Web Professionals

Carolina's Community of Digital Creators and Communicators

Campus resources and other great tools we love – March 2024 Recap

March 8, 2024 /

Are you aware of all the great tools available to digital professionals at UNC?

Have you learned about a new resource or tool that you find useful or cannot live without and are willing to share?

You’ll definitely want to attend the next Web Professionals session on Thursday, March 7th @ 2pm in the Graduate Student Center (211-A West Cameron Ave.) or on Zoom. We will be sharing and documenting free, cheap, or otherwise life-simplifying tools that improve your work on the web.

Come prepared to share your personal favorites and gather suggestions of new tools that others find helpful. From photo editing to user testing, metrics reporting to code updates, this session will share a wealth of worthwhile tools.

Let’s learn from each other!

Date: Thursday, March 7, 2024
Time: 2:00 AM – 3:00 PM
Location: Graduate Student Center and Zoom
Hosts: Rachell Underhill, Gia Branciforte, Paul Cardillo, Daniel Reeves

Presentation Recap and Notes

Agenda

  • Welcome – Rachell
  • Free resources available for UNC staff, students, and faculty – Paul, Gia, Rachell
    • Departments/Groups
    • Services
    • Training/Learning
    • Tools and Coding Resources
  • Full list of free UNC resources

Remote teamwork strategies and successes – February 2024 recap

February 3, 2024 /

Remote teamwork is here to stay. What strategies have you used with your colleagues to keep every one connected and productive? What has worked well? What strategies have you abandoned?

We will hear from some of UNC colleagues and then open the floor to hear what has worked for you and your teammates!

Date: Thursday, February 1, 2024
Time: 2:00 AM – 4:00 PM
Location: Graduate Student Center and Zoom
Hosts: Rachell Underhill, Gia Branciforte, Paul Cardillo, Daniel Reeves

Presentation Recap and Notes

Agenda

  • Welcome – Rachell
  • Announcements – Rachell
    • Upcoming meetings schedule, first Thursday of each month
      • March 7
      • April 4th
      • May 2nd
      • May 2nd
      • July 11 (adjusted for July 4 holiday)
      • August 1
    • Announcing HighEdWeb 2024 North Carolina Conference
      • Tuesday, June 18, 2024
      • Held at UNC, but open to anyone in higher education
      • Submit a proposal (open until February 29)
      • Learn more: events.highedweb.org/nc24
  • Remote teamwork strategies and successes
    • Chelsea Porter, Digital Accessibility Office
    • David Eckert, Managed IT Services
    • Daniel Reeves, ResNET (Residential Networking Education & Technology)
  • Open forum/sharing

Web Professionals Catch Up – October 2023 Recap

November 10, 2023 /

This will be a low-key town-hall style Zoom meeting to discuss the future of the UNC Web Professionals Group and to share a little of what Team members learned at last week’s HighEdWeb conference in Buffalo.

Date: Friday, October 27
Time: 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Location: Zoom
Hosts: Rachell Underhill, Gia Branciforte, Paul Cardillo, Daniel Reeves

Presentation Recap and Notes

Agenda

  • Welcome – Rachell
  • We’re still here – Daniel
    • Depth and Breadth of group, goals
    • Previous presentations
  • Who are you? – Gia
  • High Ed Web Recap – Paul
  • Questions and Feedback

Meeting Items

During Meeting

Notes

  • Attendees
    • Count: 42
  • Rachell Underhill: Intro
    • History
    • Web Redesign for the Graduate School
    • History
      • Group History
        • UNC History
        • UNC Web History
      • Current Group
  • Daniel Reeves: What we do
    • What we do overview
    • Examples of past presentations (see list above for more information)
  • Gia Branciforte: Introduction
    • History
    • Current Engagement
      • No leadership level person currently
      • More collaborative
    • Polls and Survey
  • Paul Cardillo: Introduction
    • History
    • Provides Office Hours for any Web.UNC issues
    • Teams and membership logistics
      • Information about how to get access to the team
    • High Ed Web Conference – Buffalo
      • The conference was the impetus for this meeting
      • We are all in a similar boat and trying to do much with few resources
      • Steering the Circus Presentation
      • Rachell Underhill’s Presentation
        • 6 minute video of the process she used in her redesign of the website
      • General Conversation about the conference
  • Open Floor
    • Providing a space for all to talk about the conference or anything relevant
    • Group sharing
      • Networking groups around campus are coming back together
      • Web Professionals would love to connect with and collaborate on value to campus

Questions

  • Question about scope of this group: As a custom web developer, will this group be beneficial for him?
    • Daniel Reeves described how the group has helped him in his role as a custom application developer.

Web-based Survey Design – March 2020 Recap

March 9, 2020 /

If you’ve ever been tasked with writing survey questions, you know it’s harder than you might expect. For our March session, Teresa Edwards from the Odum Institute will present on writing effective questions and best practices for web-based surveys.

