Wayne State Web Communications Blog

[Friday Links] The Chili Cook-Off Edition

Nick DeNardis — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:08:06 +0000

Today is our department’s annual chili cook-off. Not too much to talk about this week other that Chrome OS, TinyChat and a few other fun things. Hope you had a great week and got a lot accomplished. Enjoy the links of the week.

Upcoming changes to how the development server is accessed

Nick DeNardis — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:13:12 +0000

We are going to make some changes soon to the way the development server is accessed that will effect all sites in the new Web environment.

The Problem

Every site in the environment has two URL’s, one for production and one for development. Right now the development URL’s are publicly accessible.This is great for testing sites off campus but the downside is it’s too easy to pass on development URL’s and the public doesn’t realize the content may be out of date, broken or just missing.

What is worse is as soon as search engines get a hold of the URL’s they start including them in their index. This is a major issue since they show up in the public Google and Yahoo search results.

The Solution

We will be cutting off access to the development server “www-dev” URL’s from off campus computers in the next few weeks. Access from on-campus computers will not be effected.

This means if you are off campus and you need to view a site in development (www-dev) you will first need to VPN in to the Wayne State network. Instructions on how to use VPN are available on the C&IT Web site.

If you have a site that needs public access to the development server please let us know and we can determine if an exception is necessary.

Update: This change will go into effect Friday November 20th, 2009 at Midnight.

[Friday Links] The World Usability Day Edition

Nick DeNardis — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 14:30:32 +0000

This week was all about usability. Thursday November 12th, 2009 was World Usability Day. I was lucky enough to attend the yearly MSU event which featured great speakers, presentations and people. A link to my wrap up can be found at the end of the list below. The links this week seem to follow the same usability theme. Enjoy.

Aim Higher Commercials – Round 2

Nick DeNardis — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:41:28 +0000

The next round of Aim Higher commercials started yesterday. The goal of the new commercials is to expand on the existing look, feel and add more depth to the Wayne State University message. There are six commercials in total, Class Pride, Ironic, Odds Are, Real Learning, Welcome and Decisions.

Although the commercials don’t have a direct connection to the web they are still posted to YouTube so I thought I would share.

Class Pride

View all the Aim Higher videos on YouTube.

Site Launch: Undergraduate Admissions

Nick DeNardis — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:30:12 +0000

One year after the project kickoff the new Undergraduate Admissions Web site launches. Of course, we had a little fun the in process. I outlined a few key changes at the bottom of this post but wanted to go through some important changes in detail.

The old site lacked the “experience” factor. Not the hand-holding through the process experience, but the true Wayne State experience. It was dull, had scaled back images and was not inviting overall. We changed all of that with a warm, friendly and exciting new design. We used bold colors, people-focused photography and tilted elements to make certain areas stand out.

Navigation

The navigation was another huge change; we completely overhauled it taking it from the 25+ existing first level menu items to 4. We grouped everything into key areas an end-user would need: “Become a Student,” “Explore,” “Culture” and “Academic Life.” Once a user chooses a path it allows us to get everything else out of the way and focus on what they need.

Content

Last but not least, every single page was examined and rewritten. This by far made the largest impact to our prospective students. The previous site was launched 3 years ago; in that time the content changed frequently but was never looked at as a whole. The new wording makes directions clear, shortens paragraphs and is focused on helping the prospective student.

Traffic

Overall the site as been doing great. Just in the past week we have seen page views up 27%, unique views up 13% and average time spent on the site up from 2:22 to 3:00. We will see shortly how conversions to the online application have been doing.

Key changes

Overhauled navigation, simplified by task, not audience
Completely rewritten pages, not just little tweaks
Design that fits into our newest branding for consistency
A greater emphasis on photos; larger more vibrant photos
Larger emphasis on upcoming admissions events
Consolidated multiple sites, apply.wayne, openhouse.wayne
Moved the event RSVP’s to the main events.wayne.edu RSVP system

View the new site at: http://admissions.wayne.edu/

[Friday Links] The Quarantine Edition

Nick DeNardis — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:16:17 +0000

It seems like one after another sickness is starting to spread through the Web department. Yet with multiple people out we have still managed to launch three sites this week (watch for the write up’s shortly) and keep projects moving. The links this week have a theme of “tools”, helpful items for the day to day. Enjoy the links.

[Report] How visitors get to wayne.edu

Nick DeNardis — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:24:12 +0000

I thought I would share some insight into how visitors are getting to wayne.edu. Below is some detail of the incoming traffic to the homepage and child pages from users who are off campus in the past month. Ideally these are people who get a first time glimpse of Wayne State as an institution.

Traffic sources from October 4 – November 3, 2009

487,781 visits via 1,623 sources and mediums

Even taking away all on campus traffic I am surprised to see over 50% is still coming directly.

