Web Advisory Committee meeting (December 19, 2012)

December 19, 2012– Needles Hall (NH) 3001 – 3:00 p.m. 

Present:

Heather Anderson, Jay Athia, Marta Bailey, Kristy Budd, Natalie Cockburn, Janice Cooke, Chris Francis, Christine Goucher (Guest), Guillermo Fuentes, Eva Grabinski (Guest), Chris Gray, Karen Jack, Jim Johnston, Amy Meredith, Michelle Douglas-Mills, Liam Morland, Kris Olafson, Ellen Rethoré (Guest), Terry Stewart (Chair), Andrea Sweet, Jeff Voskamp, Dave Wallace (Guest), Jonathan Woodcock.

Regrets:

Donald Duff-McCracken, Marlon Griffith, Megan Saunders.

Absent:

Amy Aldous, Dave Annable, Mary Lynn Benninger, Cynthia Breen, Chris Carignan, Alison Gelata, Nigel Henriques, Vadim Kononov, Pat Lafranier, Tammy Marcinko, Geoff McBoyle, Collin McIntyre, Paul Miskovsky, Isaac Morland, Wendy Philpott, Suzana Pinto.

1. Chair’s Remarks

  • Welcome to Guests Ellen Rethoré, Associate Vice-President (CPA), Christine Goucher (CPA) and Dave Wallace, Chief Information Officer (IST).
  • One additional item under Other Business re: use of external domains with WCMS.

2. Approval of Minutes.

Minutes of November 2012 were approved without correction. 

3. Visual Identity Refinements (Ellen Rethoré)

(The presentation, "UW Identity Refinement Presentation" is online)

Ellen presented WAC with a premiere screening of the Visual Identity presentation; any feedback of the presentation would be greatly appreciated.  Please email comments to Ellen at erethore@uwaterloo.ca or Christine at cgoucher@uwaterloo.ca.

  • There will be a series of the presentations regarding the Visual Identity of the University held across campus.
  • As of now, no specific standard has been set for a banner or logo (Google ‘University Logo’- no conformity).
  • There will be a return of an official signature, with vertical and horizontal signatures.  It is important to keep the number of signatures to two.
  • The University has decided to return to the tradition shield as its logo.  Why would we bring back the shield?  It is a universal icon for a University.  The top 5 ranked Universities have shields.  The shield shows that we are not a college or a high school.
  • Goal is to achieve excellence for the University, to be in the top 5 in Canada
  • When looking at the word mark of the current top 5 Universities, the word mark is similar to UofW’s
  • From the Mid-cycle Review Consultations, we learned that there is a need to:
    • increase visibility and outreach;
    • increase promotion of UW by communicating what we do;
    • seek out more partnerships with industry; 
    • create a brand for UW that is recognized nationally and internationally;
    • market UW outside of Canada better.
  • A series of diplomas were tested with the students to see what style of diploma they preferred.  The students chose the traditional styled diploma.
  • IPSOS research has found:
    • Audiences have some familiarity with Waterloo
    • Waterloo is best known for Engineering, Math, Computer Science and the Co-op program.  This is concerning to the University because in shows the lack of knowledge of the Graduate Studies program and the research that the University does.
    • Waterloo is among 10 most visible Universities
  • By 2014 most web browsing will take place from a mobile device.  “When you wake up in the morning it is the first screen you see, and the last screen you see before bed” (unknown)
  • Digital Implications (critical):
    • Mobile image recognition technologies
    • Identity consistency
    • AODA, accessibility for persons with disabilities
    • Colour consistency

Question and comments:

Q. Was there any discussion regarding changing the font?

A. A Serif font is considered traditional, a sans-serif font is considered untraditional.  A Sans-serif font shows that the university is young and untraditional.

Q. How will the University decide on the identity of Faculties and retail department?

A. Leaders will need to decide if areas are allowed to have separate brands

Q. What about websites that cannot be transferred to the WCMS?

A. We will have to come up with guidelines on how to tackle this.

Q. Is it possible to come up with a set of CSSfor these sites?

A. Yes, something to be considered.

Q. How many times have the other top 5 Universities changed their branding?

A. This information is not known, this is something that would need to go back and look at the history of the Universities.  If we get the strategy right, we won’t have to change our branding, maybe just tweak it a little bit.

Q. When will this start filtering into the websites?

A. Eva is flagged for looking at timing; Ellen does not have an answer yet.

Q. Will there be different variations?

A. Yes. Coloured, black and white.

4. IT Strategic Plan Consultation (Dave Wallace/Natalie Cockburn)

(The presentation, "IT Strategic Plan", is online.)

  • The IT Strategic Plans goal is to enable the Universities mission through exceptional learning, teaching and research environment.  As stake holders, our purpose is to evolve, incorporate IT environment, to enable engagement, creativity and impact.
  •  When thinking of the stakeholders we need to empower the user and optimize their experience.
  • The University needs a University wide approach, making investments to stay up to date.
  • 8 Emerging Themes for IT

1.      Enabling Research – common services, local specialty support

2.      Supporting Student-Life – services, support to student use of technologies in life and study, environment for expanding learning

3.      Enabling the Learning Environment – IT services and support for technologies in their application to the learning environment

4.      Information Management – access to information to facilitate use of data, while maintaining security and privacy

5.      Governance – transparent, effective, participatory decisions

6.      Supporting Business Processes – support admin functions by providing effective, efficient, and user friendly applications

7.      Re-focusing Client Service – focus our decisions, support and evolution of technologies in collaboration with our users

8.      Campus Integrations – enable collaboration in IT support and development in our design and architecture; federated IT

(“Reputation” – embedded throughout)

Question and comments:

C.  The RT system works well; it can be a little clunky.

C.  Dave thinks the WCMS is a great example of how IT should work.

Q.  A challenge on how do we communicate the processes across campus?

A.  Need to tie things together more efficiently.

C.  Mobile website for students needs to be compatible.

C.  Privacy will be an issue.

C.  We need to be a leader with data; this will be a key driver and component.

C.  Processes need to be in place.

C.  All processes need to be coordinated across campus with the same process.  A formal process needs to be communicated.

