Guide to Editing Your Website

Our websites run on a CMS (Content Management System) called Drupal. A CMS is a technology between a database that stores all the information and the web pages that appear in your web browser. We are running multiple different versions of Drupal, and if you think you are due for an upgrade, submit a marketing request. 

If you can edit a Google or Word doc, you are already skilled enough to make edits to your website. The first thing you need to confirm is that you have an account for the website you want to update (If you need access, submit a marketing request). The next step is to go to the admin login page which you can get to by typing “/user” after whatever URL you are trying to access. For example, if you were trying to make edits on the main website, you would go to https://www.loyno.edu/user/, put in your username and password, do a little math to prove you are a human, and click the “Log In” button. From there, it is just a simple matter of navigating to the page you want to edit and clicking the “Edit” tab. You will see a block with a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing bar at the top. Make your changes and be sure to click the “Save” button at the bottom of the page. Viola! You updated your website.

Websites have unique addresses that are a series of numbers (Internet Protocol Addresses). Domain Name Servers keep those numerical addresses in a database connected to your brand or business name with a unique identifier known as the domain name. The Root Domain is the primary place where all of your websites and webpages happen. A subdomain operates within the root domain and is used to identify a certain section of the website. If loyno.edu is our root domain, then studentaffairs.loyno.edu is one subdomain. We have many subdomains across our web properties including our various colleges; law.loyno.edu, cas.loyno.edu, and citycollege.loyno.edu as well as content focused websites like academicaffairs.loyno.edu and operations.loyno.edu. You will notice that the subdomain appears before the root domain in these instances. A website is a collection of multiple web pages under a domain. A minisite or microsite acts like a subdomain but usually has fewer pages and lives within the root domain. Those smaller sites can be distinguished by having internal page navigation that is different than the main navigation.

The best thing to do when creating ANY content for the web is to think about the user. You can improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) by making your page titles and paragraph headers relevant to the content on the page. Think about bites, snacks, and meals. A bite to entice them, a snack to whet their appetite, and a meal to fill them.

The bad news is that people do not really read on the web, they skim at best. Start off with a strong page title that describes the overarching reason for the page. Next, have your paragraph headers give deeper context to the page title. Finally, have your paragraph content support your headers with simple language that most any user can understand.

A great example is if your page is about chickens, your page title should definitely have the word “chickens” in it. Your first header should strongly support the concept so “How to Raise Chickens” would be a strong option. Repeating the content that appears in your page title in your headers can also increase the relevance of your page. Instead of paragraphs, consider that bullet points in a list can direct the user to logical next steps or pages to peruse.

If you have ever wanted to have a link that does more than just link to another page, I have the answer for you. The first thing you need to know is about protocols. The web is full of protocols that do specific things when asked. HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It is used to fetch web pages and graphics in your web browser. If you want to send someone to another webpage, you use the HTTP protocol. For example, https://www.loyno.edu/ sends you to our homepage. The savvy among you may have noticed that there is a letter S after the HTTP. That just means that the resource you are requesting is secure. If you want to send an email, you use the mailto: protocol. Using mailto:marketing@loyno.edu as your link will open an email client with my address filled in. Even cooler, if you use the tel: protocol, it will allow you to create a link that will open the telephone app on your device. For example, tel:1234567890 would attempt to dial (123) 456-7890.

Mmmmm. Bacon. Is there anything better? Why yes, there is. Website revisions! In Drupal, most see a "Revisions" tab in the Admin but perhaps do not visit. This tab has the power to go back in time to undo mistakes that have been made. If you have been working on a page and hit save, a snapshot of that page at that time is saved as a revision. If you tried something out and it turned out to be completely wrong, simply hitting that revision tab will present you with a list of all of the previous revisions to a page. Select the previous version you want to appear on the page and hit the “Revert” button on the right side to publish that snapshot to the website.

Yes, but it can get a little tricky. Every chunk of content created in Drupal is saved in a database as a node. What is interesting about nodes is that they can have different ways of using the same content. You can have a page title that is different than the menu title which is different than the page URL. The database doesn’t care what that chunk of content is as much as what the node ID is. Therefore, you can add references to pages multiple times in the menu as long as you point to the correct node. The cool thing is that if you change the page title or even the page URL and because you used the node ID, the web browser will still go to the same page.

To adjust menus, you need the proper permissions and will need a one-on-one lesson to discuss the menu structure, parent-child relationships, and other fun topics before I can grant you new superpowers. Submit a project request to get started.

