We sat down with Christy Glaze, Web Services Manager at the University of Texas at Dallas, to discuss the challenges of overseeing a large and distributed web presence.
Video Transcript
So my name’s Christy Glaze. I am the web services manager in the Office of Communications at the University of Texas at Dallas. We are the central hub for all things web at the University of Texas at Dallas. And we support the high level university websites. We support admission and enrollment, we support email communications that are going out.
And specifically on my team, we do a lot of accessibility monitoring, remediation. I work with a team of content editors, writers, developers, designers to kind of bring all of our web ecosystem together. It’s something that’s consistent, especially as we reach out to prospective students and new students who are in that new student journey. Admissions is a big part of what we do.
We need to continue growing our numbers. Our university is one that’s relatively young. We just recently had our 50th anniversary. We’re growing on our physical campus, we’re growing online, we’re growing internationally, and we’re trying to expand certain parts of our student demographic at different times, targeting folks overseas and promoting different majors that are that are new and expanding.
Yeah, and that takes place in kind of a full spectrum of website social campaigns, email marketing… We have offices that have opened overseas as well. So there’s a whole kind of many-faceted communications program that’s happening. And of course the website is a huge part of that. It’s the main avenue through which folks learn about what UTD has to offer.
So the whole university is 3000 staffers. You know, my web team is 12 people. And, you know, our biggest school at the university probably has five or six people working in their communications team. Another big school has four or five new student workers every semester. So not only is it that there are a lot of people involved in web communications, but— there’s a lot of turnover in that because a lot of units do use student workers, which is great.
And we have great students here. They do a great job, but they do turnover every semester, every year. So it’s not just training once, but retraining, retraining, retraining. So having a tool that helps us sort of answer those basic questions, get people on the right track, that is really so important for helping us be efficient.
It is challenging to keep track of everything. Our university’s web domain, the sort of web umbrella is tens of thousands of pages, certainly over 100,000 web pages.
And that doesn’t include even email communications that are going out. And it’s a big lift to keep an eye on all of that, to even know what is there and have a great sense of what is happening on the web, what’s being said on the web about our university. And yeah, so speaking to kind of the variations in skill set and effort that different units, different schools are able to put in to maintaining their web presence, having a central location where we in the Office of Communications can keep an eye on what’s going on, on the web, something like Silktide is very helpful for us to get a quick glimpse at where might there be problems, who do we need to have a conversation with because some website is sort of deviating from those best practices. That’s a really big help to us.
It’s also a tool that we can share because we don’t have necessarily the capacity to one-on-one train everybody at the university who’s editing a website, who’s touching a website in some capacity, we can’t train all of them one-on-one on the whole spectrum of web best practices. So having a central resource where we can say, you know, hi, nice to meet you, welcome to the university, here’s a tool where you can kind of get started in understanding what your unit’s web presence looks like, where they may be problems, some things you need to address.
And you can just use this tool to keep everything in tip top shape. So when I was asked to step in as our accessibility coordinator about four or five years ago, at the time, I knew very little about accessibility. I pretty quickly found that we as a university, we in the central communications team and web services team, we didn’t have much awareness or knowledge about accessibility, what it is, what we should be doing, what even we’re required to be doing by law.
We were using a tool at the time that does track some of the accessibility issues that might be happening on our site. It was helpful, but it was very overwhelming, as I think a lot of the accessibility standards and the jargon— Now that I’ve been in it for five years, it makes a lot more sense, but that was a real journey for me to even understand what are these specific terms meaning in this specific context.
So we reviewed several tools. We spoke to Silktide and several other services that offer similar monitoring and guidance. And we really found that Silktide was very user friendly. We knew it would be user friendly for us on the web services team where we we’re more developers, we have more expertise in website maintenance, website creation and design, etc.
We thought it would be more user friendly for people who don’t have that background. So, for example, the director of a small research lab who pops into the website once a month to make updates. We need something that’s really straightforward for that person, that’s really user friendly and it helps them and doesn’t create more work for them to figure out what they’re looking at.
So we felt like Silktide would be really a good tool from that perspective. Our previous tool, they made it clear that they didn’t really value our business. They had the opportunity to step up and show us and they chose not to do that. Whereas the folks at Silktide really made it clear that they wanted our business. They wanted to give us a tool that works.
They wanted to work with us to find something that meets our needs. And really, you know, we could tell that they were committed to good service for us in the long run. And I’m happy to say that that has continued to be very apparent and it’s been a great partnership. I don’t necessarily feel like we’re a client who bought a product and now we’re off using the product. It’s much more involved than that.
So I continue to be really pleased with the choice that we made. And I have no problem continuing to have conversations with other prospective Silktide users to say it’s been a great experience for us and we have no regrets about the choice to go down this path.
