By . Published on February 12, 2016

#12 — January’s Gathering

When, where

January 28, 2:00-3:00pm, Commons 226

Recap

Style Audit

  • The Style Audit is a collection of visual enhancements aimed at
    • 1) Improving the user experience of our website
    • 2) Bringing more consistency across sites to strengthen the brand
  • Launched December 16, 2015
    • Overall, launch went well
  • Outstanding issues

Browser Support

  • As of January 12, 2016, Microsoft stopped supporting IE 8, 9, and 10.
    • They announced this 18 months ago.
  • The older versions still work, but won’t receive bug fixes or other security patches.
  • BCO no longer designs for IE 8 or older.
    • Less than 1% of our audience uses IE 8 or older
  • The site is still functional in IE8, it just doesn’t look as nice.
  • Use whatbrowser.org to stay up to date

Browser Trends

Screen Shot 2016-02-12 at 10.22.42 AM

Featurettes (formerly “Sliders”)

  • Featurettes content type found in left admin menu
  • Activate homepage presentation by having at least 3
  • Can be edited from the front-end
  • Ex. bates.edu/biology

Shortcodes

Annual events pages

What should I do with pages that are only relevant for a portion of the year?

  • Examples:
    • Orientation schedule, Admission Open House schedule, Reunion, Commencement, MLK Day, etc.
  • Recommendation:
    • Keep annual recurring events pages up year round.
    • Rather than taking the page down in the offseason,
      update the copy to keep audience informed. Include dates for last year’s and next year’s events.

Archiving content

  • WordPress is primarily a platform for publishing current information
  • While WordPress does have some archiving functionality (pages can be unpublished and kept as drafts; previous versions of pages are available in revision history; backups are kept for security and college records), serious archiving of information should be done outside of WordPress (Google Drive, network storage, etc.).

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