In the Drupal 8 admin, you may have noticed that there are two kinds of pages listed as a content type and wondered what the difference was. The first things we should talk about are components. Components are special blocks of content that are added to a page. That content might be an accordion, a carousel, or maybe an image tout. A landing page can use all of the components shown on our Drupal 8 style pages here and here. A basic page is not nearly as fancy and can show only a few of those components.

While landing pages are designed to provide small bites of information to lead the reader deeper into your website, basic pages are typically more informational in nature and offer a deeper dive on a specific and narrow topic. 

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locater. It is an address to find things on the web. This is what happens when you type in a URL. Type, type, type. You just typed “example.com” into your web browser. Your web browser looks up the IP address (Internet Protocol) for the domain name (example.com) via something called a DNS (Domain Name Server). Now your browser has the address as a crazy string of numbers. It knows where to go and sends a request to that web server (a computer whose job is to send out web page resources) and the server sends back a response. Your browser starts rendering the page and then starts requesting other URLs that appear in the webpage (images, scripts, and style descriptions), and the server responds and supplies the requested information. This back and forth can continue for a while, and your browser may have to get other resources from other web servers (things like ads or Instagram feeds) or may refine what the browser shows based on things you do on the page. The reason for this post is to inspire those back-and-forth conversations with your Loyola web developers. What do you need? Maybe we already have that resource.

Before you build a house, you need a plan. The same is true for a website. Your goal is to get a user from your home page to the content they are looking for as quickly as possible. If your site is easier to navigate, Google has an easier time understanding your site and what people may be searching for. Your average user has zero interest in your internal organizational structure. Think instead about organizing your content into categories for what a user would want to do. Your second goal is to minimize the number of clicks between pages. Every webpage should be within three clicks of every other page. A third goal could be strategically linking to other pages from within pages. The trick is to amplify connections by having descriptive links that mirror the titles of the linked pages. Avoid vague “click here” links but give the user an idea of what they will see if they click (E.g., Our Creative Staff is a great resource for Loyola brand questions).

Through the magic of Google Analytics, we (your friendly neighborhood web team) can tell you many things about your visitors. Not only how many visitors, but where in the world they visited the page from, what website they came from, what device they were on, and more. We can also tell you how long they stayed on the page and if they went to any of your subpages. When a user wanders around the internet, they leave digital footprints in their wake. You might think that you have a page that is well-loved only to find a smattering of folks gander at it. We use Google Analytics to help us make design decisions to best serve up what the user is looking for. When you make a page, think about its purpose and what you want the visitor to get out of it. For help accessing your Google Analytics, please submit a marketing request.

Since this is the season for giving and holiday gatherings, you might be wondering how to share your events with the Loyola University New Orleans community. If you have logged in with access to our main domain (loyno.edu) you would go to the main menu and go to Content > Add content > Events. I know I say it a million times but anything with a red asterisk is a required field and if you do not fill it in, the content will not save. You have to enter the start date and the end date even if they are the same day. You can add images but they are not required (a random color will be assigned to the background behind the title). There is an “Event Type” Field that must be filled that is used for sorting on various calendars. Be sure to change the “Save as” drop-down at the bottom of the page to “Published”, hit the “Save” button, and viola, event posted! Submit a marketing request if you think you need access to add events. 

Web pages can be ridiculously long. A user experience myth is that people do not scroll below the “fold,” a.k.a. the top of the web page that appears on the screen. If you have ever encountered a page with infinite scrolling, you will realize that it mimics social media. Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have retrained our brains to scroll (or doomscroll, in my case) through volumes of content. Web Team Lead, Eric, uses the concept of bites, snacks, and meals. Landing pages should entice and direct users to the most relevant topics (bites). The subpage under the landing page should flesh out that topic but not overwhelm the reader (snack). The subpage under that subpage is the meal where you can serve up many courses of digestible content. Think about your user when putting content on a page. Having headlines that act like short topic sentences helps since most people skim content rather than read it. Structuring your content is just as important as having accurate information. Respect the user by being concise and consistent in your tone.

Perhaps you are looking at your website and seeing something old, misspelled, or suffering from poor grammar and are wondering what to do next. Log into the website admin (submit a marketing request if you need access) and fix those grammar and spelling issues. Update any incorrect information with the current and correct content. If the information just isn’t relevant anymore, do not delete the page! You can remove a page by unpublishing or archiving it. Be sure to look for links from other pages that may point to that removed page. Decide if those pages need that link removed or pointed to a different page. Keep in mind that each department is responsible for its own content and your lovable but gruff web developers may not know that something needs modification.