So the Policies tool has been a really powerful resource for us that we’ve used a lot, especially considering the expanse of our university’s websites. So for example, the main university site references heavily our separate school websites, different programs, etc. and one time that recently we relied on Silktide a lot is, two of our schools merged and then also had a name change.
And so we use the policy features in Silktide to track down all those references to those school names and help us determine where do we need to make changes, which references were historical and needed to be left alone, so we could set up a policy, make that check available to everybody across the university, give that some description so they know, what is this policy looking for?
Who has set it up, where do you go for questions? And then use the assignments feature to split up that work between our two content editors. So one is going to focus on these ten sites and the other is going to focus on these ten. We can go through those checks and then make some notes up for discussion.
This check, this reference is fine, or this reference needs to be updated and I’ve sent a request to the content manager. That kind of thing. Mark those off as we go, and then after a few weeks, we feel confident that we’ve found all of those references, made the revisions that we need to make and we can go on to the next thing.
So that’s been a really powerful use of the policies for us. We also use it for smaller things like a name change, a title change… We use it a lot to kind of find those kinds of text references. We’ve also used policies to find use of certain plugins in our WordPress instance. So for example, we know that we’re going to be phasing out use of a particular plugin and we want to find where that’s really in use, not just that it’s activated on our site, but that it’s actually being used so we can find those instances, go and replace those things with another tool before we pull the plug on that particular resource.
So policies has been really, really helpful with that. So the analytics tool within Silktide has been really helpful for us. I think like the other aspects of Silktide it’s very user friendly. It’s not as intimidating for some of our users as say something like Google Analytics. We do also use Google Analytics. We have historically used it, but this is a good pairing with that in that if someone has sort of high level analytics questions, they want to know: How many visitors are we getting to our site this month?
What are our top pages? For those kinds of questions we can send them to Silktide. They probably already have access to it if they’re the web manager, so that’s easy. It’s right there for them and they can quickly get that information in a way that’s very simple and understandable. The heat maps, click maps… those are a really cool way to quickly visualize what people are getting out of your pages, especially when we talk about your home page, your landing page.
What are people getting to? Where are people going? We use that a lot, especially when we’re going into a site redesign to kind of see with your old site, what are people looking at, where are they going? What are they searching for? And it can help us understand what’s working and what maybe needs to change. The Frustration score is actually a really interesting one that I have used in collaboration, sort of in coordination with my accessibility work.
I have one site whose scores are not at the top of the pack, but we’re working on it. They didn’t have their links styled in a way that was obvious to people, and that’s a requirement for WCAG standards and I tell them that. But to really drive home what that means for your end user, we looked at the Frustration scores and we saw people clicking on things that weren’t links and missing things that were links.
And so it was a way to show those web managers on that team, Hey, you have people trying to get this information and they’re not succeeding. And I think that if we made a change of making your links more obvious, it’s a simple change but it can have a big impact in getting people to what they’re looking for and avoiding unnecessary clicks, which we know is one of the sort of first rules of efficiency in UX is getting people where they need to go with as few clicks as possible. Before we were using Silktide, our approach to accessibility was very haphazard, very ad hoc, and our understanding of what was really required of us to meet those standards and those best practices… we didn’t have a good understanding of that ourselves in our web services team.
Using a tool like Silktide has helped us understand where the problems are, what is really the impact for our users, for our prospective students who are really our biggest audience, knowing how we can better reach them, how we can do things like improve our page load time and really just have the most top notch site that we can. It makes a huge difference for us. We know that our prospective students are looking at so many different websites. One after another, they all look very similar sometimes, or there can be a lot of similarities and we want to make sure that they’re having a great experience when they come to our site.
So Silktide is a great tool for us to overall make sure that we are putting out the best web product that we can. As a project manager, the thing I love most about Silktide is the way I can split up sites, sections of sites, among the many different users that we have. I think we have over 100 users of Silktide right now. So being able to set up access to different parts of our web ecosystem for different users and being able to group those users together, it makes management of that much easier for me as the person who is maintaining all of those accesses.
Being able to assign different checks to different members of my team is also really helpful. Since we have content editors, designers, developers who all have their different areas of expertise, being able to assign different checks on different sites to those people helps me work efficiently and make sure that we’re covering everything that we need to cover and address.
[Voice over]
Talk to us about managing and maintaining your web estate today. With special thanks to Christy Glaze from The University of Texas at Dallas.
Christy’s team, the Office of Communications, is responsible for supporting high-level university websites, admission and enrollment, and proactive accessibility monitoring and remediation.
“We try to be proactive about accessibility in all things we do in the Communications team,” said Christy.
The team focuses on creating a consistent web ecosystem for prospective and new students, with a strong emphasis on accessibility.
