Blog

Applying Agile and Waterfall Workflows to an Academic Web Team

Following a year as the CALS/LAS Web Team’s project manager, I decided I needed to learn more about Agile workflows.

How to Find Images For Your Website

Learn how to find and use images legally for your website. Discover Creative Commons licenses, public domain content, and top resources like Flickr, