Ohio University 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’s 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’s 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.
“I am confident that the redesigned page will better meet the needs of our faculty and staff and will strengthen the University’s internal communication efforts,” she said.
The updated page, moved as part of the University’s WebCMS migration project, will provide direct access to important or useful links, and include a more robust news feed of employee-focused stories.
“We 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’s 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.
“The current Employees page is just a large collection of links to different employee resources," Logan said. “It 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’re easier to find.”
Another difference is that the resources links on the current page are in alphabetical order and not logically grouped.
“We 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,” Logan said. “We basically took a bunch of links and reorganized them, boiled them down to essential information and put them in the new system.”
Logan said the current Employees page existed almost independently of the University Human Resources page and was primarily controlled by the UCM staff.
“When we decided to improve the page’s look and function, we made sure Human Resources was part of the redesign,” 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’s CommonSpot content management platform, which will be decommissioned this summer.
“The 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,” Logan said.