Proposed changes to web.unc.edu
- ITS-Digital Services wants your feedback!
- We are moving hosted WordPress websites to the cloud, and we’re proposing changes to web.unc.edu. Come hear our proposal to address and improve digital accessibility and university branding.
- If you have a site hosted on web.unc.edu you’ll want to weigh in on these ideas!
Date: RESCHEDULED Thursday, Feb 13th
Time: RESCHEDULED – 2:30-3:30
Location: Graduate Student Center
Presenter: Kim Vassiliadis, ITS-Digital Services
Presentation Slides
Proposed Changes to web.unc.edu presentation slides (pdf)
Presentation Recap and Notes
- Moving to the cloud
- Contact signed with Pantheon
- ITS is paying for the hosting
- Primary focus is environments ITS manages
- Web Dot network
- Self service
- WP Multi-site
- Sites Dot network
- Enterprise
- Departmental
- WP hosting
- unc.edu
- Stand alone installation
- Web Dot network
- Opportunities
- Rethink offerings
- Address university branding
- Address digital accessibility
- Educate users: website ownership
- Current Multi-site
- Currently ~5K sites
- 9 Themes
- 50+ Plugins shared
- Recent sites created
- Sites created since September
- ~700 sites
- Numbers
- 83% were created by student
- Most were for classes
- Some for Resume
- Few for other reasons
- 17% were created by employees
- 83% were created by student
- WebDotUNC
- By default setup as a web.unc.edu domain with your site name
- Example site – Vaccines
- Concerns
- Copyrighted material
- Accessible
- Information Literacy
- Has a .unc.edu domain
- Concerns
- Employee Sites
- Roughly evenly split between the different use reasons
- Lab Sites
- Associations
- Professional Faculty Sites
- Personal Faculty Sites
- Roughly evenly split between the different use reasons
- Proposal
- Rename the network from web.unc.edu to some name that does not imply the authority of the university
- Has some affiliation, but not an official page/site
- Could be either a subdomain or a slash URL name
- Ex: sitename.tarheel.live vs. tarheel.live/sitename
- Criteria for a unc.edu domain
- Site Must
- Represent the university
- Meet baseline accessibility requirements
- Attend an accessibility training within a semester/year
- The site must qualify and the site/content managers require training for this level
- Site Must
- Kim’s questions
- Is tarheel.live effective?
- Do we grandfather in existing 5K sites?
- On request?
- How should we handle faculty/personal sites going forward?
- Other suggestions?
- Ownership transfer
- Could have a process to change ownership of a site (ex: student site a professor wants to keep)
- This way content can persist beyond
- New workflow
- All sites would start at the tarheel.live
- There would be a request process to move to a unc.edu domain
- Should we have this [website hosting] service at all?
- There are free services available
- But, this service is 10 years old and we are reticent to discontinue it at this point
- How to manage older sites?
- Have decommissioned
- If you are a lab, and you are spinning it up, how to have banner removed?
- Could be a request process?
- Could be moving the site to unc.edu instead
- Archive
- We don’t want to become an archive for old sites
- Can work with university archive services to capture the content but retire the site.
- SiteImprove Tool
- Researched accessibility tools, received help from people to test
- Just decided on SiteImprove recently and working with different groups to provide access
- Want to make it so webmasters can scan the various site they manage
- Pilot members
- Will it cover login sites?
- Working on that now
- Can scan the content
Questions and Discussion
- How much will visual branding be required for the initial move?
- That conversation will come in a later phase
- Suggestion to use the subdomain path
- There are challenges to both approaches
- Distinction between official sites and personal/student sites, this is WordPress and this is free for many, what about putting a banner denoting it is not an official site?
- Not sure if it will help us legally, but there is a perception that it would divorce us from the direct connection
- Have you discussed building a form for sign up that qualifies people as they fill it out?
- Yes, but we want to see on the back-end that you are doing your due diligence before getting a unc.edu site
- Advantage to separate URL?
- Can have the default domain go to an explanation page
- How to handle domain mapped URLs?
- May leave as is for now and circle back when we have the initial phase complete
- Thinking about GDPR in this process?
- Not been given any guidance so far
- How will the current URLs redirect?
- That plan is in the works but not finalized at this point
- What is the cost of the subdomain vs. subdirectory?
- One cost for a subdirectory but each subdomain could have a cost associated with them
- Theming thoughts? Will we get away from the bootstrap shortcuts?
- Yes
- They are in discussions about shared elements
- Look at the oxygen builder that can take the place of a theme
- Super fast
- Can create design without themes
- Could you have a structure where you ask for the life-time of the site?
- That way you can put a timeline on the site
- The person would need to think about how long the site would need to stay on the web.
- If I am a professor, what are my options? Does the site need to be indexed and searchable to everyone in the world?
- Could there be checkboxes for various options? Google Indexing for example?
- Could setup the Tarheel.live sites so they don’t index by default and have some process for becoming indexed
- Kim looked at other University offerings and few institutions provide the infrastructure that UNC does
- Many have some space for personal
- Is it possible to have a branch that the class sites go to that can be temporary and expire and those who want a longer lifetime could take a different path?
- Could use a directory value (LDAP values) to identify users
- Could there be an automated way to decommission unless people want to keep it?
- Essentially, you get a site for a year
- At the 11 month mark (or some other time), send an email reminding them to request another year.
- For high-level users, they could be higher on the radar for the digital services group
- Require second admin
- Could require someone as a second admin if the site is important
- Might be some cases where people leave and the site needs to persist
- For the official work sites, will it be the same functionality as current (plugin restrictions, themes, etc.)?
- Shifting what we have for now
- Want to examine this at a later date
- CloudApps has similar issues? How to handle?
- Have not started that conversation yet, but a good idea
- Inactive sites spin down over time, so may not be a pressing issues
- Are absolved from the accessibility rules with the tarheel.live?
- No but it does make a difference
- We need to do what we can, where we can
- Baby steps to make things better
- What if the URL was students.unc.edu?
- Just because you are using tarheel.live, it is still UNC related
- Investigated using sandbox accounts in the platform
- Tested it with students in a class to see the feasibility
- It was a disaster, difficult to use,
- If the site became a “successful” site, there would be a payment structure required
- Cost?
- There is no cost at this time
- Will be covered by ITS
- What could this move provide for us?
- Free up time on the Digital Services team
- A more robust and effective method for rolling out plugins
- Will ITS allow sliders on sites?
- Starting to phase out sliders.
- Old sites are grandfathered in but new sites will not allow it
- But they are not accessible, can trap keyboard users
- Design is moving away from this now (make the logo big and make the logo bigger!)
- Referring to old assignments
- Faculty like to link to previous assignments and work
- How to handle this persistence?
- Need to consider if the student