Sources in Detail

Besides for direct traffic search engines are by far our next largest traffic source. It has been said by many people before and this continues to back it up, Google is your new homepage.

Search Engines

Google tops this list probably because we use it for all our internal site searches. This is off campus traffic but it does not necessarily mean the user started at google.com. We use Google Custom Search on wayne.edu which will show up as traffic from Google. One thing I am still surprised about is how high aol still ranks, although it is no where near the top three it is still above quite a few big names. I checked out Baidu, and it looks to be a Chinese search engine started in 2000.

Keywords

It is interesting to see the keyword list, I am going to assume the top five are from people who started at google.com since (I hope) they would not be searching for us on our homepage, but you never know. This is interesting because we do track the searches on wayne.edu and typically they are for something more specific list a program, professor or department. It does look like “bookstore” would be from wayne.edu since typing it into Google directly yields national bookstores, we rank no where in the top 10 pages.

Sites in Detail

As far as non-search traffic it is interesting to see a few things. Most people are referred to the homepage from one of our existing sites. Only two results, search.comcast, which technically should be under the “search engine” category and studentvoice.com. The thing about student voice is the traffic is probably non intentional, since it is a survey service by default once a survey is complete you are either forwarded to wayne.edu automatically or it is the only link on the page. We should probably try to get that changed to more of a “student portal” to try to get someone conversions from the current students taking surveys.

Countries

This comes at no surprise, we are a US university in Detroit. US traffic dominates and we are 10 minutes from Canada. We also have a large international student body, students from 70 countries.

Take Aways

Besides for direct traffic, search is still king when driving people to wayne.edu. It is unfortunate we cannot examine this direct traffic further, it would be great to know out of the 50% how many people have wayne.edu as their homepage. It would also be nice to see if they are actually typing in the URL or have it in a bookmark or bookmark bar.

User habits have always intrigued me and we make a continued effort to examine these habits as they relate to the web. Although we can only post so much publicly I will continue to try to post as many insights as possible to better help you examine your users.

Site Launch: Go-Girls

Rolaine Llanes — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:00:12 +0000

GoooOOo Girl! Go go GO GIRL!! So you can probably tell we’re really excited to share this latest addition with you. GO-GIRL which stands for Gaining Options-Girls Investigating Real Life, is an engaging program for middle school girls to help increase their confidence in their academic endeavors. With such energetic target audience, we couldn’t help tap in our playful side during the redesign.

Some of the criteria given to us before the redesign were the use of their colors (purple, fuchsia, and teal), their logo, and with specific request – the use of their yellow stars as much as possible. With such vivid colors, bold logo and embellishment, our main concerns were overcrowding and clashing styles. So how do you design for middle school girls with much flair while still keeping the university’s web standards? Very carefully use their elements and only use them where it counts. Take a look around. We’d love to hear your feedback.

View the site at: http://gogirls.wayne.edu/

Testing HTML emails efficiently as possible

Tom Krupka — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:45:51 +0000

Recently, I talked about the pros and cons of sending HTML vs Text emails to your clients in this article “Filling your inboxes with visual appealing HTML emails”. Since HTML Emails are becoming increasingly more popular to send here at Wayne State, we are trying to come up with a system that makes this painstakingly clumsy process as streamlined as possible.

Third party testing

If you have one main template and don’t have to create new ones often, a pay email testing service might be for you. For a small fee you can use one of these services to send your HTML code to and then it will produce screenshots of how the email looks in the most popular email clients. In addition, some of these services will also test how your email will react with spam filters.

Pay for testing resources

Testing in house

If you don’t have the resources or funding to go with one of the automated services, you can go the “old fashioned way” and set up a series of test email accounts on all the popular email clients. To begin with, set up accounts on Hotmail, Yahoo, Google, AOL and of course, Outlook 2000, 2003, 2007 and Outlook Express. Don’t forget to test Apple Mail 2 and 3 and to test on the iPhone as well. This will get you tested in over 80% of all the popular email clients, according to Campaign Monitor as of June 2009, in their article Email client popularity.

Don’t forget to test email in popular mobile environments as well, iPhone for example is now more popular than gmail in viewing email. Once you establish some main HTML email templates the testing will get easier. When designing email templates, keep it simple. Trying too much, is one of the biggest mistakes designers do when creating HTML emails.

Here are some more good resources for getting a professional and cross-platform HTML email below. Remember to test, test, test!

Free HTML testing resources

Other resources and HTML email information

[Friday Links] The Spooky Edition

Nick DeNardis — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:22:33 +0000

Happy Halloween! It’s been another great week with tons of progress as we rush to get sites out by the end of the year. Looks like the community has been hard at work too, check out the links of the week below.