Suggested sessions
Find out about:
- How screen reader users experience the web
- How to provide structure with correct heading levels
- Alt text 鈥� best practices and when to leave it blank
- How to write descriptive link text
Learn about:
- Highlighting a program鈥檚 key selling points
- Showcasing the student experience and school differentiators
- Balancing visuals and text
- Presenting program requirements
- Building SEO value into program pages
- Program pages as part of the user journey
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(Moderated by our favourite Digital Communications Content Editor, Simon Labonne!)
In our quest to better serve the needs to our audiences, identifying processes and best practices for producing bilingual content has never seemed so critical鈥nd yet so elusive. It鈥檚 an undertaking rife with challenges. Keeping translations in sync and the impact of translated content on design choices are just the beginning.
What different approaches have we tried? What specific challenges have we encountered? What solutions have we found?
Based on my experience as a website editor and manager at 海角社区, I will give 3 tips on how to improve an outdated and neglected institutional website. Through 鈥渂efore鈥� and 鈥渁fter鈥� images, anecdotes from user experience testing, and examples on how to cross-pollinate traffic from social media, I will discuss how I migrated and populated content into a more visually-pleasing, user-focused, and accessible institutional website.
The stress of a global pandemic brought into focus our human need for empathy and kindness. And while we recognized these needs deeply in ourselves, do we extend this level of care to everyone who interacts with our websites? In this keynote, Joel Goodman speaks to ways our sector can holistically improve the hospitality of our web properties through accessibility, better user experience design, research, and feedback loops.
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(Moderated by 海角社区鈥檚 Digital Communications Manager, Joyce Peralta)
Our work environment has undergone significant changes over the past years. For some of us, these changes began even before the arrival of the pandemic.
What new models and methods are surfacing? What lessons have we learned so far? What challenges are we encountering?
Our panel of leaders share insights on emerging best practices and innovative solutions that are redefining the way we work.
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(Presented by 海角社区鈥檚 Digital Communications Manager, Joyce Peralta and Karl Jarosiewicz 海角社区 IT鈥檚 Portfolio Manager, Web Publishing Services)
Find out how our two teams came to work closely together to present a unified service and in turn foster a better web ecosystem for our entire community.
A few of our shared projects that we鈥檒l touch upon include:
- The redesign of 海角社区鈥檚 homepage and undergraduate admissions program finder
- Improvements to our search tool
- Development and beta launch of our Digital Design system
- Web governance and web accessibility initiatives
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(Presented by the creators of our WMS usability checker tool, Editoia11y 鈥� based on Sa11y)
The presentation will explore how Editoria11y and Sa11y:
- Focus on content-related issues
- Make web accessibility straightforward for non-technical website editors
- Present customizable and scalable solutions that go beyond your expensive cloud-based service
- Share the same vision, with slightly different emphases and features
Your institution probably has a dedicated section of its website, or a stand-alone website that helps recruit new students and guide them through the admissions process. Sometimes a faculty or School will have a similar section of the website that describes the application process and all the programs and requirements.
These sections and websites often play the role of the digital front door of your institution. The first touch-point that a potential student has when they鈥檙e researching which school to attend. And while higher education websites also need to speak to current students, faculty, and staff, more and more we expect the primary goal of this type of site to be to attract potential students.
But it鈥檚 an oversimplification to imagine that you can design a website with only one target persona. You鈥檙e likely looking at two very distinct user journeys with this type of website: potential students who know about your institution from its reputation and want to apply, and students who have never heard of your institution.
With Canadian universities and colleges trying to attract a more international audience, we are further trying to speak to that second group. We can鈥檛 necessarily assume that potential students know about our institution and why they would want to attend.
In this session, we鈥檒l talk about:
- The goal of the website and how it serves the purpose
- Web governance over content and navigation
- How to create web content that creates awareness and builds reputation
- The role of lead-generation content in your admissions website
- How to speak to the target audience like Millennials end and Generation Z and the difference in techniques and platforms
- How to adapt lead-generation techniques to the higher education context
- Efficient ways of creating and improving on your evergreen content, and its role in reputation building and converting potential applicants to applicants
- The difference between a one-time campaign to achieve a goal vs building content that builds long-term awareness
