Webmaster's Blog

Author: Megan Ross

Crazy Egg Analytics

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UMC has a limited subscription to an analytics service called Crazy Egg. This is a great tool to use in conjunction with Google Analytics that can give visual information about user habits on a single page. The reports include a heatmap of user clicks, a scrollmap of how far down the page users are scrolling, confetti showing specific clicks with a secondary dimension, and an overlay option that provides even more details.

Since Crazy Egg is set up on a page-by-page basis it is better suited for your most important pages, such as homepages, and you do have to plan ahead as it must be set to begin gathering data and then runs for up to 60 days. It is a bit harder to use this tool for historical comparisons but is a great tool to use in advance of a site or homepage redesign.

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Building a New Website

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Modern Campus CMS is available for certain Michigan Tech websites including Tech Forward initiatives, academic departments, administrative departments, official research centers and institutes, and research initiatives/groups/units. All sites within Modern Campus CMS are required to designate at least one web liaison to manage the daily maintenance of the site. At least one backup editor is recommended.

New websites are built in a test environment, within an ou- directory. This will allow the site to be published throughout the build process so stakeholders can preview and approve the site before going live. Sites within the ou- directory can only be accessed with the direct link and are not searchable.

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Accordion Snippet

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This snippet creates Slider- or FAQ-styled accordions. Clicking on one of the accordions would open or close that section. Each row in the snippet will create one accordion. Creating three or more accordions within one snippet would automatically add an Expand All/Collapse All link at the top right. If you have more than seven accordions together, it is recommended that you try to split them into multiple categories.

Screen shot of a slider with the first one open.

Screen shot of an FAQ with the last question open.

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Web Liaison Role

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Each Modern Campus CMS website is required to have at least one designated web liaison to manage the daily maintenance of the site. The liaison is the main contact for the website for suggested edits, corrections, accessibility, etc. They also manage access requests. When a liaison is not designated, the dean, department head, or chair may be contacted in their place and is able to request access and perform other roles of the liaison.

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Relevanssi WordPress Plugin

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Relevanssi is a WordPress plugin that replaces the standard WordPress search with one that includes a lot of features and configurable options. Michigan Tech has installed the free version of Relevanssi, not the premium version.

Some of the features available include:

  • sorting search results by relevance instead of date
  • matching partial words
  • setting the search or OR or AND
  • highlighting search terms
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