51社区

News and Announcements

New and improved Employees page debuts April 28

51社区 will debut a new Employees page on Tuesday, April 28, that will serve as a hub for important employee news and information.

Brandon Logan, front end developer in University Communications and Marketing and one of the new page鈥檚 chief designers, said the new Employees page will feature a fresh new look and a more user-friendly format.

The new page will include direct links to information that is frequently accessed, including links to many of the University鈥檚 academic, administration and financial resources pages, and links to the Human Resources, Information Technology, and Finance websites.

Carly Leatherwood, University Communications and Marketing (UCM) senior director of communication services, said the new Employees page is an important tool to help keep faculty and staff informed about the latest University news and information.

鈥淚 am confident that the redesigned page will better meet the needs of our faculty and staff and will strengthen the University鈥檚 internal communication efforts,鈥 she said.

The updated page, moved as part of the University鈥檚 WebCMS migration project, will provide direct access to important or useful links, and include a more robust news feed of employee-focused stories.

鈥淲e built it as an information page, but it has the potential to grow into anything we want it to be," Logan said.

Logan said the page鈥檚 redesign committee looked at the current page and realized that people were mostly using it as a jump off point to access their personal email account. He said the BobcatBUY and Workforce links were also popular.

鈥淭he current Employees page is just a large collection of links to different employee resources," Logan said. 鈥淚t linked people to important things like Blackboard, Human Resources forms, finance links, Workforce and BobcatBuy. When we looked at the data, the page had a good volume of use, but there were only a handful of links that were being used regularly. We kept the links that were most used and put them into categories so they鈥檙e easier to find.鈥

Another difference is that the resources links on the current page are in alphabetical order and not logically grouped.

鈥淲e grouped the links on the new page by category and took some of the most used ones and linked them to the Information Technology, Human Resources, and Finance departments,鈥 Logan said. 鈥淲e basically took a bunch of links and reorganized them, boiled them down to essential information and put them in the new system.鈥

Logan said the current Employees page existed almost independently of the University Human Resources page and was primarily controlled by the UCM staff.

鈥淲hen we decided to improve the page鈥檚 look and function, we made sure Human Resources was part of the redesign,鈥 Logan said.

The new page also has links to the University calendar and the three employee senate sites.

Logan said the Employees page was one of the last remaining pages in the University鈥檚 CommonSpot content management platform, which will be decommissioned this summer.

鈥淭he good thing is that people won't have to do anything different to get to the new page because it has the same address as the current one,鈥 Logan said.

Published
April 21, 2020
Author
George E. Mauzy Jr.