We had attendees from as far away as New York, North Carolina, and Louisiana, as well as quite a few of our colleagues from the University of Florida campus.  Our initial feedback has shown that our attendees enjoyed the conference and got quite a few useful ‘golden nuggets’ to help them in their everyday work.

Web Services Takeaways

Here’s a few of the takeaways our Web Services brought back from the conference:

Brad Alderman

Daniel Ryan’s keynote talk on Human-first Web Design helped open my eyes to the need for web developers to have methods in place for measuring visitor engagement on their sites, and how to use that data to make informed improvements. His talk outlined the increase in traffic, donations, and user social engagement on the Barack Obama 2012 campaign website as a result of lowering technical barriers, experimenting with content changes, and meticulously analyzing data. We may not be in the business of raising presidential campaign funds, but I believe analyzing data on visitor behavior should be just as important to us. With this knowledge, we can focus our efforts to building a better web experience for our audiences.

Amanda Austin

I really enjoyed Kyle James’ presentation, SEO for the Modern College Newsroom and the no-nonsense, actionable takeaways he left at the end of his presentation. SEO and social go hand in hand, and both are important for marketing and digital advertising. As a social media coordinator, I believe I need at strong working knowledge of SEO — and Kyle’s presentation definitely helped with that. One of my favorite takeaways from the presentation was that search engine crawlers are the “3 blind mice”, and they certainly don’t care how beautiful your website looks; they only care if the content is relevant and fresh. As Kyle said, content is an annuity, so making regular “payments” of good content with relevant keywords can pay off in the end.

Natalie Canut

I think the one thing I that was reinforced for me was that college/university websites really need to have the balance of what the organization wants and what the user is looking for.

Sean Jeng

I learned from Dave Olsen’s Optimizing your site’s web performance for the coming device-pocalypse that site performance is an essential part of user experience and will scare visitors away if your site takes too long to load. Performance improvement isn’t just something to be attached at the end of a project lifecycle; it should be take into consideration as early as design phase.

Diane Millican

The HighEdWeb Florida regional conference was full of great information.  Some new information and some information that was known, but maybe not in the forefront of our everyday knowledge.  For example, listening to Kyle James talk about always using Alt text on images is something I talk about every day.  But he also went on to say that in addition to that we should use good descriptive filenames for our media.  Don’t just add an image with the file name DSC00392.jpg, but make sure it makes sense to both a user and a search engine.  Use keywords like uf-dance-marathon. This makes sense for any search.  Whether a user is looking at a filename or a search engine is reading that file name, we certainly have a better idea of what we will get with a filename using keywords than the camera generated file name using letters and numbers.

Carlos Morales

From Daniel Ryan’s, Human First keynote: Outside of reinforcing our thoughts behind the power of testing and analytics in making refinement decisions to our designs and products, the stickiest nugget for me has been the stat around web forms. Specifically the idea that for each field you add to a form, you can lose as much as 10% of your conversion rate. We must always ask ourselves what we plan to do with this data, and is it absolutely required that we get it now, versus a subsequent follow-up with the submitter. Brad Alderman sent a long a nice infographic reinforcing some of the same ideas around reducing the amount of fields in your forms: http://blog.dropifi.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/howtooptimizecontactforms.png

Jeff Stevens

I was very impressed by Carrie Phillips’ and Brent Passmore’s presentation on You’re Shooting Video on an iPhone. Their workshop showed how it’s possible to shoot and edit high-quality video on an iPhone. With the demand for multimedia ever increasing, a hand-on sessions that shows how to use the tools at our disposal without having to invest in more resources could not be more timely, especially in higher education where every penny matters.

Greg Turner

One of the things that seemed to come up again and again is user-centered design. Specifically, design your site centered around a single purpose. What is the call to action you wish your customers to fulfill? I think for us the singular purpose for UFandShands.org has been to convert the curious to customers and get patients through our doors. Whether that be through an easily accessible Request an Appointment button, rich information, or, as Carlos Morales mentioned in his connected content presentation, smart linking throughout the site so users can find what they’re looking for, we need to keep refining the site so users never feel as if they’ve reached a dead end. We want our users’ entire experience to be seamless, effortless, and ultimately successful. Both for them and for us.

