Greetings! Between snowshoeing, shoveling, and everything else you do, I hope you'll take a few minutes to review these important Reason updates.
What's New & Good
- Alumni Magazine Website: You may have noticed that we have a brand new alumni magazine website. As part of this project, we exposed the captions of embedded images, so make sure to check your pages to ensure everything looks good.
- LinkedIn Social Account: We have added the capability to include a LinkedIn icon below the site menu (along with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, and newsletter). We will be adding this to all academic department sites, but other site owners may request as well. (P.S. Have you seen Luther's LinkedIn University page?)
- New Pagetypes: We have several new pagetypes that you might find useful, for example the ability to have multiple text blurbs in the center column of a page. Please contact us if you see something on the website you'd like to replicate on your own site, and we'll help you find the right pagetype.
- Website Reviews: The web content team continuously reviews individual websites on www2.luther.edu to ensure accuracy, consistency, and great user experience. Let us know if you are interested in a website review.
- ReasonCMS.org: Reason has a shiny new website! If you have contacts at other schools who complain about their content management system, direct them to this website. We're always looking to add new schools!
It's All About Storytelling
One of the things we're focusing on more and more in web content is storytelling. It's one thing to display facts to website visitors; it's another to tell the story of an actual human being who had a great experience or outcome. You can see examples of this here:
- Outcomes: Alumni Profiles
- Career Center: Internship Stories
- Study Away: J-Term 2015 Course Blogs
- Scholars Program: Peace Scholars
We are also working on work-study stories, student-faculty research stories, first-year seminar stories, and more. If you have ideas for how storytelling could be used on your website, let us know!
Training for Students - Part 3
Students and supervisors should have received an email announcing the third and final training session for the 14-15 school year. Students who work in Reason CMS are required to attend one of the two scheduled training sessions:
This is a great opportunity for students to be reminded of our web guidelines and get trained on more advanced functionality.
Rerun: Website Accessibility
One of the strategic goals for the web content group this year is to ensure that our website is accessible to people with disabilities. As part of this effort, we have created a set of accessibility guidelines for content creators. Please review this carefully. We will also cover in future training sessions. Key items to note:
- Always add a good short caption to photos.
- Use simple, straightforward language.
- Use headings appropriately (to organize content rather than to highlight content).
- Make sure there is always a text version of any graphical element.
- Follow instructions for making PDFs web accessible.
Web Resources
- Web Style Guide: https://www2.luther.edu/style-guide/
- Reason Video Tutorials: https://www2.luther.edu/web-content/resources/reason/
- Web Guidelines: https://www2.luther.edu/web-content/resources/guidelines/
We are here to assist you with all web-related matters. Feel free to call with questions or enter a helpdesk ticket (instructions here).
Thanks for reading—and stay warm!