Feb. 24, 2022: Taking steps to improve search
Our website is figuratively a living, breathing thing. It will never be done or finished, and as such, we are continually evaluating its performance and making adjustments to improve the user experience for everyone who visits the site.
Improving search
As we continue to develop and improve the website, one area that requires ongoing monitoring and maintenance is search. One of the pieces of feedback we receive most frequently from community members is that the search function isn’t yielding accurate results. To that end, we continue to gather and review analytics to inform strategy and adjustments; this aids in the constant optimization of the search function.
Removing email addresses
Per OIT policy, all faculty and staff email addresses are no longer displayed within the site’s directory. Doing this prevents external bots and scammers from pulling email addresses from the site and helps reduce spam emails.
We know this may cause some concern within colleges, where providing access to faculty or staff email addresses is a necessity for prospective students. We have created alternative options for faculty and staff email addresses to be displayed on department pages. If you wish to have your email address displayed, please contact your primary web collaborator, who will work with members of the digital strategy team to ensure your needs are met.
www2.cmich.edu updates
Accessing www2.cmich.edu directly will soon require you to sign in with your global ID to access all content. Doing so ensures certain information remains internal and, more importantly, helps to increase speed and reduce errors on the back end of the new cmich.edu website. These steps have already helped reduce our error count by 98%.
Program page updates
We have implemented a fix for a previous issue that caused credit hours to import incorrectly from SAP. Concentrations have been updated to no longer show inactive concentrations or concentration locations, and we have adjusted the sorting of both to provide a better user experience.
The website is constantly evolving, with new content, functionality and usability improvements. We are enhancing, changed, editing, deleting and building features every day. Measured day by day, these changes may be hard to see; however, when measured over weeks, months and years, the evolution of our website and the way we communicate through this medium will be demonstrably better. We will achieve our goal to serve our many stakeholders in ways that move CMU forward.
If you have additional questions about any of these topics or the new website, please visit the FAQ web page, talk to your area’s website collaborator or contact the OIT Helpdesk for assistance.