When I help our community learn to edit our websites, I have a few rules. The rule many folks like to ignore most is “Do not copy and paste from a Word or Google Doc!” Rather than admonish the culprits, I want to explain why here, there be monsters. In HTML, the structure is separate from the presentation. In code, I might see

<p>I am a paragraph.</p>

and know that the structure for that paragraph is clean and solid for the browser to show.

Now, if the code shows

<p><font face="comic sans">I am also a paragraph, but ugly.</font></p>

I know this was a copy-and-paste job from Word. First off, the font tag was depreciated and is now obsolete. Second, who in their right mind would use comic sans? Even worse, these word processing programs sometimes try to emulate page layout programs and add unnecessary structural tags to the HTML code that breaks the page. Microsoft Word and Google Docs can export files in Real Text Format (.rtf). The exported result will maintain your bold and italicized text and retain your links. You will have to restyle headlines with the drop-down in the WYSIWYG admin box, but that should be second nature for you now.

Sometimes when you add a component to your page structure in Drupal, you may have found a form field labeled CTA and grimaced at yet another weird tech jargon acronym. CTA stands for “Call To Action.” It is another name for a button, but this button usually stands out in the component. Buttons and CTAs are useful tools to direct a user to another page. There are two important parts of any CTA, and the first is the text you want to see inside the button. You want buttons to set expectations for where the user will be taken. Avoid ”Click Here” and “More…” but instead, use helpful short phrases like “Download the Academic Calendar” or “Read our FAQ about Tuition Remission.” These buttons with better descriptors also increase your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The second part of the CTA is the link. Double-check that the link works in a private or incognito browser if you send a user off-site. I have seen people link to Google Docs that do not have the share permissions set correctly, causing all sorts of misery for all involved.

There are web pages with information pertinent to a particular year. Each year, they send the information to users, and the robots and spiders cruise the web for search engine indexes. Instead of creating a new page and wasting all that valuable digital equity, update the content on the same page and either push the old content down the page or simply replace it with the latest and greatest information. Again, the magic relationship of headlines and SEO meet on these pages. Let’s say I have workshops to teach folks how to wield a lightsaber (which I do), and I want to announce the next round of offerings. My H1 headline on that page would be “Learn to Wield a Lightsaber Workshops.” I would then have a paragraph describing what to expect in the workshops. Following that, I would have an H2 headline saying “Spring 2022 Lightsaber Workshops” with dates and times and sign-up information (always think about what you would like your visitor to do). If I had previously had workshops in the winter, I could keep the H2 Headline “Winter 2021 Lightsaber Workshops” but change the content below the headline with photos or videos from the events. That is using your digital equity wisely.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word content as being “in a state of peaceful happiness.” Doesn’t that sound nice? Unfortunately, when it comes to the other type of content—namely, the kind that lives on your website—it may not leave you feeling quite so peaceful. Taking time to regularly review and update your copy (every six months or so) is an important best practice to improve your user experience and make your website more effective. Otherwise, students, colleagues, and other community members may hit a dead end when they try to connect with you online. That’s frustrating for everyone involved.

Here are a few quick tips for reviewing your content:

• Check that all links are working and accurate
• Remove/update old deadlines, dates, or other time-sensitive information
• Review your copy for accuracy and consistency (use our style guide for reference)
• Add more subheaders and key points to help break up large chunks of text
• Adopt more inclusive and non-violent language on your website
• Incorporate clear calls to action that encourage readers to contact you and explore more

The web team is here to help! If you need help accessing your website to make edits, or if you want support optimizing your web copy, please reach out to our office at marketing@loyno.edu.

Way back, when you were young, and History class was called Current Affairs, you may have had a typing class. You proudly sat in front of a minty green IBM Selectric typewriter, clacking away on those keys and adding two spaces after a period. Friends, I need you to stop it. Modern typography has evolved and the brilliant computers that you use nowadays take into account the space after a period. Look at the words you are reading now. Silky sentences separated using the power of technology. Not a double space to be found. When I am updating pages, I will frequently find an unusual character following a space in the code. The odd character is “&nbsp;” which is a non-breaking space. I can make you look 20 years younger by removing them. Cheaper than hair-dye.

