WebAIM’s analysis of the accessibility of the top million homepages came out the other day, and we made the top 25% for the first time. That puts us as #7 in the state for Community Colleges, #13 for Oregon public colleges. Well done SOU for being the highest ranked college in the state!
That’s two successive improvements to our rank. Hopefully we’ll move up quite a bit post redesign! See our entry on WebAIM’s site.
As mentioned in the broken links post, there are a lot of pages on the Lane website that are what I’d call “Resource pages”. These pages don’t necessarily provide a lot of content on their own, but have a lot of links on them to help visitors find useful resources on other pages. I’ve heard some conflicting opinions on resource pages, so I wanted to dig into if these pages are problematic, or generally helpful.
While we’ve made some progress on how many broken or moved external links there are still thousands of broken links on the site. Because resource pages tend to be full of links to external sites, they naturally collect bad links. I’ve spent a lot of time during the last week fixing pages, and I keep coming back to resource pages, just because they have so many links.
It only takes a few bad links on a page before visitors start to wonder if the other links are any good. If I’m on a page with a couple bad links, for me it’s an immediate indicator that this page hasn’t been reviewed in a while, and I probably shouldn’t trust it.
Resource pages are usually put together out of a genuine desire to be helpful. But they’re not as well used as you might think. Here’s some data for the last year on 5 different pages I’d consider to be resource pages:
| Page | External links on page | % of external links clicked |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 17 | 47% |
| 2 | 133 | 19% |
| 3 | 27 | 19% |
| 4 | 12 | 42% |
| 5 | 25 | 52% |
At best, only about half the links on a resource page are even clicked. And sometimes, that number is a lot worse.
There’s also a whole set of people who are never even going to see your resource page. In user experience discussions, we sometimes talk about searchers (who use the search box) and browsers (who explore the site using navigation). While obviously you can be both at different times, finding a resource page as a searcher feels like a long shot to me. More likely, you’d just perform a search on Google itself and not look for anything on our site.
To me, it feels like resource pages are for browsers. People who came to the site for something else, and then stumbled on these pages and have time and interest in what was is them.
Of course, that’s just my conjecture. So I thought I’d check the data.
| Page | Views | Entrance | Exit | % Bounce |
| 1 | 774 | 30% | 27.39% | 38.2% |
| 2 | 222 | 45% | 38.74% | 60.61% |
| 3 | 93 | 5% | 5.43% | 0% |
| 4 | 78 | 5% | 17.95% | 0% |
| 5 | 410 | 14% | 11.19% | 64.29% |
This surprised me. While pages 3 and 4 certainly match my thinking, pages 1, 4, and 5 don’t. 1 and 2 actually have a higher than average entrance and bounce rates – an indicator that these pages are being found via search and attracting traffic. But the higher than average bounce rate is an indicator that we’re not retaining that lands on those pages. The people who find those links aren’t staying around.
I did a quick check on Google Webmaster Tools to see what people were searching for. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough queries listed for Pages 2 or 4 to learn much, but Page 1 stood out. There were a lot of queries referencing a specific service that actually has a page of its own, but was linked from this page. That’s a potential issue: it means that searchers aren’t finding the page they’re looking for, but instead have to land on the resource page first, then figure out what link to click.
That said, at least page 1 provided context for the links. Some resource pages are literally just collections of links, without even headers, making it very difficult for people landing on the page to find what they’re looking for.
To understand this one, you’ve got to know a little bit about how Google works. This will, of course, be a gross oversimplification. If you’re interested, the wikipedia page has considerable detail.
Here’s a simple directed graph:
Pretend each one of those circles is a web page, and each arrow represents a link from one page to another. Google uses those links to infer importance, and gives each page a score. If we start with each page having a score of 1, and we allow each page to transfer a third of its score to a linked page, we get something like this:
If each page has a base score of 1, and gives a third of that rank across every link, you end up with A and B keeping their scores (no one links to them), C having a score of 1.66, and D a score of 1.55. So if there’s a search, and these 4 pages are in the result set, they’ll end up with C first, and D second. Links from C are more valuable than other links, but can still be beat out by lots of low value links.
You can likely predict how people try to game this: link farming. If you get a bunch of websites to link to your page, you’ll get ranked higher. For a while, you could even pay for links to your page. Google has since adjusted their algorithm to account for that and now, if they see your page as a link farm, they’ll bump it down in the rankings. So how do they know if you’re a link farm?
