Webmaster's Blog

Category: Best Practices

Writing Good ALT Tags

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Alt tags (also known as Image Descriptions or alt text) are 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:

  1. Screen readers will speak the alt tag of an image for users who cannot see.
  2. If an image cannot be loaded due to some sort of network or IT error, the alt tag will display instead.
  3. Alt tags boost search engine rankings and can help your website’s images display in Google search results.
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Image Optimization

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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.

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HTTP vs HTTPS URLs

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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.

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Google Search

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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.

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How to Collect Good Student Testimonials

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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.

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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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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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Organic Audits

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University Marketing and Communications (UMC) conducts courtesy organic optimization audits for websites within Modern Campus CMS. Our goal is to guide departments in polishing their web content with an end result of attracting prospective students to the university or meeting other strategic goals.

The audit conducted by UMC reviews key best practices for the various parts of our websites to identify areas for improvement. We have an internal checklist for our staff to use when auditing a site that we review with you after the audit is completed. A link to a shorter, self-audit organic checklist is also available for you to use.

Designated web liaisons can use the Organic Audit Request Form to request an audit. Audits are done in the order that requests are received, as project workload allows, and could take place a couple months after the request is placed. A project manager will contact you once we are ready to begin your audit to learn more about your goals and set up a kick-off meeting. Once started, the audit should be completed and recommendations provided within two weeks. It would be up to you, the liaison, to implement those recommendations.

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