Good morning, Unit Web Coordinators!
Happy October! We hope everyone has been able to stay safe and healthy, and appreciate your continued efforts to ensure your sites are up to date during these difficult times. The past month has mostly been continuing work on past initiatives, but there are a few exciting things coming up that we wanted to ensure you were aware of!
- Virtual Scavenger Hunt
- As announced in September’s email, this month is Disability Pride and Heritage Month, and the Virtual Scavenger Hunt site will be released in the next few weeks! We’re very excited for everyone to have the opportunity to explore the accessibility tools available in web browsers and learn about how websites can be improved so that everyone can use them with ease. In the latter half of the month, there will be a series of Zoom workshops involving technology and accessibility, one of which will be specifically about WordPress! We will be sending an email out to all WordPress users when the exact dates and times of these workshops are solidified, and hope to see you all there.
- Development Initiative Report
- Development efforts have recently been focused on a priority project, and as such the fixes scheduled needed to be pushed. New target dates have been identified and the page has been updated accordingly. If you are experiencing any bugs or strange site behavior that you do not see reflected on the list, please submit a ServiceNow ticket to let us know!
- Website governance
- University Marketing and ITS are partnering to explore options for reinstating the Web Advisory Council. The proposed goal of this group will be to maintain and enhance the integrity of the NAU websites, including both www.nau.edu and in.nau.edu, by establishing and upholding web standards, policies, and procedures. The specific responsibilities of this council are currently being drafted along with a vision for how it will function. Membership is expected to include representatives from ITS, Marketing, Academic and Non-Academic departments. More to come on this topic as the details solidify!
- Siteimprove
- Digital Marketing has continued to battle down the broken links on nau.edu, once again reaching record lows on the network. The next stage of reports is still in progress, but with the excellent progress from our Marketing colleagues we will likely be expanding the new reports to all sites together, so that users can get more in-depth information on their sites and how to make them the best they can be. If you are not already using Siteimprove, please do not hesitate to reach out to learn how to get an account and start learning more about the platform!
- Training
- Last but not least, the usual reminder: we are still offering our Virtual Open Labs for WordPress support! If you have questions or concerns about something you are working on in your site, or just can’t get something to work the way you are hoping to, feel free to sign up for an appointment! We still have openings for October 14th, and the December dates will be added soon. If you have been hoping to make an appointment and the times have just not been working for you, please let us know– we would be happy to shift to alternate slots to help accommodate other users better.
As always, we greatly appreciate the work you and your site stewards do, and hope you all have a great month!