We’re not entirely sure. But we think one way has to do with the ratio of outbound to inbound links – that is, links to other sites vs links to your own. If we have a page with a few dozen outbound links, like on some of our resource pages, then suddenly that ratio isn’t so good. There’s no strict rule about what that ratio should be, and since Google doesn’t publish either its actual algorithm for ranking pages, or what your score is, we can’t really know if our resource pages make Google see us as a link farm. But it’s something to keep an eye on.
You should also be alert to backlink requests. These often show up as an email, where someone will ask you to include a link to their page on your page. It’s possible that their site is actually helpful, but more likely they’re reaching out trying to capitalize on your page’s score to improve their own.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you should just start packing your page full of internal links either. There are a number of pages on the site that are entirely internal link resources pages, often including an abbreviated steps to enroll or a subset of our one master resources for students page. As previously mentioned, the intent is good, but if enough people add pages like that, we’ve just added more pages for our visitors to sort through, and set up a circumstance where pages can be out of sync (that is, content doesn’t match, and we tell students potentially conflicting things). What starts out as an attempt to fix a broken navigation on our site can end up exacerbating the problem.
For instance, here’s a budget page. If I do an analysis like with the pages above, the numbers will look terrible. And this page definitely doesn’t provide any links in context. And compared to some of our pages, I can’t imagine it gets a lot of traffic. But that isn’t the point. This page gets used a lot in the budget planning cycle, as emails and presentations refer people to this site as a place to find specific resources. While it may be one of the most plain pages on the site, the headers make it quite functional. Sometimes a resource page is the right choice.
As with anything else complicated, it depends. There’s a place for resource pages, but if you’re thinking about putting one together, you should think long and hard about if that’s the best solution. For instance, if you’re putting that page together because you genuinely think it’s important students learn about each of those links, you might be better off communicating a few resources every so often with a targeted population, or regularly posting resources to social media, or you might be better off working resources into each of your other pages, surrounded by related content.
If you absolutely must have a resources page, then make certain to put some context with the links, so that page visitors know why you’re bothering to put this link on a page. Be sure to revisit your links once in a while, and fix any broken or moved ones. And watch out for backlink requests!
If you have a page and you’d like to know if it’s working, reach out! We can dig into how people are finding it, what they’re clicking on, and if they go on to other pages.
We’ve getting to the stage of the web redesign where it’s time to think about content. And our website has a lot of content. Even though our website is smaller than it’s ever been, it still has more than 3000 pages and some 10,805 external links.
While I’m pretty good at clicking links, I can’t possibly click all of those. Instead, the website has a service which checks some links every fifteen minutes. Right now, every external links on the site gets checked every 3 days. Here’s a terrifying statistic: about 1 in 4 external links on our site needs to be updated somehow.
The vast majority of those are 301 errors. The page isn’t really broken, it’s just moved. Much of that is due to Chrome’s move to mark HTTP pages as not secure. But even though those links still work when we click on them, it’s important that we update them. Eventually, server redirections stop working, and if we don’t update the link before then, the link will eventually turn into a 404.
404 links are pages that can’t be found. Those are the next biggest category of broken links on our site. A 404 is the worst. We’ve all encountered them. You think you’ve found a helpful link, but when you click it, you’re left guessing about what was there. And they make us look bad, like we dont’t even have the decency to keep our pages updated.
Here’s another terrifying statistic: out of the 3439 nodes on our site, only 1 in 3 has no problematic links on it.
We need to do better. Lori and I are going to spending a lot of quality time over the next few weeks trying to fix some of these. I’m afraid this is another place where you can expect some nagging emails from us: if a page 404s, we may not have any idea what we should link to instead, and we may be asking you for help.
There’s one particular type of page which tends to have a lot of links with errors: resource pages. There’s a few dozen pages on the site which are little more than collections of links to other sites. While these page are often well meaning – they’re trying to help students find resources we’ve verified as being helpful – they’re sometimes misguided. We’ll dig into those pages deeper in a later post, but for now, when Lori or I find broken links on these pages, we’re just going to remove the link and move on.
Our new goal is to cut the number of links with errors in half before Fall term. Wish us luck!
In the mid to late 90s, you could count on most websites having some sort of under construction or coming soon message on them. Often as a gif. Mental Floss reports this was due to people seeing a website as a project, like a film or a book, that would be eventually completed. Website design reflected that process: outline your chapters, then fill them in. Hence the placeholder messages and gifs, just so people didn’t get confused when they got to an empty page.