Christy’s team works with content editors, writers, developers, and designers to support various aspects of the university’s web presence. She emphasizes the importance of consistency and accessibility in their communications.
Admissions is a big focus for the University. “We are growing a lot. We’re growing on our physical campus. We’re growing online. We’re growing internationally. And we’re trying to expand certain parts of our student demographic, at different times targeting folks overseas, promoting different majors that are new and expanding.”
They use various communication methods such as website, social campaigns, and email marketing. The website is the main avenue for people to learn about the university.
There are 13 people in the central web services office, including content editors, designers, and developers. They also have a distributed model where some schools and units have their own communications teams with varying skill levels.
The central office oversees brand standards and best practices, and coordinates with other units to ensure consistency in voice and tone.
How did you get into web accessibility?
“When I was asked to step in as accessibility coordinator on my team about five years ago, I really knew almost nothing about accessibility and it was a little intimidating, but it’s something that I found very quickly that I was super interested in and was really surprised at what I found.”
“I didn’t know before I started making a conscious effort to learn about accessibility – I can look back now at decisions I made in the past that weren’t the best. And I understand why I did those things.”
“I think that gives me some insight into why other folks are doing what they’re doing on the web, why some things are getting missed.”
“My introduction to accessibility happened at a same time around the same time when I was starting to do some volunteering with adults with intellectual disabilities and intellectual and developmental disabilities. And so it really was a time for me to see the full picture of what life can be like for people with disabilities, whether it’s their day-to-day or their work life.”
“And so I really found that I had a passion for accessibility. It was a way for me to be more invested in my work and become excited really to go to work every day and to work on something that I think really does have an impact. And the more I’ve been involved in the accessibility community, the more I am aware of problems, but also inspired by people who are doing this same work who care and who want to do better.”
“I think there’s a lot of potential right now for developers for designers, on the web and, in other areas also to really make a difference. So I’m excited to see how we can do better. I’m excited to be part of that. And I have really embraced that at work.”
“I have learned to love training. I’ve learned to love working with people on coming out of that place of unawareness that I was in five years ago, and helping them understand why accessibility is important and how it can be really beneficial.”
What are the challenges of overseeing a large and distributed web presence?
Christy’s main challenge was that it is difficult to keep track of content across tens of thousands of pages under their control.
The university also has a very large web team, with relatively high contributor turnover as students move onto other projects.
“There may be four or five new student workers every semester, and they’re really great, but this presents the challenge of retraining new people in how to contribute to the website frequently.”
Training knowledge is lost and has to be started each time someone new comes into the teams.
The university has a distributed approach to content, meaning there are a lot of people across a wide range of departments contributing directly to the website.
Christy’s team oversees this content and best practices.
“It is challenging to keep track of everything under our university’s web domain. The web umbrella contains tens of thousands of pages, certainly over 100,000 web pages.”
“And that doesn’t include e-mail communications that are going out, and it’s a big lift to keep an eye on all of that to even know what is there, and have a greater sense of what is happening on the web or about our university.”
“And so, the variations in skill set and effort that different units and different schools are able to put in to maintaining their web presence can be a real challenge”
“Silktide gives us a central location where we can keep an eye on what’s going on the web. It’s very helpful for us to get a quick glimpse at where there might be problems, and who we need to talk to to resolve them.”
How does Silktide support in training staff members?
Silktide’s platform is helpful in training and retraining staff, especially those with limited web experience or awareness of accessibility guidelines.
“We don’t necessarily have the capacity to train people one-on-one, especially across the whole spectrum of web best practices.”
“So having a central resource we can point new and existing team members at, to help them immediately see where there might be issues to address, is key.”
The platform provides high-level information on issues that need to be addressed and suggestions for remediation. It also offers tips on optimization for SEO, speed analytics, etc.
“The information available in Silktide is super helpful for us and other folks across the university, especially folks who maybe aren’t developers or don’t have a lot of web experience.”
“They can get a high-level overview of issues and drill down for more details as to how to fix them. That’s really helpful.”
Silktide has enabled staff to be more self-sufficient and efficient in managing their websites.
Christy said “Silktide is often used as a guide to teach people about accessibility standards, including the difference between automated and human checks, and the importance of considering the end user’s experience.”
Christy was asked to step in as the university’s accessibility coordinator about 4-5 years ago
“At the time, I knew very little about accessibility. I pretty quickly found that we, as a university and the central communications team and web services team, didn’t have much awareness or knowledge about accessibility, what it is, what we should be doing, what even we’re required to be doing by law.”
“We were using a tool to track accessibility issues, but it was overwhelming and not user-friendly, filled with jargon and a bit overwhelming.”