James Young

Conference in Review

If you were unable to attend the conference, most of the presenters’ slide decks are available on the conference’s website. In addition, you can hear about some of the highlights of the conference from attendees on the April 25th episode of HigherEdLive.

HighEdWeb Florida is hopefully first of many annual southeast regionals, and Web Services will let you know if and when a regional is announced for 2014. In the meantime, keep sharing your experiences and knowledge with us and with your colleagues, as through sharing, we help to make the experiences of our users ever better.

Despite the success of the site, there was one area we knew had to be improved – the mobile experience.

In January 2013, nearly 20% of the visitors to UFandShands.org came from mobile devices, predominately smart phones. 2010 – 3%, an increase of 17% since January of 2010. For this audience, the new UFandShands.org website provides some usability challenges – comprehensive mega menus lose their usefulness if they are too small to use with the tip of a finger. The screen size of a phone required a new design built on the expectation of the device user.

The UF&Shands Mobile Experience

Web Services set out to make a mobile site that did not sacrifice the depth of content of the primary site for portability.  Rather, the design divides primary task based content with the full content of the site, creating an easy to use experience geared primarily for patients.

Compact Design

The mobile site reduces the primary home page footprint to the primary tasks of the site: making an appointment, finding a physician, finding a location, researching a health condition or services, and exploring the research studies at the University of Florida.

A Complete Representation

In addition, the home page delivers the news slider and links to MyChart, News, and Making a gift. All of the width and breadth of the desktop site is still available through the fly out menu, including our patient care, education, and community content.

What’s Next

This summer, Web Services will begin developing a responsive web component for our Apollo WordPress theme. The responsive design will deliver a similar optimized mobile experience for our academic sites, and give our faculty, students, and staff the same rich mobile experience across the Academic Health Center.

We Love Feedback

Your input helps us to build a better web presence. Web Services welcomes your suggestions, issues, and observations. We look forward to hearing from you!

Registering an Account

Registering an official social media account is a three-step process:

Consult with your Department or Unit’s Communications Representative

Take time to meet with your department’s communications specialist to discuss the use of the account, the types of content to be produced, the frequency of posting, potential audiences, and overall goals. Approval from this representative for the account should be indicated in the form at left.

Submit a Form for Approval from the UF&Shands Academic Health Center

UF&Shands News and Publications and UF&Shands Web Services reviews account requests for compliance to AHC guidelines and makes recommendations for approval to the Senior Vice President and Chief Communications Officer. General this approval process takes one to two weeks.

• UF&Shands Social Media Registration Form

Apply for Approval from University Relations

Following approval from the Senior Vice President, a unit or department must also register their social media account with University Relations.

• University Relations Social Media Registration Form

Suggestions or Questions

If you have any questions about the registration process or suggestions on refining how we gather submissions, please contact Amanda Austin, the UF&Shands Social Media Manager, at austae@shands.ufl.edu.

Before setting forth on creating an account, it’s important to consider the long term implications of an account and the responsibilities in setting one up. A common misconception is that a social media account is free to set up. Technically, this is true – anyone with five minutes of time can create an account. However, to run a successful account will take planning, resources and time to maintain and grow, and these costs should be accounted for.

In an environment like UF&Shands, there are even more considerations. An account manager has to be cognizant of FERPA and HIPAA rules, as well as other legal regulations. An account administrator has to be fully invested in the strategic direction of their department and the larger ecosystem and to be able to coordinate their messages with others, not only to make sure they deliver a consistent message but that they can cultivate a network to help promote and further their own messages to larger audiences.

This is no small task. It can seem to be overwhelming at times. And that’s why UF&Shands Web Services is here to help.

