Marketing Technology is continually making changes to improve the WPI website. Some of the changes are behind the scenes to optimize our website for the search engines or to improve the accessibility of our website. These may be in the code behind the website or slight changes to the user interface that may not be immediately noticeable. Other changes, such as the ones below, enhance the look and feel of the website to improve the user experience.
3-Column Widget
The 3-column widget shown in the screenshot to the right is our newest design element. It allows you to highlight three main focus areas that you want your visitors to know about and then direct them to other pages on the website for more information.
Each column can contain a square photo, a title, a brief description, and up to 5 links. None of the fields are required, providing a lot of flexibility, but we recommend that the content be consistent across all three columns to maintain balance.
This new widget provides our audiences with a lot of information in an attractive, compact space and helps them to quickly find the information they need.
Directory Widget
If you’ve been to a “Meet the Team” or “Faculty & Staff” page in the past couple of days, you probably noticed a major change to the directory widget. The two screenshots below show before and after images of the directory widget. The new version looks cleaner, more modern, and has more white space.
If your profile is missing information, please follow our step-by-step instructions to edit your Staff Profile or Faculty Profile.
Announcements
The changes to the announcements widget are more subtle than the changes to the directory widget, but also present a cleaner look & feel. As shown below, the "after" version is a little more compact and the announcement titles have been moved above the corresponding date and department. In addition, the “See More Announcements” link has been moved to the top for greater visibility.
Event Calendar
Recent updates to the events calendar widget provide more information to the user about your events. As you can see in the "after" screenshot below, we are now displaying the "Brief Event Description" below the event title and time. When you are adding an event, make sure to add a short description (255 character limit) to this field to entice visitors to click on the event link. A few other enhancements to this widget include:
- The background color was changed from white to gray.
- The "See More Events" link has been moved to the top.
- The boxed dates have been replaced with a simple date for a cleaner look.