5. Digital Initiatives Update (Jonathan Woodcock)

  • Homepage traffic over​view
  • Social Media Committee website
    • uwaterloo.ca/social-media-committee
    • Similar intent to the Web Advisory website
    • Just launched this December.
    • Aaron Miller (a2miller@uwaterloo.ca) is the contact for the site.
  • Web Accessibility Working Group Report
    • Target for final report is April 2013
    • Web Steering has asked that schedule be accelerated, and the group will be assessing that at the next meeting. (January)
    • Web Steering has also requested the addition of a risk assessment in relation to January 1, 2014 compliance at uWaterloo.  Draft of this item to be completed at the January meeting of the working group.
  • Holiday closure notices on the homepage
    • Top feature item on homepage and all pathway pages.
    • Notification in Facts & Figure area
    • Audience pathway page placements (Feature Story)
    • Event on homepage about university closure, linking to Daily Bulletin info.
    • CTA linking to Daily Bulletin info on homepage and all pathways, will be made available for use on other sites.
    • NOTE: An email containing this information and including the CTA for reuse will be distributed to the web and communications mailing lists on Friday December 21, once the permanent link for the bulletin is available.
  • Accessibility review of colour palette
    • Digital Initiatives is reviewing the university colour palette based on the website accessibility requirements. 
    • Process is ongoing, Andrea Sweet (a2sweet@uwaterloo.ca) leading.

Question and comments:

C.  To see if the Google search appliance is working better now Jonathon and Kris are going to see if they can review the Google search stats.

6. Waterloo CMS Update (Kris Olafson)

  • Have you hired a co-op student to work on your current or scheduled-for-migration site in the WCMS?  We will be training our 6 WCMS team co-op students on January 3 & 4 from 9:00-noon.  If you would like to include your co-op student in that training session contact me, hawey@uwaterloo.ca. Note: All space have been filled.
  • New! Create your own call to action buttons. Would you like to add a call to action (CTA) button to your site (like you see in the sidebar of the Waterloo Events  website)?  Andrea Sweet, Digital Initiatives – CPA has created PowerPoint templates for you to use to create your own CTAs. The CTA templates and instructions are available on the Web Resources site. 

  • ​No Developer Drop-in Lab in December – Happy Holidays!

  • If you are interested in providing feedback to the Waterloo Content Management System (WCMS) development team, please join us in the New Year.  Held the 4th Wednesday of every month from 1:00-4:30 pm, MC 2060.

  • 15 more sites have launched in the Waterloo Content Management System (WCMS) since our last update on November 12.
  • WCMS Recent Accomplishments – Dec 17th, 2012
    • Nov 12th – 23rd sprint
      • Added audio player to blog posts for podcasts
      • Fixes for new “wide web pages” so design elements span the wider content area
      • Usability improvements for the admin interface
      • Users can now enter text below image galleries
      • Custom work to support Conrad Grebel’s academic journal “Conrad Grebel Review”
      • Improved draggable views functionality to sort content
      • Work on the Student Portal mockups
    • Nov 26th – Dec 7th sprint
      • Created an interactive student budget calculator for Financial Aid
      • Maps for events prototyped using the Leaflet library and ESRI map data
      • Investigation into issues with deleting uploaded files
      • Styling work on user comments
      • Investigation into scheduled content publishing
      • Work on a better looking Varnish error page for Drupal outages (awaiting CPA feedback)
      • Additional file types can now be uploaded
      • More fixes for “wide web pages”
      • Work on the agile project management and feedback site
    • Dec 10th – Dec 21​​st sprint
      • Investigating iCal data for single events (instead of entire calendars)
      • Added a cost field for events
      • Investigating up/down voting for user stories and comments for the agile project management and feedback site to gage interest better
      • News from the Web Resources site now appears on people’s Drupal dashboards
      • Investigation into collapsible content regions
      • Continued efforts on scheduled content publishing
      • Cleanup of RSS feeds/removing extra unnecessary markup
  • Focus in early 2013
    • Building a Person content type to replace Contacts and Person Profiles
    • Work on custom pages that list content dynamically (Nextide ideally)
    • Work on a site where users can spawn wikis (Nextide perhaps)
    • Work on a beta Student Portal for release
    • Organizing working groups for Student Portal and mobile design enhancements
    • Work on Drupal content types so the Google Search Appliance can tell them apart
    • Work on the Google Search Appliance to add new features/functionality
    • Investigation into Google Analytics data from all Drupal sites for CPA
    • Work on the Exchange Program content type for the Study Abroad program
    • Investigation into content sharing and/or feeding data between sites

Question and comments:

Q. When will Wiki be up and running?

A. Would like WAC to test it out first?

Q. Sounds like we are rebuilding SharePoint?

A. Yes we are, IST only has one person to support SharePoint.  SharePoint consultation is very expensive.  Wiki would be able to have private searches.

8. Other Business

All pages in the WCMS will be part of the uwaterloo.ca domain.  Sites will exist as https://uwaterloo.ca/>.   External URLs will not be supported for several reasons including the cost of certificates and lack of control over external domains (Eg, askthewarrior).  External sites can still be used to direct clients to the site within uwaterloo.ca domain.  Eg, ahs.uwaterloo.ca points into uwaterloo.ca/ahs.

9. Next Meeting 

  • 3:00-4:30p.m., January 16, 2013. Location to be determined.

10. Meeting Adjourned at 4:30 p.m.