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Web Presence

As we ensure our physical campus space is accessible for all individuals, reasonably accommodating people with disabilities so they can easily use every space on campus, we must also provide the same access to our website.

The Office of Civil Rights oversees that organizations consistently met web accessibility standards as defined by WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines. Below is a very brief overview of the web accessibility standards we actively monitor and enact on the rockhurst.edu site, but we encourage Rockhurst web content managers to review the full text on the WCAG website linked above for more information.

As different colors are layered on a webpage, we must meet a minimum level of color contrast, so the two items are distinguishable from one another and readable/viewable by those with a sight or color disability. The following color combinations pass all accessibility requirements for the web:

Video has become one of the most important digital channels of communication in the 21st century, particularly through sites like YouTube. Closed captioning needs to be included on all YouTube and social media videos.

Although YouTube and other services provide automatically generated captions, these can only be used as a starting point, as the timing, grammar and word recognition is never 100% accurate. Rockhurst employees must “clean up” the captions to ensure they are accurate, readable and timed with the video itself.

For any public-facing video on the the official Rockhurst YouTube page, accurate captions are required before publishing. All videos produced by the Rockhurst Marketing Department will include captions developed by our in-house team.

For individuals at the University submitting a video to the University Marketing Department to be public-facing on the rockhurst.edu site, or on the Rockhurst YouTube page, we require a captions file to be submitted along with the video before it will be posted.

Any text editor (TextEdit, Microsoft Word, etc.) can be used to create the necessary format Marketing can use to convert into a captions file. Follow this format:

[Section of subtitles number]

[Time the subtitle begins] --> [Time the subtitle ends]

[Subtitle]

The timestamp should be formatted as such:

[hours]: [minutes]: [seconds], [milliseconds]

The final product will look something like this:

Captions are not required for videos that are “unpublished” and not placed on the main rockhurst.edu site, but they are still best practice.

Limit text lines to 1-2 per screen; never 3 and follow the Rockhurst writing stylebook.

When adding captions to a video in Premiere Pro use the Din (new san sarif?) font or the current primary sans serif font listed in the Rockhurst University Brand Guidelines. The font size should be at least 60 pt. It should be big enough to read while scrolling on social media. Caption font color should be white. If needed, you can add an 80% opacity black background if the text is hard to read against the background, or use a drop shadow with 100% opacity and 5-7 distance without a background.

Please contact University Marketing with any questions you have regarding the production of captions.

Website are becoming increasingly visual in nature, particularly through additional incorporation of videos and photos. Individuals who are visually impaired use words that we provide in “tags” to understand the visual contents of a webpage.

We provide the following tags:

• Image Tag – Placed within an image that allows it to be placed on a website. The description of the image tag displays when your mouse hovers over an image and is critical for accessibility.
• Alt Tag – Specifies an alternate text for the image if the image cannot be displayed for any reason.
• Title Tag – Used by screen readers to assist users with visual impairments in moving between pages on your website. It's crucial that a title tag accurately reflects the content of the webpage with an informative and succinct title.

For WCAG compliance, hyperlinks must be both underlined, and a distinctive color from the text surrounding it. For example:

The hyperlinked text is both underlined and blue, meeting ADA compliance standards.

Generally speaking, when you hyperlink text while editing a page in Drupal, it will automatically create the compliant blue and underlined text. It is never advisable to manually change the hyperlinked text color or underlined structure without approval from University Marketing. Although there are situations where changing the color would be necessary (if the background color does not provide proper contrast, for example), these situations will be rare.

Additionally, for increased SEO, it’s best to hyperlink a relevant word in the text, rather than use a “click here” prompt. Use relevant context copy for hyperlinking as often as possible.

Broken links, or 404 errors, are bad practice regardless of the accessibility implications. If anyone at the University comes across a broken link (as displayed below), please inform University Marketing, including the URL, as quickly as possible so we can investigate the problem. Even when a link is active, it’s also important to ensure the proper page is being linked to.

The ability to navigate a website using only a keyboard controls is another critical element of accessibility standards.

As defined by the regulations, all functionality of the website content must be operable through a keyboard interface without requiring specific timings for individual keystrokes, except where the underlying function requires input that depends on the path of the user's movement and not just the endpoints.

If anyone in the Rockhurst community using keyboard controls ever experiences issues navigating the site, please inform University Marketing so we can rectify the issue.