Social Media Guidelines

As part of the relaunch of the Academic Health Center web presence, the Policies and Procedures subcommittee developed a series of social media guidelines for the use of social media by departments and colleges within UF&Shands. The guidelines provide some basic recommendations and ground rules for running social media accounts and guiding departments on the process of registering an official account with UF&Shands communications and with University of Florida University Relations.

Social Media Consultation

The team in UF&Shands Web Services are available to meet with you to assist in growing your social media’s effectiveness by providing:

• Long-term content planning to align your social media messages with your departments’ strategic goals
• Short term strategies to promote events and campaigns
• Methods for delivering content that builds your audiences and encourages two-way discussion and sharing
• Best practices on crafting messages that get noticed and shared to a wider audience
• Trends in the social media landscape and recommendation on other channels to reach your audience

To schedule a meeting, please contact either our social media coordinator, Amanda Austin, or the Web Content Optimizer, Jeff Stevens.

Social Media Training

In the near future Web Services will be rolling out a Social Media training course that will discuss our best practices and look at some of the best – and worst – examples of the use of social media. We’ll also have discussions with the attendees about their current efforts so we can share with one another our lessons of working in social media.

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/people/carfull/

Also included is the ability to have your search engine include results from other websites (if you manage a small network of websites, such as a series of departments within a college, or divisions within a department).

Learn more

Today we have added a new feature to the Apollo that will automatically append the file extension of the file (PDF, DOC, or XLS) and also provide a small icon. See the below image for an example.

If you are experiencing any issues with your site, please let us know at http://webservices.ahc.ufl.edu/contact-us/.

This feature now affects either the slider or the story stacker.

Log into your website and visit Appearance / Theme Options / Featured Content

There you will find a field titled  ‘Slider Speed‘. Change the value and experiment with the results!

If you enter a higher number the slider or story stacker will move slower.  Want it faster?  Enter a number lower than the default of 5.

This feature was in high-demand, so thanks for the feedback that led to it!

If you are experiencing any issues with your site, please let us know at http://webservices.ahc.ufl.edu/contact-us/.

The Problem with Replacing a File

A good example of the old way is to think about a document that is updated annually, like a policies document.

Up until now, in order to update the document, you would have done the following:

• gone to the WordPress Library, and selected edit document
• deleted the old document
• uploaded the new document in it’s place

While straightforward, this process has its quirks. The new document that has been uploaded is given a new file name and a new file address has been created. Any links to the original document on your site are now broken. This is not a disaster if the links are all within your own site and can be easily corrected  However, what if you have a dozen policy files to update? Even more critically, what if the links are outside of your site? There may be many other sites that link to your document.  If these are broken, we now have a problem that we can not fix ourselves.  You could try to send the new links to the managers of those other sites, but you can see what a huge problem has been created.

A Better Solution for Replacing Files in WordPress

With a WordPress Plugin called Replace Media we can now edit, save, and swap the old document with the new version.  Replace Media keeps the same file-name, thereby keeping the same URL or file address.  Links to the document are now preserved and there should be no broken links or complaints from your users that your files are inaccessible.

• Replace Media works within the Media Library.
• Find the old file and choose edit.
• There is now a button in the edit dialog box named Upload a new file.

This works very well for various media files such as .PDF”s, .DOC’s, .XLS, and .PPT, files.

We have some detailed step by step instructions on using Replace Media in the How to Section of our Web Services site.

Diane Millican

Support and Training

Back in the Stone Age, (i.e. before computers) Diane received a degree in Education. That meant using a typewriter for all those term papers and projects. Things have come a long way since then.

Diane “used” that degree in Education to work in banking for several years. Then she found a new friend in her first Compaq computer with a 20 MB hard drive, received as a hand me down from a younger brother. When she got the chance, she went back to school and acquired a degree in Internet Technology. Diane has always enjoyed teaching and helping people use new technology. Now at UF she gets the chance to put both her computer and education degree to work.[/left]

Find Diane on Campus

• Communicore Building, C3-012
• 352.273.5770
• dmillic@ufl.edu

Photo by Thomas Riggs, Flickr.