Yes, you can! Adding a video does require a little preparation but ultimately putting it on the page is simple. If you have a video that is being produced for you for future viewing, please consider adding captions for accessibility. We do not host videos as they take up a great deal of space and slow down our servers when they stream. Instead, the video needs to be uploaded to YouTube so that you can get a URL to share with the world. After that, you need to go to the page and the place inside of your content that you want to share your video and place your cursor there. Then from inside the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), there is a button that is a rectangle with a small, black play icon that you will click. A window will pop up and ask you to put in the URL you got from YouTube. You can choose options if you want the video to play automatically or if you want it to be responsive (filling the page). Don’t forget to save your page (down at the bottom) or you will not see the change you made.

A PDF (Portable Document Format) is a file type commonly seen on the internet. Many devices can display them although they may not be legible on phones with small screens. PDFs are based on printer instructions so they look almost exactly as they would if you printed them. Fonts and images can be embedded but that doesn’t mean that you can edit them easily. If you need to make a change, you need to use your original source document and create another PDF to replace the old one. Google can index a PDF but most are not exported with search engine optimization (SEO) or accessibility in mind. Savvy users may not trust PDFs as they can contain small bits of malicious code that can exploit vulnerabilities on a device (such as opening windows in web or multimedia browsers). PDFs can even have other PDFs embedded in them that may be troublesome. Beware, my friends, not every PDF can be treated the same.

The easiest way to load your pages faster is to keep them simple. Adding tables and complicated layouts with custom fonts and scripts can grind a page to a halt. The next most important thing is to size your images correctly for the web. An image used for print uses vastly more information than a monitor does. Simply reducing the resolution DPI (dots per inch) from 300 to 72 will easily shrink an image file size by two-thirds. People with limited data plans will adore you for considering their wallets. Faster page loads impact your search engine rankings for the better.

If you have used images on your web pages you have probably added seen the file extensions I mentioned in the question. You why you might want to use one file type over another based on what the image looks like. All of these file types have strengths and weaknesses and they all compress differently. A .gif is amazing because it can be animated and have transparency but it does that by reducing the color palette to a measly 256 colors. A .jpg is the type of file you want to use for photos. They compress by having a greyscale version of the image and an algorithm applied to the color. If you have ever seen a photo that looks like lumpy potatoes but they are not a pile of spuds, most likely the person chose too much compression when saving. A little compression goes a long way with a .jpg so consider saving your photos at around 85% quality. Images saved as .png are really interesting as they can have real transparency and are considered a lossless format. Unlike when you save a .jpg and it throws out information, a .png looks at an image from up, down, left, and right to determine the best way to compress all of the information. You would mostly save logos or graphics with large flat areas of color in the .png format.

One of the most common issues responsible for a slow-down to your web pages is using images that are way too big. If you have a camera phone that can kick out an image from its 8MB capture card and upload it to your site, the person viewing your page is also downloading that 8MB image. If they are paying for data, they are not only waiting for superfluous data but it is costing them real money. It is better to resize that photo down for the website. You do not need Photoshop. I suggest you try Resize Pixel as a free online service. Click the green “Upload Image” button and get started. There are a variety of tabs on the left that allow you to resize, crop, mirror, rotate, compress, and convert. It will show you a real-time preview of your changes. I did an experiment where I took a photo from my phone that was 2MB and used ResizePixel to compress the image to 300KB (an 88% reduction in size while keeping the original dimensions) with no discernible difference! Don’t forget to add a description in your alternative text field in the admin for accessibility and search engine optimization goodness.

This fabulous tip comes from your friendly neighborhood University Photographer, Kyle Encar. Software giant, Adobe, has a site that allows you to resize photos for the web. Visit https://www.adobe.com/express/feature/image/resize to get started. Hit the purplish-blue “Upload your photo” button and you will see a box that says “Drag & drop an image”, where you can do just that OR you can click the text below that says “Browse on your device” to root around your computer. Once you image is in there, you can do some resizing and cropping. At the top, there is a dropdown labeled “Resize for:” where you can choose what social media platform you are making the photo for OR you can choose from a few standard sizes OR you can choose a custom size. The smallest size you can go is 50 pixels. I am fond of squares so I chose “Instagram” and the Square 1080 x 1080 size. From there, I can pull the slider (right above the download button) left and right to make the image bigger or smaller in the space. You can even drag the photo around inside the box until you get the perfect crop. Once you are done, Click the “Download” button and you will be asked to either sign in or sign up for an account. It is free and you do not need a credit card. Once you have an account, a slew of other tools becomes available. Automagic! Thanks Kyle!

