June 16, 2025

Greetings Site Managers,

I hope your summer is off to a good start. This month, the newsletter is packed with important tips and updates. Read on to hear about your access to web analytics, important summer tasks for your website, and a neat tool for ensuring that your webpages display well on mobile devices. To risk sounding like a broken record, I'll say this again: please let me know if there are any topics you'd like to see covered in future newsletters!

Best,

KJ Schaeffner

Web Content Specialist

Arts & Sciences | Marketing & Communications

At the end of the month, SiteImprove will no longer provide us with web analytics such as page views, user counts, or other metrics related to website traffic. However, we will still retain other important features of SiteImprove, such as the feature that tracks broken links and the policy creator. Speaking of broken links...

Summer is a great time to review SiteImprove's broken-link finder if you, understandably, couldn't keep up with it during the busy Spring semester. For a refresher on how that works, check out the Web Guide article below!

We created a new dashboard that leverages web data collected by Google Analytics, including metrics related to page views, sessions, users, user devices, and user sources. You can preview what that dashboard looks like below. The data in that sample dashboard pertains to the main A&S website (artsci.washu.edu), but we can recreate the same dashboard and apply it your website upon request. If you're interested, fill out the webform linked below!

As I've previously mentioned in these newsletters, faculty pages make up a significant portion of our web traffic. So, it's important to make sure that these pages stay up-to-date! Summer is great time to work with your department/program to determine:

While you're working on this, you might keep the guidelines for drafting profile pages (found below) on hand!

In the process of updating people pages, you may discover the need for new headshots for faculty/staff profiles. This will likely be the case for new hires, but you may also find there are staff members whose profiles are outdated and who also need new headshots.

Below, you can find a guide to optimizing your headshot photographs, alongside a form for requesting headshots to be taken by A&S MarComm's Senior Multimedia Designer, Sean Garcia.

Also: new faculty hires should be on the lookout for the opportunity to get their headshots taken at the new faculty orientation session that's held at the start of the Fall semester!

In the process of migrating websites, the Web Team noticed a spattering of faculty profile pages that were missing key information. In faculty profiles, specifically "long" faculty profiles, they noticed that the links sections were sometimes missing a link to the faculty member's department.

It may seem redundant to include a link to your faculty member's department/program - after all, the profile exists on their department webpage! These profiles, however, travel and often exist on other websites. For instance, all faculty profiles should be shared with the main A&S website. And many faculty members have affiliations with multiple departments and are often imported to those websites as well. So, you can imagine how it would be helpful to provide your department link to a user who is seeing your faculty member's profile on the main A&S website or on an affiliated department's website.

So, while you're updating profiles this summer, keep an on eye on that link section! For guidance on including links on long faculty profiles, check out the relevant section of the web guide included below.

A quick shout-out to a site manager doing great work!

Not only did Nick Freed do a great job of assembling the Spring 2025 PoliSci newsletter, he - ahead of publishing it - also did a great job of proactively checking how the newsletter looked on different screen sizes. Not all of the users who visit our website are using desktop computers. In fact, a significant percentage are visiting our website from their phones. For reference, about 35% of visitors to the main A&S website this month are viewing our webpages from their phones.

Working within Drupal, you should keep an eye on how images, in particular, display on different screen sizes. Here are a couple things you should do when publishing web content that contains images:

If you're unfamiliar with these browser tools, I've included a quick guide to using them in the link below.

The A&S Web Team is continuing the hard work of migrating the websites of all departments, programs, and units from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10. In fact, they are scheduled to officially wrap up all those migrations by the end of the month! After that, they will turn their focus to preparing the main A&S website for migration.

Web content question? Content sharing question? Reach out to me, KJ Schaeffner, at schaeffner@wustl.edu.

Technical issue with your website? Reach out to the A&S Web Team at artsci-webteam@wustl.edu.

Inside ArtSci question? Logo question? Reach out to Simone Becque at sbecque@wustl.edu.

Social media question? Reach out to Gennie Avellino at avellino@wustl.edu.

To help support the work of web admins, I will be available for office hours every Wednesday from 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM. If you have any questions or concerns about web content, please don't hesitate to drop-by! No rsvp or appointment necessary. You can find the re-occuring Zoom link in the Box document linked below.