To get access to Modern Campus CMS and receive training, the site’s web liaison should fill out the Modern Campus CMS Access Request Form.
For additional help, please email webmaster@mtu.edu.
Alt tags (also known as Image Descriptions or alt text) are a very important for the accessibility of your webpage. Moz does a good job of explaining what alt tags are. Please take a moment to read up on what alt tags are and why they are important. Moz also provides some tips for how to write good ones.
There are many uses for alt tags. The most well-known ones are:
- Screen readers will speak the alt tag of an image for users who cannot see.
- If an image cannot be loaded due to some sort of network or IT error, the alt tag will display instead.
- Alt tags boost search engine rankings and can help your website’s images display in Google search results.
With a decentralized model for web maintenance at Michigan Tech, each department is responsible for creating and maintaining its own website within the University’s requirements. University Marketing and Communications provides a content management system (CMS) for many departments on campus along with several resources for using the CMS, web best practices and strategies, writing guidelines and standards, and brand management. There are also external sources available for further professional development.
The Image Editor Gadget in the CMS will crop, compress, and optimize the images you create for your webpages. There is also code on our pages that serves up the most appropriate size of the image crops for the device being used. All images used in the CMS should be created with the Image Editor Gadget to ensure this code and the snippet code work, provide standard image sizes across our sites, and improve page speed and performance.
Digital Services in University Marketing and Communications hosts a Digital Marketers Meeting every other month. Digital Marketers is a group for digital platform managers (digital ads, photo/video production, social media accounts, websites, etc) across campus. Our discussion is focused on digital content production and best practices. We also provide a great setting to stay informed and plug into recruitment and reputation initiatives spearheaded by University Relations and Enrollment.
To receive a Google Calendar invitation for the meetings that includes a Zoom link, the campus community can join our email list.
Many academic departments will link to a listing of departmental courses in Banner. The URL looks like:
https://www.banweb.mtu.edu/pls/owa/studev.stu_ctg_utils.p_display_class_facbio?ps_department=EE&PS_STYLE_DEPT=ece&ps_level=UG&ps_faculty=all
The URL includes several parameters that can be customized for each department.
Michigan Tech has been using a tool called Siteimprove to find various issues on Modern Campus CMS webpages. The system has the ability to send scheduled reports to people on a regular basis. UMC created a custom CMS Content Editors Dashboard listing several quality, accessibility, search engine optimization (SEO), and editorial issues in one place. While Siteimprove has many more reports available, the selected issues have been identified as within the control of departmental CMS editors. This Dashboard replaces the previously available separate Broken Links and Misspellings reports.
Dashboard Reports
The CMS Content Editors Dashboard includes the following reports, subject to change at any time:
A dashboard for Google Analytics 4 (GA4) data and a Search Engine Optimization dashboard are now available for Modern Campus CMS websites, Michigan Tech Blogs, and Michigan Tech Events Calendar in Looker Studio. In the GA4 dashboard, you will find charts with analytics for:
- Page traffic and users
- Acquisition
- User demographics
- Device information
- 404 hits
- Vanity URLs
- Files and outbound links
- Anchor, call, and email links
- Buttons, cards, and touts
- Accordions
- Pop-ups, forms, and gift box shares
- Header media and image galleries
- Lightboxes (pop-up images)
- Tabs
- Videos
- Search terms
The SEO dashboard provides details on traffic coming from Google Search and how that traffic converts to prospective student leads.
When using URLs on webpages, documents, or other files, it is important to pay attention to the first part of the URL—HTTP or HTTPS. This could apply to hyperlinks, iFrame code, embedded images and videos, etc.
The “s” in HTTPS means that the connection is secure. URLs that use HTTP are not secure and malicious parties could steal the data being sent. They may intercept usernames, passwords, or other information filled out in a form; credit card information; or other personal data. For details on how HTTP and HTTPS work, there’s an easy-to-understand article that explains it using a carrier pigeon example.
The search functionality on the Michigan Tech website is powered by Google. It works the same way as a search on google.com, except it only searches within the mtu.edu domain, subdomains, and sites that we manually tell Google are also owned by Michigan Tech (such as superiorideas.org or michigantechhuskies.com).
Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking
In order for webpages to show up in search results, they must be crawled by the search engine’s bot. The bot navigates pages it has already crawled and follows links to find new pages. The new pages found are added to an index that the search engine pulls results from.
Student testimonials are vital to university marketing content. When prospective students learn about the Michigan Tech experience directly from the source, it creates a deeper emotional connection. Students getting their hands dirty, doing the work, and sharing their experiences and excitement drives potential students to see themselves doing the same thing. They really want to be at our university doing what they love to do.
How do you grab those moments to share with prospective students? Ask current students to highlight the access, opportunities, experiences, and self-improvement they’re engaged in at Michigan Tech. You can capture their perspectives in person, virtually, or even by email.