and it opens up your page with statistics on who is clicking where by percentage. If you are logged in to Google Analytics and open another browser it gives you an overview on the page with all of your statistics. (Chris mentioned that the new navigation may or may not affect that in page analytics.)
Tony Kirchmeier-Living Off Campus
Tony first went into to show us statistics of what countries we were getting the most views from. He also was able to show us Graduates vs. Undergrads. The cites where the most clicks are coming from.
Chrome was the most used browser and he shoed how you can adjust the timeframe for what information you are looking for. You can also see who is using mobile devices vs. Desktop PC. Another useful tool is seeing where the clicks came from so you can see which departments are referring their students to your site.
Nina told the group it is easy to set up and if you would like to get set up, just let her know.