Best Practices Archives

Crazy Egg Analytics

Published May 10, 2022

Best Practices

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.

Rearranging A Website

Published May 6, 2022

By Megan Ross

You may need to rearrange content on your website to meet strategic goals or due to a department reorganization. Decisions should be based on analytics, research, or other data-based factors. There are some key steps to this process to ensure it goes smoothly and that all changes are reflected in the final redirects to avoid frustration for users searching or using bookmarks.

Building a New Website

Published April 29, 2022

By Megan Ross

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.

Web Liaison Role

Published October 26, 2021

By Megan Ross

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.

CMS Content Search

Published November 19, 2019

By Joel Vertin

Best Practices

Content managers may occasionally want to search for specific phrases within the content of their CMS website. To search your site for a specific phrase, follow these steps.

Page or Site Redirects

Published July 19, 2019

By Joel Vertin

Redirects are important when webpage URLs change on your website. There are many reasons why this could happen:

your site’s root folder name may need to change because your department is going through a name change
you may change the name of a folder or subfolder
you may move a page, folder, or file
you may delete a page, folder, or file

When any of these actions occur, it is important that a proper redirect is put into place. This ensures that the old URL continues to work for any users who find it or have it saved.

Recommended Formatting of Hours

Published May 29, 2019

By Megan Ross

Best Practices

There are many instances when you need to display hours on your webpage—hours of operation, advisor walk-in hours, and learning center times to name a few. The following formatting recommendations and tips for displaying basic hours will make them easy to see and understand by both sighted users and anyone using a screen reader. Additional formatting information can be found in the University Editorial Guide.

Sidebar with Hours title and example hours. — Basic hours of operation differentiate by time of year.

Sidebar with Make an Appointment title and text and hours in the content. — Basic hours with additional text.

ALT Tags on Images in Blog Posts

Published August 28, 2018

By Megan Ross

ALT tags (also known as alternative text, ALT text, or image descriptions) are an important factor in making your webpages accessible. This is also true for images used in your blog posts. Michigan Tech’s Accessible Technology Training Resources provides a training resource and guidelines for image ALT tags.

Creating Headings

Published April 2, 2018

By Megan Ross

Headings play a key role in accessibility requirements and general page usability. It is important to use properly structured HTML headings instead of bold paragraphs or single lines of text when organizing your web content and to not use the heading styling when the content is not a heading. Think of webpage headings as a table of contents for a story.

Headings help break up and organize lengthy informational webpages—improving readability. Proper heading use is not only important for accessibility, it also has search engine optimization benefits, which can help your webpages rank higher in Google’s search results.

According to the University’s editorial guide, headings are always title case, meaning you should capitalize all words that are not articles, prepositions, or to-be verbs. Do not use a colon (:) at the end of a heading.

How to copy/paste clean code

Published July 5, 2017

Best Practices

Have you ever pasted content into the CMS, and it just do_esn’t look r~~ight~~? You’re probably carrying old formatting code into the new CMS. Common culprits are copying from a Word document, copying text from one browser and pasting it into another, or copying text that was formatted in-line (using <span> and <style> tags directly in the code instead of letting the preformatted stylesheets do the work.)

Adding content with this type of formatting is bad for a couple of reasons:

It doesn’t let your page update with the rest of the CMS. We may decide to change the font size or style to make the site more accessible or to keep up with modern design trends. By using the standard heading (<h1>, <h2>, etc) and paragraph (<p>) tags, your content will be ready to shift in an instant. If you leave hard-coded styles in the page, your look won’t automatically change.
It can look strange on different devices. Everything on our new template is designed to expand and contract with the user’s screen size. Hard-coded styles may not change in the right way between desktop and mobile.
It’s annoying for you, the CMS user. Sometimes you’ll have lines and lines of needless code – annoying when you’re trying to find one or two words in pages of <span>s and <color>s. For example, look at the coding on the links below—the <u> and <span> tags make for messy code on the back and and ugly links on the front end.

Category: Best Practices