When pointing webpage visitors to content further down a webpage or to a specific portion of content within a webpage, traditional anchor links remain the preferred solution. While modern browsers sometimes generate special “text highlight” links that automatically scroll to and highlight specific wording on a page, these links should generally not be used within Michigan Tech websites.
When considering using stock photography in your marketing projects, lean into the authenticity that helps shape Michigan Tech’s brand. The UMC Studio Team has put together a guide for when to use (and not use) stock photography.
When choosing to use stock photography for marketing projects (e.g., blogs, emails, print, PDFs, social media, websites), it is the department’s responsibility to take a few additional steps to ensure images are used appropriately and documented properly. These best practices help protect the university, support long-term content management, and make it easier to address questions about image usage in the future.
At Michigan Tech, our strongest visual asset is our people. Our students, faculty, researchers, and campus environments tell a story that no stock image can fully replicate. While stock photography can be a helpful tool, it should never replace authentic visuals when real, relevant Michigan Tech imagery is available.
This guide is meant to help you decide when stock images make sense, how to choose them well, and why authenticity matters so much to our brand.
With our CMS vendor’s upcoming retirement of the Form Assets in 2026, the Digital Strategy and Services team recommends switching to Google Forms, as they are easy to use and widely recognized. While UMC does not directly support the Google suite of products on campus, we want to provide some best practices for implementing their use on your CMS website.
There are many common issues you can watch for and best practices you can follow on your webpages to help increase the quality and search engine optimization (SEO) of your pages, meet accessibility requirements, and follow Michigan Tech’s editorial standards.
Specific instructions that may be included in this information are for Michigan Tech’s Modern Campus CMS.
UTM tracking parameters (also known as UTM codes) are small snippets of text added to the end of a webpage URL. When applied properly, they give marketers clear insights into where visitors originate and how different audience segments engage with a site. By leveraging this data, marketing teams can pinpoint the platforms and content that drive the strongest results, helping refine strategy and achieve marketing objectives.
Once you understand what UTM codes are and what to put into them, the next step is making implementation both easy and consistent. Below are some ways you and your team can streamline building, applying, and managing UTM tags in day-to-day marketing work.
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:
- 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.
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.
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.