“When we needed to renew our contract with the tool, we took the opportunity to review other options and we found Silktide to be very user-friendly and straightforward, for developers and non-developers.”
“The folks at Silktide really made it clear that they wanted our business, they wanted to give us a tool that works. They wanted to work with us to find something that meets our needs. And, and really, we could tell that they were committed to good service for us in the long run.”
“And I’m happy to say that has continued to be very apparent and it’s been a great partnership.”
“And so I continue to be really pleased with the choice that we made. And I have no problem continuing to have conversations, with other prospective Silktide users to say it’s been a great experience for us and we have no regrets about the choice to go down this path.”
Christy appreciates the effort Silktide puts into improving their tool and providing specific training, such as webinars, for their university team.
Which Silktide features stand out for you?
“The policies tool has been a really powerful resource for us that we’ve used a lot, especially considering the expanse of our university’s websites.”
For example, the main university site references heavily, our separate school websites, different programs, etc. And one time that recently relied on Silktide a lot is when two of our schools merged and then also had a name change.”
“And so we use the policy features in Silktide to track down all those references to those school names, and determine where we need to make changes, which references were historical and which needed to be left alone.”
“Then we can use the assignments feature to split that work up between our content editors. We do this for all checks in Silktide, it helps us to request work from content manages and then check them off as we go.”
“We can feel confident we’ve found all the revisions we need to make and can move on to the next thing.”
“We’ve also used policies to find use of certain plugins in our WordPress instance. For example, we know that we’re going to be phasing out use of a particular plugin and we want to find where that’s really in use ,not just that it’s activated on a site, but that it’s actually being used.
“So we can find those instances go and replace those things with another tool before we pull the plug on that particular resource. So policies have been really helpful with that.”
How do you use Silktide Analytics?
“The analytics tool within Silktide has been really helpful for us. I think like the other aspects of Silktide, it’s very user friendly. It’s not as intimidating for some of our users as say something like Google Analytics.”
“We do also use Google Analytics and Silktide is a good pairing with it, in that if someone has a high level analytics questions, they can get a quick answer, like ‘how many visitors are we getting to our site this month?’.”
“Most people probably already have access to Silktide so can get this information themselves quite easily.”
Christy’s team uses heat maps, click maps, frustration maps, and scroll maps to understand user behavior and make improvements to their website. She shared an example of using frustration scores to show web managers the importance of making links more obvious to users.
“Users were clicking on things that weren’t links and missing things that were links, because of the way things were designed. We could show this to the web managers and say ‘hey, we think you should make these changes to make things more efficient’, so it’s useful to have this information available.”
Have you seen any improvements to the user experience since using Silktide?
Christy uses Silktide together with user testing tools (which help the team conduct live interviews).
They have seen improvements and made changes based on feedback from users in their testing experiences. They also mention doing specific accessibility testing with the tool and getting validation from end users that they are on the right track.
How has your workflow improved since using Silktide?
“Before we were using Silktide, our approach to accessibility was very haphazard, very ad-hoc, and our understanding of what was really required of us to meet those standards and those best practices – we didn’t have a good understanding of that ourselves.”
“Using Silktide has helped us understand where the problems are, what the impact is for our users and for our prospective students, knowing how we can better reach them, and how we can do things like improve our page load time. Really, just to have the most top notch website that we can.”
“Silktide makes a huge difference for us. We know that our prospective students are looking at so many different websites one after another. They all look very similar sometimes, or there can be a lot of similarities, and we want to make sure that they’re having a great experience when they come to our site.”
“If you’re considering Silktide, I think the best thing that you can do to really understand if it’s the right tool for you is to try it out to use it a little, get a trial and get in there, get with some real users in your unit in your department and see what they think, see what questions they have.”
“I think if you start using it, you’ll find that it really is easy to use. It is very intuitive. It’s easy to pick up and go without a long sort of build up time.”
“I would say that our investment in Silktide is absolutely worth it. I would have no hesitation in renewing our contract with Silktide again. And again, I think especially compared to other tools that we’ve used, the level of service that we’ve received has met and exceeded our expectations, which I really appreciate as the point person between my university and Silktide.”
“We know that we’re in good hands going forward.”
What do you like most about Silktide?
“As a project manager, the thing I love most about Silktide is the way I can split up sites into sections among the many different users that we have. I think we have over 100 users of Silktide right now.”
“So, being able to set up access to different parts of our web ecosystem for different users and being able to group those users together. It makes management of that easier for me.”
“As the person who is maintaining all of those accesses, being able to assign different checks to different members of my team is also really helpful, since we have content editors, designers, developers who all have their different areas of expertise.”
“Being able to assign different checks on different sites to those people, helps me work efficiently and make sure that we’re covering everything that we need to cover and address.”
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