Welcome to almost thirty days of school! A few updates are in order as we’ve made a number of changes since our last Web Author Newsletter:
"Manage Righty" has been completely re-written (and we hope you'll agree, improved) to allow for drag-and-drop re-ordering of elements and removal of custom elements. It's also been cleaned up a bit so that it looks friendlier. We all like "friendly" applications, right? We also improved the display of training events for your website visitors (see comparison images) to make it even easier to see available training sessions and register for them. Stay tuned for a few new additions in the near future, including "Blackhawk streaming media" integration and more.
Now when you request a new QuickURL, you can select, "enable advanced tracking" to store detailed usage information via Google Analytics. You can use this information to better-understand your website visitors – where did they come from, where did they go, what did they look at while on your site, etc.
It is also a very unique mechanism to compare advertising-based website visitors to normal website visitors. Those of you that attended our training session saw what information is available and just how different the two audiences can be. We encourage all Web Authors to make use of this convenient feature when developing advertising (whether print, email, or web-based).
For several months we've provided a count of how many times your QuickURLs are being used, but recently we've dramatically expanded the information available.
Now, when you click on the "Hit Count" column in your "QuickURL Listing" page, you'll see a report that shows details of how often your QuickURL was used, by whom, and much more, for a selected date range (the default is the past 30 days).
This can be particularly helpful in understanding how people find your site and in directing advertising effort (and dollars!) to websites and search terms that people use to find your site.
Between mid-June and late-July, many departmental and program/initiative websites may have received limited or no Google Analytics (GA) visitor tracking due to an issue with our header updates.
Although GA data will never be recoverable for this timeframe, you can make use of the new QuickURL reports (see previous section) to see visitor traffic and trends. We apologize for this issue and will work to ensure that it does not happen again.
We've made a number of changes and updates to MessageHub in an effort to make it easier to use, provide additional value and insight to you, and improve integration with our existing systems. To that end, we consolidated message types and (hopefully) made it easier to pick portal/email messages.
We completely re-wrote the "view message" page to (again, hopefully) make it easier to see what was going on with your message and identify next steps/potential issues.
Finally, we provided a "Message Stats" page that shows you how visitors are viewing and interacting with your message. The level of detail depends on the type of message and where it is being displayed, but can include views, deletions, and file downloads.
In the near future, we'll be adding the ability to copy a message, which will include the ability to copy from one type of message to another (for example, to copy from a calendar entry to a portal/email message). Stay tuned for more information on updates to MessageHub in our next update!
Since the release of the V4 website in late January/early February, all website feedback has been sent to our Web Services address. While we love to hear what people have to say about the site, more often than not they're asking a question that is relevant to the section of the site that they are visiting.
We made a change in August to allow each department to control and customize where "website feedback" email is sent to. If you haven't already done so, please be sure to login to the "Web Control Panel" and select "Department Configuration" to enter or update the email address that feedback will be sent to – otherwise it will be sent to us and delayed as we determine where it should be sent to for follow-up.
We also made a very simple change which should make it easier to respond – now, instead of coming from "DO-NOT-REPLY@yc.edu", the email will appear to come from the user, so you can simply hit "Reply" to email them back.
Thanks to a lot of "typie-typie" from Jerry, many of the most prolific YC web applications now utilize a much more up-to-date and cleaner form validation to ensure form fields are correctly filled out.
This will end up saving everyone time and hassle as you'll be quickly and clearly alerted to issues with forms you are completing on our site.
Do you have a form that you'd like to add validation to? Just drop us a line, and we can make it easily happen.
The Web Services work request and management system is now online and in-use.
We encourage you to take a look at WorkHub.yc.edu(network login required). There you can request assistance (new content or changes to your site, report access problems, and more), check the status of an existing work request and (in the near future) see the status of projects that involve or affect you.
We request that you begin using WorkHub to request any service instead of emailing or calling us directly – it will allow us to respond to your request more completely and ensure that requests are not unnecessarily delayed due to employee scheduling conflicts or other reasons (you know, like annoying vacations and such).
In the very near future, we'll be re-writing the "Contact Us" elements of the "Web Control Panel" to include more granular control over hours (you'll be able to pick and set them by day of week, including setting exceptions to a standard schedule). You'll be able to start and stop a schedule by semester (for example, summer hours vs. fall/spring hours), and more. We use this information on our main website, in the portal, and on our mobile website, so please be sure you've entered it and are keeping it up to date – your website visitors/customers and we thank you!
Please see the NewsFlash that's being sent out later today for news on portal updates and information on the new mobile website that's optimized for smartphones, PDAs, and other handheld, Internet-connected devices.
As always, we sincerely thank you for your efforts on behalf of the YC website and invite you to contact us should you have any questions, comments, concerns, or suggestions. We look forward to offering additional training sessions beginning in October to address additional changes to "MessageHub", "My Web Control Panel", how to use "WorkHub", and other changes to the YC website, myYC Academic portal, mobile website, and more. Have a preferred date/time? Let us know!
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