But now we know the web isn’t like that. We now know the web to be a continual process. Content gets stale and you have to revisit. Images need refreshing. And while we can miss certain amazing pieces of 90s web design, I don’t miss the under construction gifs.
As of right now, the phrase “coming soon” appears on the Lane website 15 times. In 10 instances, buried in the text is a promise that more information on a certain topic is coming soon. On 4 pages, the phrase “coming soon” is the only text on the page.
“Coming soon” and “Under construction” are aspirational messages. They’re a way to tell a visitor that we’ve thought about content we know they’ll care about, and remind them to check back later.
But these intentions often don’t work. Remember those four pages that just have a “coming soon” message? Here’s the last time they were edited:
The other pages have a similar range of edit dates. “Coming soon” sometimes seems to mean forever. If I’m browsing the web and I that message, I don’t set up a calendar reminder to come back and check later. I move on.
Here’s a scenario. There’s some new program, and we know about 90% of the information. But we’re waiting on the state to tell us about the application process. We need to alert students to the program, but until the state gets back to us, we can’t tell them how to apply.
First option better than just saying “coming soon”? Add a date. Simply saying “information on the application process will be released by May 15, 2020” creates a whole different impression of the page. But what about when there’s no date?
A good option is to use that opportunity to drive people to another communications channel: “We’re currently waiting for application information from the state. Follow us on Twitter to be updated as soon as application information becomes available.” As an alternative to social media, this could be a great time to get an email list going, which you can repurpose later to promote other programs.
Sometimes that won’t be appropriate either. As a last resort, at least add a note about when someone should check back: “As of April 27th, we are yet to receive application information from the state. We will post an updated message here by May 11th.” Then you can keep updating that message, even just to tell people that you still don’t know anything new. Not only does that help to demonstrate to the visitor that there will actually be information here, it forces you to remember to actually go back and update the page.
Coming soon messages happen with new pages too. Someone will be thinking about how to redesign their site, and they’ll create some empty pages as placeholders, or they’ll be thinking about some cool new feature on their site. Except then something doesn’t work out, or some more pressing task comes up, and we end up with a page that just says “Coming soon”.
Solution? Always have your content ready first. We’ll actually be adopting this rule as a policy going forward for the web team. While we’ll be happy to talk with you about what a webpage could look like, we won’t actually create the page until you can show us some content first.
Over the next week or two, expect some nastygrams from Lori or me as we try to clean up some of these content gaps. And if you’re having trouble trying to think around a difficult “coming soon” situation, let us know. We’d love to help.
In the last post, I learned that not only does phone number format matter from an SEO perspective, but phone numbers can be really annoying to the blind. Depending on the screen reader, a phone number like 541-463-3000 could be read as “five hundred forty-one dash four hundred sixty-three dash three thousand”. That seems terribly annoying.
I started out trying to implement the solution at the end of this blog post, but then my curiosity got the best of me, and I got digging deep into CSS speech modules. It looks like support is limited even though they’re so cool! But the limited support means I’m going to stay away.
Instead, we’re back to the regular expressions replacements, using the Drupal custom filter module. Currently, we look for
/\((\d{3})\) (\d{3}-\d{4})/
And then replace it with
<a class="telephone_link" href="tel:+1-${1}-${2}">${0}</a>
Over the last few days, we’ve changed that to grab each number individually:
/\(((\d)(\d)(\d))\) ((\d)(\d)(\d)-(\d)(\d)(\d)(\d))/
and replace it with something much, much longer:
<a class="telephone_link" href="tel:+1-${1}-${5}" aria-label="${2} ${3} ${4}. ${6} ${7} ${8}. ${9} ${10} ${11} ${12}">${1}-${5}</a>
It’s a bit of an ugly regular expression, but not only will this hopefully make a better experience for screen reader users, it’ll also introduce a new phone number format as currently recommended by the AP: 541-463-3000.
The other day, Lori pointed out that the phone number format on one of the mockups from iFactory was different from what we normally use. In accordance with AP style, we use (541) 463-3000. But the new mockups use the format 541-463-3000. And it’s pretty common to see phone numbers formatted with two dots: 541.463.3000. Does the format matter?