• Never upload an image with copy on it. Without meticulously creating the proper image and alt text, this will violate the standards. The best route is to upload a plain image and provide the connected text elsewhere on the site.
• Don’t upload PDFs unless it is absolutely necessary (and it will be rare that it’s necessary). It is extremely difficult to properly format a PDF to be web accessible, and most of the time, a PDF was not created with a web experience in mind. In other words, best practice would be to take the content included on a PDF and “translate” it into a web experience.

The University Marketing Department actively monitors our site to ensure accessibility standards are being met and identify any issues as they arise.

To aid us in this effort, we use tools by Moz and SiteImprove, among others, to locate and report accessibility problems like broken links, color contrast, missing tags, etc.

With everything we write for the Rockhurst website, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is always top of mind. This is what helps people find Rockhurst through search engines like Google, and it is a critical and ongoing element of the Rockhurst web strategy.

Tracking

Rockhurst Marketing Department tracks pages to ensure they’re performing well in search rankings, and finding opportunities to make adjustments to improve performance.

Research

When we write pages, we perform research and make intentional decisions on the best keywords to use in both titles and body copy.

Content

Our website’s content is one of the primary focuses for attracting new students. We aim to continuously create relevant content and retire old content to attract new users to our site. Additionally, avoiding duplicate content throughout the site helps avoid penalty from search engines.

Our website’s content is one of the primary focuses for attracting new students. We aim to continuously create relevant content and retire old content to attract new users to our site. Additionally, avoiding duplicate content throughout the site helps avoid penalty from search engines.

This refers to how competitive a site is in Google’s search results. Among other contributing factors, both incoming and outgoing links contribute to a site’s domain authority. Larger and older sites have a big head start on this, which poses a challenge in ranking high on pages with very popular keywords.

Important to take into account when creating pages, page hierarchy refers to how Google crawls pages and prioritizes what to look at first when giving users search results.

• This starts with the H1, the largest text on the page and the top header. This is where we insert our primary keyword for the page, so search users and web users know exactly what the page is about.
• From there the H2 and H3 take importance. These are internal headings in the copy of the pages that separate content out and where we often insert some of the more searched and important secondary keywords.
• Google also takes the page’s meta description and summary into account, as we use these to give brief synopses of the page that show on search results and give search engines a better understanding of what we as the page creators want users to know.
• Lastly, the body copy on the page is read by the search engine. We still insert important keywords here, but this is mostly for the users. All the information we need to get across and our visitors need to see should be laid out here. To complicate it further, Google understands the semantic relationships between words, so it’s not as simple as “keyword stuffing,” i.e. just randomly adding keywords wherever and whenever. We have to write in the keywords in a logical way so Google reads it in a way that determines the content to be relevant to users, and therefore boosts the page ranking.

As a smaller and more local institution, we know that our pages have a lower chance to rank nationally and show up on searches for those far away. This is why we often focus on local search engine optimization. Based on location data, Google gives users search results that are relevant to where they are. We do our best to be a great part of the community offline, so we do the same thing online as well.

The Rockhurst University Marketing Department takes a data-driven approach to planning and executing our strategy. Every digital channel we use to further the Rockhurst brand provides data and analytics for us to draw insights from, learn what is and is not working, and ultimately inform how we modify our strategy in the future.

The rockhurst.edu website has the most thorough data at our disposal through several tools we regularly pull data from for analysis. Each tool provides a different angle of the website and the overall experience of our users. Here are some of the tools we utilize, and the specific insights we try to glean from the data.

The deepest data pool of all the analytics tools, Google Analytics provides an overview of virtually everything happening on the rockhurst.edu site (and our affiliated sites, such as rockhursthawks.com, etc.). GA can provide quick, very broad looks at who is coming to the website, or dig as deep as who is going to a single page, where they’re coming from, how long they’re on the page, where do they go next, etc.

Here are some of the specific insights we look at most often in assessing the performance of the website. Web traffic in higher education follows a consistent annual pattern, so each data point is compared YOY:

• Users/New users – returning and new users that visit the site.
• Pageviews – how many pages are loaded and viewed by users.
• Sessions – individual sessions on the site (i.e. when a single user goes to the website, that’s a session).
• Session duration – how long a single session lasts before the user leaves the site.
• Sessions/user – the average number of sessions per user. This gives us an analysis on how many users are coming back after the first sessions expires.
• Pages/session – how many pages are being viewed each session.
• Bounce rate – the percentage of users that leave the website after viewing only one page. The lower this number, the better.
• Organic search users – how many users come to the site through an organic search on YouTube, Yahoo, etc. This helps us analyze the effectiveness of our SEO efforts.
• Organic search sessions – how many sessions start from an organic search.