Date: Thursday, March 5th
Time: 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Location: Graduate Student Center
Presenter: Teresa Edwards, Odum Institute

Survey Design Best Practices (pdf)

 

Presentation Recap and Notes

Presentation Overview

  • Writing questions
  • Response categories and scales
  • Questions to collect qualitative data
  • Ordering questions
  • Format and layout

Goals for writing

  • Each question interpreted the same way by all respondents
  • Minimize cognitive burden
  • Maximize accuracy

Response Task

  • Comprehension
  • Recall
  • Judgment
  • Formatting
  • Editing

Example

In the past 6 months, have you used Google or another search engine to look on the internet for information about an infectious disease?

  • Comprehend individual words (Google, “another search engine”, internet, infectious disease) and put them together to understand the question, reference period (past 6 months)
  • Recall any useful information/experiences (My mother got sick and we couldn’t figure out what it was, we got that note from the school about chicken pox)
  • Make a judgment based on information retrieved (Does googling “causes for cough” count? Was mother’s illness within the past 6 months?)
  • Format response using response options (Yes, No)
  • Edit answer, social desirability

Tips for question Writing

  • Keep questions short
  • Use simple words
  • Define key terms
  • Use a reference period
    • In the past 30 days
  • Be specific, but use examples carefully
  • Avoid “double-barreling”
    • Would you like to be rich and famous?
  • Avoid hidden assumptions
    • How old were you when you first smoked a cigarette?
  • Avoid negative grammatical structure
    • Women with young children should not work.

Tips for Writing Response Categories

  • Response categories should:
    • Match the format of the question
    • Be mutually exclusive (unless check all that apply)
    • Cover all circumstances
    • Not assume regularity of frequency
      • “In the past 6 months, how often did you visit the library” – might be a lot of variation in a long time period
  • Unsure/don’t know option
  • Don’t assume respondents understand percentages
  • Rethink ranking
    • only use if you want to know the ranking order really matters
  • Beware of anchoring
    • Respondents may assume that the “middle” means average or typical and choose/adjust their response accordingly.”Surely I don’t want more tv than the average person”
  • Scales
    • Label all points on a scale

Open Ended Responses

  • Specify the reporting unit
  • Size the answer space appropriately for the information being asked
  • Punctuate the answer space appropriately (for phone numbers, dates, etc.)

Collecting Qualitative Data

  • Be clear what you seek
    • What do you think of this webpage? vs. What aspects of this webpage are helpful in your daily work
  • Size the answer space appropriately
    • If you’re asking open ended questions, ensure that the response boxes are sized appropriately
  • Only one question per answer space
  • Have a plan for analyzing/summarizing the data

Recommended Readings

Proposed changes to web.unc.edu hosting – February 2020 Recap

February 13, 2020 /

Proposed changes to web.unc.edu

  • ITS-Digital Services wants your feedback!  
  • We are moving hosted WordPress websites to the cloud, and we’re proposing changes to web.unc.edu. Come hear our proposal to address and improve digital accessibility and university branding.
  • If you have a site hosted on web.unc.edu you’ll want to weigh in on these ideas!

Date: RESCHEDULED   Thursday, Feb 13th
Time: RESCHEDULED – 2:30-3:30
Location:  Graduate Student Center
Presenter: Kim Vassiliadis, ITS-Digital Services

Presentation Slides

Proposed Changes to web.unc.edu presentation slides (pdf)

Presentation Recap and Notes

  • Moving to the cloud
    • Contact signed with Pantheon
    • ITS is paying for the hosting
    • Primary focus is environments ITS manages
      • Web Dot network
        • Self service
        • WP Multi-site
      • Sites Dot network
        • Enterprise
        • Departmental
        • WP hosting
      • unc.edu
        • Stand alone installation
  • Opportunities
    • Rethink offerings
    • Address university branding
    • Address digital accessibility
    • Educate users: website ownership
  • Current Multi-site
    • Currently ~5K sites
    • 9 Themes
    • 50+ Plugins shared
  • Recent sites created
    • Sites created since September
    • ~700 sites
    • Numbers
      • 83% were created by student
        • Most were for classes
        • Some for Resume
        • Few for other reasons
      • 17% were created by employees
  • WebDotUNC
    • By default setup as a web.unc.edu domain with your site name
    • Example site – Vaccines
      • Concerns
        • Copyrighted material
        • Accessible
        • Information Literacy
        • Has a .unc.edu domain
  • Employee Sites
    • Roughly evenly split between the different use reasons
      • Lab Sites
      • Associations
      • Professional Faculty Sites
      • Personal Faculty Sites
  • Proposal
    • Rename the network from web.unc.edu to some name that does not imply the authority of the university
    • Has some affiliation, but not an official page/site
    • Could be either a subdomain or a slash URL name
      • Ex: sitename.tarheel.live vs. tarheel.live/sitename
    • Criteria for a unc.edu domain
      • Site Must
        • Represent the university
        • Meet baseline accessibility requirements
          • Attend an accessibility training within a semester/year
        • The site must qualify and the site/content managers require training for this level
  • Kim’s questions
    • Is tarheel.live effective?
    • Do we grandfather in existing 5K sites?
      • On request?
    • How should we handle faculty/personal sites going forward?
    • Other suggestions?
  • Ownership transfer
    • Could have a process to change ownership of a site (ex: student site a professor wants to keep)
    • This way content can persist beyond
  • New workflow
    • All sites would start at the tarheel.live
    • There would be a request process to move to a unc.edu domain
  • Should we have this [website hosting] service at all?
    • There are free services available
    • But, this service is 10 years old and we are reticent to discontinue it at this point
  • How to manage older sites?
    • Have decommissioned
  • If you are a lab, and you are spinning it up, how to have banner removed?
    • Could be a request process?
    • Could be moving the site to unc.edu instead
  • Archive
    • We don’t want to become an archive for old sites
    • Can work with university archive services to capture the content but retire the site.
  • SiteImprove Tool
    • Researched accessibility tools, received help from people to test
    • Just decided on SiteImprove recently and working with different groups to provide access
    • Want to make it so webmasters can scan the various site they manage
    • Pilot members
    • Will it cover login sites?
      • Working on that now
      • Can scan the content