Visiting a website should be a positive experience. If someone cannot fill out a form or important contact information is hidden, that user will get frustrated. User Interface (UI) is just one part of the “usability” of a website. Having accurate information with correct spelling and grammar is more important than how it looks. This is why the phrase “Content is King” has been the mantra of the web for at least 20 years. Improving the user experience could be as simple as auditing the links on a page. Does the link go to where it is supposed to? Does that link go to a downloadable file, and is that file up-to-date? When you make updates to your content, think about the user. Put the important content in plain view. Have your links explain the context. Much better for a link to say, “download the updated tuition and fees schedule,” rather than a “click here.” Write in a clear, concise voice understanding that the user is scanning for information as opposed to reading for pleasure.

You may see a box in Drupal that says REAL-TIME SEO FOR DRUPAL at the bottom of the admin page. This module can improve the likelihood of your content appearing in search engine results. The form field labeled Focus Keyword should include a few words explaining what the page is about and reflect the page’s title. You may notice a section labeled Content analysis with a series of colored dots. This is where suggestions appear to improve your SEO. A green dot means that you have successfully met a Search Engine Optimization goal. Orange or red dots mean there is work to be done. Adding an image or a link to another useful page quickly bumps up the score. The most important thing to remember is that you do not need to get green dots up and down. The most important dot appears right below the Focus Keyword field. If it is green and says SEO: good, you have made beneficial content changes to be proud of.

I have some tips to make your time Googling for things on the internet more satisfying. If you wrap quotation marks around your search terms, Searching “Crawfish Mac & Cheese” on Google will return results that have the exact phrase “Crawfish Mac & Cheese”. Let’s say that you want to search for saints but you want to exclude results about our local team, use a dash. Saints -football will return football-free results. If you use a tilde, Google will search using synonyms. Cute ~dogs will return cute pups, cute doggies, and cute pooches results. 

Having content that is structured, accurate, and seen as worthy of linking is only the first step to successful SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Our data overlords at Google have a variety of metrics that they apply to our pages to determine where they “rank” in terms of “findability”. Your humble team of two web developers has to deal with concepts called Core Web Vitals. Our alphabet soup of web health acronyms includes Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). LCP is a measure of how long it takes to load a block of text or an image in the viewport. The longer it takes to load, the “sicker” your webpage is. FID measures how long it takes for a browser to respond to user interaction (clicking, tapping, etc.) as a website that is a slog to move through is not likely to rank well. CLS is when elements on the webpage shift around because certain elements haven’t finished loading. It could be fonts, images, or videos. Because a webpage can appear on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone, responsive web design can have wildly different layouts depending on context. If you have ever seen a webpage load and look terrible for a couple of seconds and then suddenly look 100% better; that was a FOUC (Flash Of Unstyled Content). FOUCs occur when the browser hasn’t loaded the instructions for how the page should be styled. If your page takes too long to load or looks ugly and broken, users will leave without hesitation. For geeky fun, point your web browser to https://www.webpagetest.org/ and choose “Core Web Vitals” from the dropdown, and plug in your favorite URL.

Have you ever been wandering around the internet and found a page that won’t load and instead you see an error code? What you are seeing are one of many HTTP status codes. When you open a web page, you send a request to the server that the web page is hosted on. A server is simply a computer where the images, files, and databases are stored. In response, the server sends a status code indicating how your request was fulfilled. There are five categories of HTTP status codes:

• 1xx — Information responses
• 2xx — Successful responses
• 3xx — Redirection messages
• 4xx — Client error responses
• 5xx — Server error responses

The most common status codes you will probably encounter are 200 – OK, 301 – Moved Permanently, 404 – Page not found, and 500 – Internal server error. A status code of 200 indicates that everything is working as expected and the request has been fulfilled. A 301 indicates that the information you are looking for has moved. Usually, if a redirect is set up for the old page to a new page, it will resolve to a 200 status code quickly. A 404 is the most common and it means the pages does not exist. It may have existed at one time but it may have been deleted, unpublished, archived or simply never was. If you delete a page, it is always a good idea to request a URL redirect so we can send the user to an appropriate page. If you encounter any of our Loyola sites with a status error in the 500 range, please send me an email as we need to figure out what went sideways.

