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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The following tips are meant to help CMS users with day-to-day maintenance of basic content on their websites.
Paste as Text
If you paste content from a document or email into Modern Campus CMS, you will likely get a bunch of bad code added behind the scenes that will effect how your webpage will look at function. To avoid issues, try clicking the “Paste as Text” button before pasting your content or use the Ctrl + Shift + V key combination.
The negative to pasting as text is that you will have to do some formatting manually (adding bold, adding links, etc). However, this will help to ensure that your website meets brand and accessibility standards and works correctly on all devices.
Headings
Headings play a key role in accessibility requirements and general page usability. It is important to use proper HTML headings instead of bold paragraphs or single lines of text and to not use the heading styling when the content is not a heading. To apply a heading style to a line of text, put your cursor inside of the line of text and then select a heading level from the paragraph dropdown menu in the Modern Campus CMS editor. The same method working in other online applications, such as Google Docs. For text that you want to highlight that is not actually heading content, use the font styles in the Styles dropdown menu of the Modern Campus CMS editor instead.