Good morning Unit Web Coordinators,
As noted earlier we have cancelled this month’s in-person meeting in favor of an email update. We hope the new academic year is starting well in your respective areas and that the initial surge in activity is settling back into a normal routine.
Since our August meeting, our progress has been primarily in these key areas:
Site Stability: Our WCM, Development, and Platform teams worked hard over the summer to improve the performance and reliability of the WWW and IN websites. These efforts paid off as we had no significant outages on the enterprise WordPress environments during move in week and over the first few days of class. The exponential traffic increase during this timeframe caused some minor slowdowns and a few scattered errors, but this pales in comparison to the multi-hour outages sustained in prior years, and is a testament to the efforts of those teams.
Site Transfers: After careful review and collaboration with University Marketing, all site transfers between nau.edu and in.nau.edu were completed in early August. We discovered some users had access issues post migration, but no content concerns arose throughout the 70 sites moved, and now have the process secured. Thank you to all who were patient during this process!
Directory: On August 19th, the newly-designed Directory update went live. These changes not only added visual and graphic improvements, but also provided the long-requested capability for photos (all employees, via id.nau.edu) and additional bio information for faculty, via Faculty180. There will continue to be refinements and process improvements, but we are very proud of the work put in by the development teams. Please coordinate with any of your site stewards that had built a custom directory page to transition to the standard template as prudent.
Enterprise+ Training: The first workshop was a success, and we greatly appreciate those of you who were able to attend as well as the feedback you provided. Rye and Sarah are working on finding a good time for the lab to schedule additional offerings, and there will be a communication sent to collect ideal times from remaining UWCs to ensure you all have a chance to attend.
Training: With the beginning of the semester, the web support team has returned to a cadence of weekly open labs to provide assistance with WordPress and Siteimprove. You can view the schedule for the entire semester on our training schedule page. Feel free to come by with any questions or concerns, or even just to get some work done on your site with support staff present.
Siteimprove: Every week, both ITS and University Marketing are working to help correct broken links, misspellings, and other QA concerns across all of WordPress. However, many issues require context or knowledge that central support teams simply do not have; if your site stewards are not already using Siteimprove, we encourage they come to one of our open labs to get started. It has never been easier to ensure your sites provide the best experience to their visitors, and to confirm the quality of your content.
As always, thank you for your involvement in NAU’s WordPress community as well as the ongoing support for the various web related efforts underway on campus. We are all in this together, and it takes all of us to ensure success.
Most appreciatively,
Chad D. Stiller | Associate Director
ITS Enterprise Information Services