You may think of cookies as a delicious treat usually made with more butter and sugar than one should reasonably consume. But since this is a tech-related column, today we will be referring to a different type of cookie. When a user visits a website in a browser, a small text file with some data is created that is called a “cookie”. These cookies are built to personalize your browsing experience by saving information about your session (the time you spent on the site). Login information, preferences, and what is in your shopping cart might all reside within the cookie. There are many kinds of cookies. Session cookies are never written to the hard drive. Persistent cookies track multiple visits to the same site and make it more likely that you will be served up pages of particular interest to you. Cookies are not inherently dangerous, as they cannot install malware or infect your computer with a virus BUT there are real cookie monsters out there. Third-party cookies are generated by websites different than the page you are viewing (think about the ads on a news page). They can track your history as you move from page to page and site to site. There are even zombie cookies out there that are permanently installed on your computer even when you opt-out of receiving cookies. If you remember my previous column, you can mask your web experience by using a VPN so that the remote server poses as you. If, like me, you have a teenager – you can review previous cookies by going to the preferences of your web browser. Prepare yourself, all those cookies could give you a stomachache.

In our modern world, there are barcodes everywhere that help track inventories and facilitate fast checkouts from the grocery. Barcodes have a few inadequacies such as how much data they can hold or limited angles at which lasers can read them (I am looking at you, frozen bag of peas). The QR code (or Quick Response code) was invented by a company called Denso Wave to keep track of parts in Toyota’s manufacturing process. There are four distinct cube shapes, three of which are the same size, and one smaller cube (the alignment pattern) that helps orient the code so the reader (usually a camera) knows which side is up. At the bottom edge of the big cube, there are lines of alternating black and white dots that the reader uses to figure out how big the QR code is. Then, there are format information dots that help with error correction using redundancy in the QR code. The actual data stored in a QR code starts at the bottom right corner and winds its way like a snake until it reached the middle. The left side is now filled with error correction information in case part of the code is obscured. One super cool thing is that the company that invented QR codes never exercised its patent and released the technology for free! Check out this helpful color-coded and labeled QR code.

Not everyone sees your webpage. Many people have screen readers that describe images or describe where certain blocks of content appear on the page. Whenever you add an image to the page there will be a field to fill in an “Alt text”, which is a description that the screen reader conveys to the end-user. Try to make your Alt text as descriptive as possible. Improving accessibility also increases the chances that your page will be found by search engines. An Alt tag that reads “Happy English students discuss Shakespeare outside in Palm Court” is going to rank higher in Google searches rather than just “students” and provide a sight-impaired person a richer experience.

Senior designer Karwai Pun is part of the accessibility group at Home Office Digital, which designs, builds, and develops services for the United Kingdom government. She created a great resource called The Do’s and Don’ts of Designing for Accessibility with general guidelines and best design practices for making digital services accessible. Currently, the series has six posters catering to users from these areas: low vision, D/deaf and hard of hearing, dyslexia, motor disabilities, users on the autistic spectrum, and users of screen readers.

Here are my favorite top five accessibility tips that also improve search engine optimization:

1. Make buttons large so they are easier to click. Bigger targets, better conversions.
2. Buttons and links should be descriptive. Give the user an idea of what will happen when they click. “Contact us via email” is better than “Click here”.
3. All videos should have subtitles. Better yet, provide a written transcript below the video. AI can be prompted to listen to your video and create your transcript.
4. Write in plain English using simple sentences or bullets. Have a readable font size and good color contrast between the text and the background.
5. Use the alternative text field to describe images on your page in detail. “Loyola University New Orleans students share insights in the Peace Quad” is better than “image” for both screen readers and SEO.

YOU will benefit from accessible technology at some point in your life. There may be permanent, temporary, and situational situations that impact a person’s ability to accomplish a task. Someone who is blind might need a screen-reader to read a webpage. Someone with cataracts might need help temporarily to hear the sound of a crosswalk signal. A distracted driver might benefit from their GPS telling them to make a turn. The reason you want to close caption your videos is that it benefits those who are permanently deaf. It also benefits someone with an ear infection temporarily. Closed captioning also provides benefits to a bartender in a loud venue. The difference between someone who is non-verbal and someone with laryngitis or who speaks with a heavy accent is very small. One more quick example. Think of someone with an amputated arm, and then think of another person with their arm in a sling, and finally think of a person holding a baby. The outcome has the same impact even if the prevailing situations are permanent, temporary, or situational.

