Web Team Blog

To prepare for the next version of our Faculty and Staff Bio content type, we need to do some cleanup now.

We expect the full new version to be ready by Spring, but before then we need our content editors to do some housekeeping on the existing items. This will repair SEO issues with the existing bio.

In this post we'll cover the basic steps of migrating your Faculty and Staff Bio items.

On Friday, May 1, 2020, MarCom hosted a virtual marketing workshop covering two topics:

• Best practices for filming yourself with a smartphone and other DIY tips
  • Presented by Carter Johnson, Videographer
• Accessibility and social media (including how to create video captions) –
  • Presented by Megan Otis, Web Support Specialist, and Matt Lipsen, Social Media Marketing Specialist

Check out this blog post to view the powerpoint presentation, video (forthcoming) and other resources about the workshop topics.

This blog posts covers several announcements from the MarCom Web Team, including:

• Farewell Jason
• Follow-up to the Fall Forum on Accessible Documents
• New Content Types:
  • Back-to-Top
  • Box Navigation
  • Card
  • Course

This blog posts covers several topics all under the umbrella topic of End-of-Year Clean-Up in TerminalFour:

• RSVP for 19SQ Web Forum
• Clean-Up in the "T4 Playground"
• Purge Deleted Content
• Review Who Has Permission to Edit Your Site
• Give Us Your Feedback

This blog posts contains an important request from the Undergraduate Operations Council (UOC) to review the contact information on your websites. This blog post also contains instructions and tips to help you fulfill this request.

The MarCom Web Team has a few announcements we’d like to share:

• Web Accessibility Video Now Available
• Six New "How To" Articles
• Coming Soon: Some New Visual Changes
  • New Option for Infographic
  • New Design for Title Banner

This blog post covers:

• CMS training now fully online
• Forum on website accessibility
• Website style changes
• University changes that may impact your website content

This blog post covers:

• Monthly website improvement topics
  • Following up on past topics: Misspellings and broken links
  • This month's new topic: Images missing 'alt' descriptions for accessibility
• Help managing time-sensitive web content in T4
• Analytics reports from Siteimprove
• Users who no longer need access to TerminalFour

This blog post covers:

• What is an 'alt' description and why do we need to add them to our images?
• How do we add 'alt' descriptions in TerminalFour?
• Using Siteimprove to find and fix images missing alt descriptions

This blog post covers topics:

• Why is it important to fix broken links?
• How to fix a broken link
  • Internal links
• Reporting broken links
• Using Siteimprove to find and fix broken links
• Other useful tools to find broken links

This blog post covers topics

• Why is it important to catch misspellings?
• Tools to prevent misspellings
• Using Siteimprove to find and fix misspellings

This blog post includes announcements about:

• A new resource for content editors: Searchable "How To" Articles
• Monthly Website Improvement Topics, using Site Improve
• Reminder to review the list of users who have permission to edit your websites

This blog post covers the following topics:

• Follow-up to the Design Refresh
  • What do to if you missed a Demonstration and Training Session
  • Where to find information on all of the new content types and how to use them
• Two new content types, and new banner customization options
• New contract with Site Improve -- a tool to identify content quality, accessibility, and search engine optimization issues within our Seattle U websites

Topics covered in this blog post:

• Next week's launch details
• Instructions on how to preview your page with the new look
  • How to preview your page to full width
• Invitation to attend a demonstration and training session

Topics included in this blog post:

• New Graduate Viewbook
• Launch Update

Topics included in this blog post:

• Launch Details
• Action Needed Before Launch
• New Resource on Accessibility

Included in this blog post:

• Missing form submission emails? Check your junk mail!
• ORSSP website URLs changing
• Update on design refresh time frame

Design refresh update: Sneak peek

The timeframe for rolling out the design refresh and template changes will be several more weeks, but in the meantime here are a few more details about the design refresh we’re excited to share with you all:

• Overall cleaner look with fewer grey borders and more white space
• Website background color will be changing from light grey to white
• Font size and line height (space between lines) will be increasing 15-25% (depending on the content type)
• Yellow page titles will be replaced by red page titles (hooray!)
• The Jumbotron and Quicklinks content types will be redesigned with brighter brand colors and a cleaner look (goodbye black and yellow flags!)
• More options for content type placement. Some content types are currently limited to just one zone, but after the roll out, more content types will be available in more zones. For example, the infographic content type (which is currently only available in zone A) will be offered in all zones on the page.
• New styles for all banners
• Launching several new content types, among which include the Panel, and the Spotlight, which we’re excited to show you a sneak peek of the designs by clicking to read in our blog post.

This blog post includes details on some of the new features content editors will see in the Site Manager now that now that we've upgraded to TerminalFour version 8.2.1 including:

• User interface changes in Site Manager
• View "broken" section or content links in Preview mode
• Easier creation of accessible tables
  • Adding column and row headings
  • Adding table caption and summary
• New features in Form Builder
  • More options after a successful submissions or form failure
  • More options to deploy T4 forms

Earlier this morning, the Seattle University content management system (CMS) was upgraded to TerminalFour version 8.2.1.

When you log in, you may notice some changes as this version includes some user interface improvements, performance upgrades, and important bug fixes.

In the next couple days, we’ll be writing a more detailed blog post summarizing the changes and new features.

In the meantime, let the MarCom Web Team know if you have any questions or concerns.