This only scratches the surface of the insights Google Analytics can provide, so if you’re ever interested in learning something about how users interact with our site, reach out to University Marketing and we’ll be happy to see what GA tells us!

Over 85% of prospective students find our website through a non-brand Google search (meaning their search words do not contain “Rockhurst”) and 93% of all Google searches never go past page 1. Therefore, it’s imperative to find as many high volume keywords that we can potentially rank on page 1 for, and optimize the content on the website to reach the top 10 of the national or local rankings.

Moz is the SEO tool of choice for Rockhurst. It provides several tools that help us determine what keywords we should focus on, chart a course of action to achieve the desired ranking, and track our progress over time. Here are some of the statistics we monitor to help us understand how our SEO efforts are performing, and what our next steps should be:

• Average monthly keyword search volume – we want the keywords we optimize for to be searched by users as much as possible.
• Difficulty – provides an assessment of how difficult it will be to rank for a particular keyword. Moz analyzes who currently ranks for it, how many sites are trying to rank for it, etc.
• SERP – “search engine results page.” This is the average first page results of a given keyword search, providing insights into who currently ranks for the search, and exactly how difficult it will be for us to rank on page 1.
• Non-brand keyword rankings – an analysis and tracking of the non-brand keywords we rank for nationally and locally, broken up between Top 3 (highest likelihood to get clicks), Top 10 (page 1), Top 20 (best chance to move up to page 1), and Top 50 (the highest the ranking assessments go).
• On-page analysis – can use this to look at other websites and understand what their domain authority, headers, meta tags, etc. are. Learning what our competition is focusing their SEO efforts on can illuminate opportunities for us to go where they are not.
• Keyword Explorer – this provides a full list, ranked by relevance, of possible keywords that can used as primary and secondary keywords when writing content for a page. Google bots crawl our page and assess the words in the content, analyzing semantic relationships between the words, and their placement on a page, to determine where and how to rank a page for specific keywords.

Like Google Analytics, these are just a handful of the tools Moz provides for us in our SEO efforts.

Hotjar is a tool that provides a slightly more qualitative analysis of our website than the purely data-driven GA and Moz. Hotjar allows us to view in real-time how users a scrolling and interacting with the website. There is certainly a data element to it, but many of the tools on Hotjar provide its greatest value in what you see, rather than what you read.

• Recorded sessions – this allows us to literally watch a user’s mouse movements, scrolling, and clicks as they go through the site. It provides a window into what the user is looking at, and not only what they do while on the site, but also what they don’t do while they’re on the site. This tool can provide insight into our own blind spots, helping us see issues with the site that pure data won’t provide.
• Form analysis – allows us to see at what point in a form a user drops off and does not complete. This informs us of any fields in our forms that could be limiting the number of users to voluntarily enter the enrollment funnel.
• Heatmaps – Hotjar provides several different types of heatmaps, most notably allowing us to see where the majority of activity is on the page (clicks, mouse activity, etc.), and how far down a page most users are scrolling. The most important information is, generally, placed above the 50% point, and whenever possible, “above the fold” (the average place on a page that is at the bottom of the display when a page is first loaded).

Providing a proper and engaging user experience (UX) is the best way to ensure users who visit your site find what they’re looking for, and walk away with a positive impression of the university (as the website represents the university in many ways).

Good UX requires many things: great visual appeal, high-quality images and videos, easy navigation, etc. But in order to provide all of those elements, we must first consider who our primary audience is, and how they are accessing the website.

With the advent of smartphones, we have seen a gradual shift of traffic from desktop computers to mobile phones. In 2019, we averaged 55% of users coming from mobile phones, and only 41% from desktops:

You’ve also likely noticed that websites display and operate differently depending on if you’re viewing it from a desktop or your phone. Here are examples of our homepage from both the desktop and mobile view:

The differences are often subtle, and we work hard to make it that way! Often, it requires custom coding, or a specific design template, to make each version work properly, and provide a seamless visual experience for the user. Unfortunately, one size does not fit all when it comes to designing for desktop and mobile.

We approach the rockhurst.edu site with a mobile-first mindset – in other words, when considering new functionality, designs and content, we considering the implications for a mobile phone first, and a desktop second. If it won’t provide a good UX on a phone, then we won’t move forward with it.

When a custom design for mobile is not possible, we rely on a “responsive design” in which the desktop version can be properly scaled to the correct size and display for every device. Either way, we still start from the same place: how will this look and feel on a mobile phone first, and expand to desktop from there.