I make things with a limited shelf life. It might be better to say that I make eventual garbage. There are programming languages that I have learned that are now useless and lost to time. Beautiful websites have fallen by the wayside as clients didn’t update their content. I try to be zen about it. In my youth, I was inspired by artists and twin brothers, Doug and Mark Starn. Photography was not considered fine art as even limited editions implied that there was more than one of something. The brothers made photographic monographs held together with cellophane tape and other highly nonarchival materials that embraced decay and chaos. The value of their works was that they weren’t made to last forever. They weren’t sustainable. The irony here is that while designing and building web pages, I always do so through a lens of sustainability. If I have pages that have concise text in plain language, I help the user find content that is useful in completing their tasks quickly. If I build for the widest range of audiences, I become less concerned about their devices or connection speeds. If I focus on the tasks that a user wants to accomplish, I can reduce the amount of fluff on the page. Finally, if I pay attention to the non-text assets on a page (videos, images, fonts), I can cut down on page size by optimizing them. The point I am trying to make here is that your web pages will serve their purpose longer if you provide content that is accurate, and concise, and provides the user a clear path to accomplish why they were on that page in the first place. How can you get rid of the trash?

Continuing my obsession with technologies that will one day replace me, today’s FYI is about having a robot frenemy. ChatGPT is an intelligent computer program that can “talk” with you. You can ask it questions and request the answer to sound like it was written by a pirate. I asked ChatGPT for a Mexican lime grilled chicken recipe and I have to say, it was pretty tasty. Now that we have this fabulous technology, what do we do? Horrible things, of course. Students ask ChatGPT to write their essays and book reports and do their homework with a couple of swipes on the keyboard. How can you spot computer-generated text? ChatGPT text will be consistent and lacking in emotion. It simply (at the moment) doesn’t have the capacity to feel or give opinions. It will not provide details about their life or any personal experiences. You might also detect a more formal tone or the usage of complex technical language or jargon. The good news is that I speak plainly and in simple English and will chatter about my personal life while giving info and opinions about technology.

I have been listening to a novel full of scary technology, scary people, and scary diseases. I don’t scare easily, but a lot of people I know are terrified of technology. Many of our interactions with computers are simple automation. If the user types this on a keyboard, the computer will display the text they typed. Machine Learning goes one step beyond by using its programming to look for patterns and trends in the data that the user types. The computer then becomes more efficient by taking advantage of those trends. If you send an email to multiple people named “Mike”, your computer may recognize that you send more frequently to one particular “Mike” and put their name in the “to field” in your email first. Machine Intelligence goes further by having problem-solving and prioritization in addition to the learning it was already doing. Artificial Intelligence allows a computer to accept all available information and combine those chunks of data into solutions that might match or even exceed human intelligence. There are two fundamental kinds of AI. An Applied AI can intelligently trade stocks or drive autonomous vehicles. Generalized AI can, in theory, handle any task by sensing, reasoning, acting, and adapting. Not everything AI does has to be scary. It could construct and analyze a “digital twin” and then synthesize an individualized plan of medical care for the “human” twin. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.”

Stupid trivia: The name HAL is short for H-euristcally programmed AL-gorithmic computer.

Technology adoption is speeding up. Decades passed before the telephone was in 50% of homes. In only five years, cell phones reached that same level of adoption. ChatGPT, an AI bot, was used by 100 million people last month, two months after its launch. It took TiKTok nine months and Instagram two and a half years to reach that same size audience. You may have already benefited from AI and just haven’t recognized it. Here are some real-world examples. GPS apps that consider traffic, construction, and weather use AI to determine the shortest route. Uber and Lyft have AI to match riders with drivers and even figure out ETAs to detect fraud and abuse. Some social media platforms perform facial recognition with AI to suggest tagging friends in photos. If this email doesn’t get to you, you may never know that the spam filter used by Google doesn’t like me sharing its secrets. The everyday benefits of artificial intelligence should outweigh the risks of AI. However, I recently read about how AI researchers gave Boston Dynamics’ robot dog Spot the power of speech after they combined ChatGPT and text-to-speech. They were already quite scary, and now they can talk!

Here comes another article about Artificial Intelligence (Bwah ha ha, I am obsessed). Generalized artificial intelligence (AGI) is a type of artificial intelligence that can perform tasks, much like a human. Unlike narrow AI, which is designed to perform specific tasks, AGI can learn and adapt to new situations. The rise of AGI is likely to have a significant impact on employment. A study by the McKinsey Global Institute found that up to 800 million jobs worldwide could be displaced by automation by 2030.

