It’s that time of year again! The days are getting longer, the pollen is getting thicker, and your website is slowing down under the weight of media bloat, broken links, and outdated content.
Join us for the next Web Professionals Session on Thursday, April 4th at 2:00p.m. in the Graduate Center (211-A West Cameron Ave.) or on Zoom. We’ll be discussing ways to clean up your website, improve site performance, and create better user experiences. Whether you have a dedicated maintenance schedule, or have never considered this topic in your life, we will share tools and strategies to help you get your website spic and span.
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
- 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
- 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
- Employee Sites
- Roughly evenly split between the different use reasons
- Lab Sites
- Associations
- Professional Faculty Sites
- Personal Faculty Sites
- 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
- Kim’s questions
- Is tarheel.live effective?
- Do we grandfather in existing 5K sites?
- 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?
- 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