Yes. It turns out google is better at recognizing some formats as phone numbers than others. That post tested ten different formats, and found that the one we use and the one iFactory used are the ones best recognized by Google. The double dot notation? To quote the linked blog: “”
Of course, that doesn’t settle which of those two is best. So I checked to see if there are any accessibility considerations with phone numbers. There are, but they don’t relate to visible format. All phone number formats are terrible, and something like (541) 463-3000 would probably be read to a blind person as “five hundred forty-one [pause] four hundred sixty-three three thousand”. There’s a fix for that, using aria-label on a surrounding link, but that just adds something for my todo list, and doesn’t solve the debate here.
And that’s how I found myself at 10pm, doing a survey of college websites, to see how they format phone numbers:
| 541-463-3000 | 25 | Harvard, UO, OSU, Washington, UC Denver, KSU, UMass, FSU, F&M, UCLA, MIT, Cal State Fullerton, Ohio State, Penn State, VT, Louisiana State, Wisconsin State, Yale, Georgetown, Alaska, Berkeley, Skidmore, Colby, Baylor, OHSU |
| 541.463.3000 | 10 | Portland State, Gettysburg, NYU, SNHU, WGU, U Phoenix, UVA, Middlebury, GA Tech, U Maine |
| (541) 463.3000 | 1 | Gonzaga |
| (541) 363-3000 | 13 | Idaho, UVM, Dickinson, Michigan State, Kentucky State, U Penn, UConn, Binghamton, Dartmouth, Cornell, Ithaca, Notre Dame, American |
| Mix | 2 | Rutgers, Princeton |
We’ve been working on the website redesign for a while, but I’m afraid that I’ve totally dropped the ball at posting updates to this blog. Things have been much busier than anticipated. Though I’m sure I’m missing some parts, here’s a quick overview of what’s happened so far.
In order to help iFactory get to know Lane as a college, we answered a multi-page inventory covering basic items like what our roles are, questions on our market, our programs offerings, and even our guided pathways efforts.
Three iFactory employees came to campus to get to know us even better, eat some delicious Eugene food, and conduct focus groups with students and employees to learn more about what the campus thinks is important in the website. Afterward, they surveyed more than one hundred current students for their thoughts about our website.
Well, at least as many needs as we can. Think of personas as pretend people which you can use to evaluate the site. For instance, we have Colleen, a traditional high school student interested in taking some classes at Lane to save money before transferring to a 4-year college. The other three are even more complicated, with tricky backstories. While we’ll never capture every unique situation at Lane, our personas are different enough to make sure we look at every piece of this redesign from at least four very different perspectives.
Having collected a lot of information about the college, we were presented with six different mood boards. You can think of these like Pinterest boards for the college, with different collections of pictures and screenshots of other college websites. We provided feedback on each one, and explained why they did or didn’t feel like Lane.
From the mood boards, some simulated pieces of a new site were created for us to critique. We provided feedback again on which directions we wanted to pursue.
While working on some of the design tasks, we were presented with two iterations of an information architecture (IA). The IA is how the site is going to be structured, and starts to provide some structure to the navigation on our site. While we’re pretty confident the IA we’re going to use is roughly correct, it’s still being polished.
We were provided with a spreadsheet of more than ten thousand different URLs that are a part of the Lane domain. While they weren’t all part of the Lane website, they were each linked somehow from the Lane website and a part of our domain. Our job was to determine what to do with each page. Was the content correct? Could it be merged elsewhere? Should it be archived? This task took several weeks of near full time work, and resulted in our cleaning a lot of content. Due to the sheer number of pages to look at, we weren’t able to consult with everyone on each page, but I did talk to dozens of people about their content throughout December and January.
One common step in website development is to draw a rough layout of content, without putting any color or pictures in it. The goal is to get you to stop thinking about the appearance of the content and instead think about the layout and the flow of the text. Some wireframing software will even make the lines look like they were drawn with a crayon or thick marker, just so that you know immediately that we’re just roughing in content elements.
This is when things got really exciting. Finally, in the last month, we’re starting to see some fairly polished concepts of what the new homepage might look like. We’re still finalizing some of the language, so they’re not quite ready to share, but we’re getting close.
We’re currently working through wireframes and mockups for several other types of pages, and have started preliminary conversations with their developer. Soon, we’re going get an outside perspective on the actual content of our website, and see where we have some gaps. Quite a bit of time this spring is likely to be occupied with content development, since we know we have some content gaps.