Topics discussed in this blog post:

• Update on the upcoming design refresh and template changes (including what content editors need to do to prepare)
• Updates on Albers and ITS URL changes
• Fall quarter CMS training sessions for new content editors
• Reminder to review CMS access and permissions for your SeattleU websites

Earlier this month we hosted our quarterly brand marketing workshop. The workshops are open to the campus community and typically include college marketers and preferred vendors for creative and design. 

Albers URLs are changing

Albers School of Business and Economics will be changing the URL of their websites from www.seattleu.edu/albers/ to www.seattleu.edu/business/ in order to increase their website’s search engine optimization (SEO). This change is scheduled to occur next Thursday, September 7.

SEO is a set of techniques to make your website more visible to search engines like Google and Bing; and the more visible or highly ranked your website is to search engines, the more likely you will connect with more, new users. Read our blog post if you want to find out more about SEO and things you can do to increase your SEO using TerminalFour.

Changes coming to Technology Support and ITS websites

All content from www.seattleu.edu/support will be transferred to www.seattleu.edu/its starting on Friday, September 15th at 6pm, the current technology support website (www.seattleu.edu/support) will be removed and all content will be transferred to a redesigned www.seattleu.edu/its. All support content will still be available, but via the main ITS website (www.seattleu.edu/its). The ITS website will also be reorganized to a service catalog format to make it comprehensive and user friendly.

Read this blog post to find out what you need to do to prepare for these upcoming changes

Recently, we announced that Albers School of Business and Economics will be changing the URLs of their websites from www.seattleu.edu/albers to www.seattleu.edu/business in order to increase their search engine optimization (SEO).

Many of you may be wondering about your website's SEO and what changes you can make in TerminalFour to increase your SEO, especially those who are actively seeking to reach more prospective students and increase your enrollment.

So the MarCom Web Team has put together this blog post to help you get started.

Included in the blog, we discuss some basics such as "What is SEO?" and keyword research. Then we discuss some aspects of your website that impacts SEO including:

• URL
• Page title
• Metadata (especially meta description and keywords)
• Content (especially including headings, links, images

We break down how to make these changes in TerminalFour, include lots of resources if you want to learn more about SEO, and lastly we discuss some important things to think about before making changes.

As I'm sure you've experienced before, it's frustrating to search for something in a search engine and end up with 404 - File Not Found - errors in the search results.

As content editors, you can prevent your users experiencing this frustration.

This blog post discusses things you should think about before deleting sections or renaming URLs, including how to prevent broken links to and from those sections/content items, and preventing broken links from appearing in search engine results.

Topics discussed in this month's blog post:

• Content Type Encyclopedia
• New content type: Color Box Navigation
• Web Team Blog
• Design refresh coming soon!

Website visitors tend not to read long paragraphs of text. Web browsing is a rapid activity, increasingly done while on the go or while the user’s attention is divided. Users prefer to scan down the page, skimming for the information for which they’re looking. Converting paragraphs into lists makes skimming easier.

This past spring in our content editors feedback survey, one theme that arose was that many users find it difficult to navigate within the TerminalFour content management system, especially given the large number of folders in our site structure.

So to help, I thought I would share some tips and tricks that I've discovered which make navigating in our TerminalFour CMS a little bit easier, including the Filter tool, Bookmarks, and a few keyboard shortcuts.

Topics discussed in this month's blog post:

• Who still needs access to TerminalFour?
• CMS Upgrade
• Summer training sessions

The TerminalFour CMS will be offline from 6:00pm tonight (Wed, Apr 19) until 8am tomorrow (Thu, Apr 20).

We’re hoping, since this outage is occurring outside of normal business hours, that it won’t be too inconvenient or disruptive for you all.

The good news is that TerminalFour will be offline in order to move to Amazon Web Services (AWS), a new set of servers. This switch is being done to address some issues with file transfers and forms, improve emergency communications, and will result in improvements to the system.

Topics discussed in this month's blog post:

• Last call for feedback on TerminalFour
• New content types launched this month
  • Infographic
  • More social media options
• Update on Form Submission Emails

This email is to confirm that TerminalFour engineers were able to restore form submission emails on Friday afternoon.

During the email outage, TerminalFour continued to store your form submissions in T4, in your form’s “submissions” folder.

If you have any questions or concerns about how to retrieve your form submission data from within T4, feel free to drop me a line at otism@seattleu.edu. 

TerminalFour form submission emails are currently down. T4 is aware of the problem and they are working on fixing it right now.

We will keep you posted with updates as we learn more, and our sincere apologies for the inconvenience.

"T4 Playground” Clean-Up

We are doing an early spring cleaning in the “T4 Playground” (our online training space) and we plan to delete everything in the section. If you have a section within the T4 Playground that you do not want us to delete, please let me know (otism@seattleu.edu) by 12:00pm noon on Monday, February 27th.

Reminder: We are waiting for your feedback!

We would deeply appreciate receiving your feedback about your experience in TerminalFour. Please fill out our very short survey and let us know what improvements you’d like to see in T4.

Topics discussed in this month's blog post:

• New in TerminalFour
  • CMS Upgrade
  • Social Media Feeds
  • New Banner Option
• Launch of newly re-designed Seattle University News and The Commons
• Font changes
• Upcoming training sessions
• Give us your feedback!