Questions and Discussion

  • How much will visual branding be required for the initial move?
    • That conversation will come in a later phase
  • Suggestion to use the subdomain path
    • There are challenges to both approaches
  • Distinction between official sites and personal/student sites, this is WordPress and this is free for many, what about putting a banner denoting it is not an official site?
    • Not sure if it will help us legally, but there is a perception that it would divorce us from the direct connection
  • Have you discussed building a form for sign up that qualifies people as they fill it out?
    • Yes, but we want to see on the back-end that you are doing your due diligence before getting a unc.edu site
  • Advantage to separate URL?
    • Can have the default domain go to an explanation page
  • How to handle domain mapped URLs?
    • May leave as is for now and circle back when we have the initial phase complete
  • Thinking about GDPR in this process?
    • Not been given any guidance so far
  • How will the current URLs redirect?
    • That plan is in the works but not finalized at this point
  • What is the cost of the subdomain vs. subdirectory?
    • One cost for a subdirectory but each subdomain could have a cost associated with them
  • Theming thoughts? Will we get away from the bootstrap shortcuts?
    • Yes
    • They are in discussions about shared elements
    • Look at the oxygen builder that can take the place of a theme
      • Super fast
      • Can create design without themes
  • Could you have a structure where you ask for the life-time of the site?
    • That way you can put a timeline on the site
    • The person would need to think about how long the site would need to stay on the web.
  • If I am a professor, what are my options? Does the site need to be indexed and searchable to everyone in the world?
    • Could there be checkboxes for various options? Google Indexing for example?
    • Could setup the Tarheel.live sites so they don’t index by default and have some process for becoming indexed
    • Kim looked at other University offerings and few institutions provide the infrastructure that UNC does
      • Many have some space for personal
  • Is it possible to have a branch that the class sites go to that can be temporary and expire and those who want a longer lifetime could take a different path?
    • Could use a directory value (LDAP values) to identify users
  • Could there be an automated way to decommission unless people want to keep it?
    • Essentially, you get a site for a year
    • At the 11 month mark (or some other time), send an email reminding them to request another year.
    • For high-level users, they could be higher on the radar for the digital services group
  • Require second admin
    • Could require someone as a second admin if the site is important
    • Might be some cases where people leave and the site needs to persist
  • For the official work sites, will it be the same functionality as current (plugin restrictions, themes, etc.)?
    • Shifting what we have for now
    • Want to examine this at a later date
  • CloudApps has similar issues? How to handle?
    • Have not started that conversation yet, but a good idea
    • Inactive sites spin down over time, so may not be a pressing issues
  • Are absolved from the accessibility rules with the tarheel.live?
    • No but it does make a difference
    • We need to do what we can, where we can
    • Baby steps to make things better
  • What if the URL was students.unc.edu?
    • Just because you are using tarheel.live, it is still UNC related
    • Investigated using sandbox accounts in the platform
      • Tested it with students in a class to see the feasibility
      • It was a disaster, difficult to use,
      • If the site became a “successful” site, there would be a payment structure required
  • Cost?
    • There is no cost at this time
    • Will be covered by ITS
  • What could this move provide for us?
    • Free up time on the Digital Services team
    • A more robust and effective method for rolling out plugins
  • Will ITS allow sliders on sites?
    • Starting to phase out sliders.
    • Old sites are grandfathered in but new sites will not allow it
    • But they are not accessible, can trap keyboard users
    • Design is moving away from this now (make the logo big and make the logo bigger!)
  • Referring to old assignments
    • Faculty like to link to previous assignments and work
    • How to handle this persistence?
    • Need to consider if the student
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