I’d also like to share the first change that we’re confident that is going to impact our web editors. On the current site, almost all of your content is in one field called “Body”. This is great, in that it’s very customizable, and terrible, in that it’s very customizable, leading to broken, inconsistent pages. Best practices developed a few years after our previous launch suggest providing reusable components that you can plug into any part of your site: a slideshow here, a callout quote there, some text over there. They also suggest making them remixable, so you can lay out your page however you’d like, using a common language of elements, letting your page be instantly familiar to everyone as a Lane page, but also customized to your content.
We’re going to be adopting that approach as a part of this website launch, which I hope will help meet some of the website customization needs I haven’t been able to meet over the last few years!
More details soon, honest!
As part of our website redesign, over the last two months I’ve visited each and every page on the Lane website. As part of that process, we’ve cut a lot of pages, and at just 3413 nodes, the Lane website is now smaller and more svelte than it was when we launched it back in 2011 (and that includes more than 100 nodes that aren’t even real pages!).
But also as part of that process, I discovered that there were two categories of pages that had a lot of pages, and a lot of good information, but not necessarily a lot of value.
The first was contact pages. By convention, we try to have a page, usually located at a url like lanecc.edu/department/contact, which contains contact information for a department. This is an important page, and the way we structured things was an attempt to bring some standardization to the Lane website. But it also resulted in duplicate information (contact information is sometimes on the department homepage, and some departments also created employee directory pages). We’ll likely to contact pages differently next time around.
The second chunk was frequently asked questions pages. There are probably forty or fifty pages on the website that are full of FAQs. And while often the information in them is helpful, just by presenting that information in the FAQ format we may be making it less likely students will find and understand what we need to tell them.
For a good overview of why FAQ pages can be less helpful than other content, you should read this A List Apart article. A brief summary of issues:
I also think FAQs are problematic for people that aren’t searching for an answer to a specific question. If you’re just exploring a site, trying to determine if a program is for you then a FAQ often fails to guide you through content in a meaningful way.
If you happen to be stuck at home with some time to do website edits, one thing that would be really helpful is working on your FAQ page. Here’s my suggestions for slimming down, or dumping, your FAQ:
After all that, you may still be left with some FAQ questions which just don’t fit in anywhere. And that’s ok. Sometimes a FAQ provides the right solution. But even just shortening the length of your FAQ page can help students to better find information and improve the quality of your other pages.
As always, if you’re working on something like an FAQ and have a question, send us an email at webmaster@lanecc.edu.
With the start of the new school year comes to the launching of our website redesign project! We’re pleased to announce that over this year, we’ll be working together closely with iFactory, a Boston based company specializing in higher education and non-profit websites, to completely re-envision what Lane’s front door on the web looks like. iFactory has done a lot of college websites, including Santa Barbara City College, Central Wyoming College, and Prince George’s Community College, and has already impressed us with their transparency and project management skill.
Since our last redesign, it’s become clear that the front page of an effective college website needs to be oriented to the needs of prospective students. The other primary audiences (current students and employees) need to have a better home online which more directly serves their needs, and which integrates the tools they most commonly use. So as part of this launch, we’re hoping to move some employee-centric pages (like CPDT, FPD, Budget, and others – there’s about 1000 pages in total that are really only important to employees) to a more employee oriented site, where we can offer greater flexibility in terms of content editing and viability.
And we’re interested in your opinions on the college website. Some folks from iFactory will be coming to visit soon, and they’ll be conducting some interviews with folks around campus. But of course they won’t be able to talk to everyone. So if you have any feedback on the website (and remember, we’re just talking about www.lanecc.edu here – myLane and Moodle are outside the scope of the redesign), please email us at webmaster@lanecc.edu. We’ll be sure to pass that feedback along and use it as part of the research phase in this redesign.
This is just a quick post to share some news about the ever evolving legal web accessibility landscape. The LA Times has a nice write-up of Robles v Dominos, and how by declining to review the 9th Circuit ruling, we’ve conclusively determined that the Americans with Disabilities Act does apply to websites and apps.
While this doesn’t impact the college directly – we were already subject to website accessibility requirements – it does serve as a great reminder that digital accessibility lawsuits are on the rise, and we need to continually work to ensure what we do is accessible.
And remember, that work doesn’t include just websites, but all things posted online, on any website used in relation to Lane. PDFs have some pretty good checking tools that are worth looking at.