A mobile-first design is becoming increasingly important for SEO as well, as Google is now using mobile-first indexing of websites in their search results. So, not only is mobile-first necessary for a positive UX, but it’s becoming imperative just to be found through a Google search in the first place.

Urchin Tracking Modules, or UTMs, are often used in conjunction with our advertising campaigns. Especially with campaigns that span several channels like display, social and email, we use UTM parameters to differentiate between the traffic that is coming from each source. These are also used when we run paid search campaigns to see which search keywords have been driving traffic best. 

When tracking results, we look at the specific URLs that are receiving traffic and can also track users by source and medium, so we don’t get confused between users who are coming to the page organically and the ones who went through our ads. We can also track where these users go next, showing us how many of them go straight to an application, making UTMs a great way to see the direct impact our campaigns have on admissions, donations, etc.

Best practices are to keep the UTM keywords short so the users’ URLs don’t get incredibly long and look suspicious, plus it’s a lot easier to track on the backend.

UTM’s should be used on all digital communications (email, social media, video, etc.) in which there is an identifiable goal or conversion related to the communication, such as registering for an event, submitting an application, etc. This allows us to analyze the effectiveness of all marketing and communication efforts.

Google Chrome provides a web extension that easily and quickly generates a UTM to be used in your communication material. Search for “Google Analytics UTM Builder” in the Chrome extension store to download.

For more information, you can look at Google’s advice on UTMs.

The point of our vanity URLs is to redirect users from a simple URL to a more complicated one. These can be outbound links but should only be used for Rockhurst properties like our catalog, a form, or one of our YouTube videos. These are approved on a case-by-case basis by the web and marketing staff.

To request a vanity URL, contact University Marketing Department.

Google has become such a force in our world, that the company’s name is now also a verb, i.e. when you Google something. This shift in how we find information is prevalent in how prospective students discover and analyze the universities they’re considering attending. Over 85% of prospective students’ first interaction with an institution is through its website, over 90% of them find the website through a non-brand Google search specifically about an academic program, and 98% of Google searches never pass page 1.

With that data in mind, we strategically approach degree program pages to achieve these goals:

• Make them Google-friendly through SEO keyword research, implementation, tracking and iterative updates
• Highlight the academic impact, student experience and post-graduation outcomes
• Provide a major map so a student can visualize their time in the program
• Tell a story that prospective students will connect with

There are two main types of pages that we create for the website: simple pages and layer cakes. They both have certain uses that we’ll go over here.

Layer Cake Pages

These are mainly used for the landing pages for degree programs and schools. Even our homepage is built on a layer cake style!

There are certain modules that create these pages and can be implemented here.

Headers

These are the main pictures to our pages and invite the user into the webpage. The main header and subheading are there for both the audience’s information and SEO purposes and can include links.

Buttons

We use these on every degree page to prompt users to do the two main things we want for the admissions funnel. They can be used elsewhere as well for large calls to action.

Section Intros

These are all text sections that give context to the rest of the page. They come with headings, subheads and content.

Heroes

These look a lot like headers, but the text animates, and it includes a picture as a background.

Quotes

These are great to use when we have testimonials from students or want to attribute any quote correctly.

Promotions

These blocks specifically link to related pages on the Rockhurst site.

View and Block Embeds

These bring in dynamic sections like news and events specific to the page.

Pods

These bring in other sections in smaller chunks so that they’ll look nice next to each other

Simple Pages

These are much, well, simpler than layer cakes! They can include text, tables, accordion folders, and video embeds. The vast majority of the pages we create are simple pages.

The layout of these pages is very intentional, as we want users to find what they’re looking for as soon as possible. We keep titles and headers at the top of degree pages and links to apply or request info soon after. Since the basic pages don’t include our sidebar menu, we like to have that page’s submenu listed high on the main page as well. If you need ideas on how to make your page look good, feel free to look around the site! We’re always making sure that all of our pages are in tip-top shape, and if you have an idea for your page and have one to reference, that makes it a lot easier for us.

Our menu structure is large and complicated, though it is simple and perfect at the same time! We keep like things together and oftentimes alphabetical to help make navigating easier.

Our header bar gives users our most important and most clicked-on links at the same time. The footer is for those who have reached the bottom of a page and may not have found what they’re looking for. Links to the schools and our contact information live down there.

You may wonder why the sidebar menu is over on the right. Well, that’s because we want the content of the page to be the star! English is read left to right, so we want the users’ eyes to start with the content before they move over to the menu.