Who is at risk? Sadly, coders, computer programmers, software engineers, and data analysts as AI is great at crunching numbers with relative accuracy. Thinking about myself doing Math on Monday mornings makes me concerned. Legal assistants are responsible for consuming large amounts of information, synthesizing what they learned, and then turning that info into a legal brief or opinion. Legalese is very structured and language-oriented making generative AI an easy fit for future firms on a budget.

Customer service agents, accountants, stock traders, financial advisors, market researchers, and anyone who works with data need to be mindful of what is coming. Graphic designers, photographers, and illustrators have to appreciate that millions of untrained people will be upskilled and able to create or manipulate images based on what they say.

However as AGI becomes more prevalent, there is a potential for new jobs as AI developers, trainers, and maintainers. The media industry is already experimenting with AI-generated content, but that content still needs human judgment and review. Hopefully, technology can free up human workers from repetitive and dangerous tasks which may lead to more creative and fulfilling work.

P.S. ChatGPT said that my article “is well-written and provides a good overview of AGI and its potential impact on employment. The tone is engaging and informative, with a touch of humor, which makes it enjoyable to read.” Uh, thanks.

Another day, another acronym. API stands for Application Program Interface. It is a fancy way of saying, a way for programs to talk to one another. These interfaces allow you to pull content or functionality from some other site to your website. There is a Google Map API that allows you to pull Google Maps into your website. There is a PayPal API that will allow you to accept payments through your website and put that money into your bank account. Recently, Google introduced an oxymoronic branded “Privacy Sandbox” API. This API will “allow” you to “share” ad topics with other websites. This all has to do with cookies. Google plans on turning off third-party tracking but this only affects Chrome users as Apple and Firefox have been blocking those cookies for years. When their rivals blocked the cookies, it was a win for privacy but put some serious pain on Google’s advertising business. The good news is that you can go to the Chrome Settings, then "Privacy and Security," then "Ad privacy" (alternatively, paste "chrome://settings/adPrivacy" into the address bar). From there, you can click through to each of the three individual pages and turn off the top checkbox, and in a mere six clicks, you can presumably turn off the ad platform. Whew! If you don’t do anything, Google will kindly share a list of topics for advertisers to serve up to you when browsing. Google’s motto of “Do the right thing” sure seems suspect.

A prompt is a short piece of text that serves as input to an artificial intelligence (AI) model. AI prompts are used to both train and fine-tune machine learning algorithms to give better output. To get better results, context is key. Providing all relevant information to the AI results in better results in the response. I asked ChatGPT in a later prompt if I could swap potatoes for the Brussels sprouts in the recipe I just asked it to generate. It understood from the context of the previous recipe what I was trying to accomplish and suggested a different way to coat the potatoes.

Text generation prompts are used to generate coherent and meaningful text, such as writing a story or essay. Did you know that you can ask the AI to output that text in the style of your favorite author or as a pirate?

Translation prompts convert text from one language to another. The crazy thing is that you could ask the AI to translate the most commonly used French verbs by gender and give that answer in tabular form to create a handy study sheet (just in case you want to send a well-deserving web developer to Paris).

Question-answering prompts are just that, but you can get better answers if you are specific. Tell the AI where you are going and the ages and interests of the people traveling and it can generate an itinerary. In the future, as the AI matures, it will be able to book flights and hotels and purchase tickets to the attractions that interest you while taking into account the weather, transportation strikes, and other unforeseen challenges.

Text summarization prompts are used to make articles into shorter, more digestible summaries. The input level tops out at around 4,000 words but you can use copy and paste as your friend. The AI can condense the output into bullet points or as a single paragraph. You can have the text response adjusted to your audience as well. Ask the AI to summarize the gist of “War and Peace” for a 10-year-old to see what I mean.

If you have ever heard me talk or teach about technology, you know I want you to play around and not be scared. Go to https://chat.openai.com and make an account. Goof around and ask weird questions. There are amazing advances in science coming as a result of what AI is being asked to analyze and your prompt about the best gifts for a Jesuit might just help.

Your scrappy marketing web team is here to help! Here is the thing: we manage over 150,000 pages across multiple website domains. We know a great deal about building websites but only a moderate amount about Forensic Chemistry and Postcolonial Literature. We need your help as well! We rely on the faculty and staff to update the content of their websites as they should know their specialty better than the web team. If your information on a web page is outdated, please fix it. Be sure to check spelling and grammar before hitting the save button.

To schedule a Drupal training with our team, submit a marketing request or email marketing@loyno.edu.