May 13, 2025

Greetings Web Admins,

What an exciting time around campus! As the dust settles on all the celebrations, it's a good time to review the Website Annual Checklist and prepare for summer website maintenance. You'll find that resource below, along with other notes about sharing events with the university-wide Happenings calendar, faculty bookshelves, and some more Drupal 10 training sessions. Again, as I work to re-establish this regular communication channel with y'all, please let me know if you have ideas for what it would be helpful for me to include in future newsletters.

Best,

KJ Schaeffner

Web Content Specialist

Arts & Sciences | Marketing & Communications

This year, A&S MarComm invited six graduating students to reflect on messages they wrote to themselves during their first days on campus as freshmen. They shared what they've learned during the past four years and what lies ahead.

If one of your students is featured in the video, you might consider including it on your website or in an upcoming newsletter!

There's recently been some confusion about how an A&S department or program can get their event featured on the university-wide Happenings calendar that is managed by University Marketing & Communications (UMC).

In order for your event to be added to the Happenings calendar, it should first be added to the main A&S event calendar.  Once an event is added to the main A&S calendar, it is automatically sent over to UMC. At that point, the folks over at UMC can review it and import it to the Happenings calendar.

So, whenever you have an event that you want promoted on Happenings, here's what you need to do:

As you are well aware, a lot goes into website management, strategy, and maintenance. To help manage this process throughout the year, you should review the full website checklist below. It features recommendations for weekly, monthly, and semesterly tasks, and even includes a "Summer Updates" section that you'll likely find helpful right now as you start to coordinate your department's summer priorities.

If your website's homepage is set up to automatically display upcoming events, check if you have any on your calendar over the next few months. With many departments/programs, it's a strong possibility that your calendar will be empty for the summer - which, in turn, creates an empty spot in a highly-visible area of your website.  Here are a few options:

A couple of quick shout-outs to some A&S web admins doing great work!

Shout-out to Gabrielle Weeden and Emilye Lombardo for recently helping to promote new faculty books! When you have a moment, check out either faculty member's profile below to get a sense of how books are featured on faculty pages:

Faculty page views make up a significant portion of our total website traffic. So, adding faculty publications to those profiles is a great way to make sure their research is reaching our audiences!

If would like to publicize a faculty member's book on the main A&S bookshelf and on the faculty member's A&S profile, just make sure that the Book content is marked as "shareable" in your Drupal site. Otherwise, don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions about managing your faculty bookshelf!

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. If you want to check in on their progress, take a look at this regularly-updated list of websites that have been successfully migrated to Drupal 10.

When your website is coming up in the queue, the A&S Web Team will reach out to schedule a time to migrate it. Taking into consideration the restrictions that come with the content freeze, the Web Team will work with you to determine a time that works best for you to minimize potential disruptions.

The biggest learning curve in Drupal 10 is the webforms. To support you and help you adjust to the new webform system, the A&S Web Team is periodically hosting training sessions on Zoom. Sign-up for an upcoming date!

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.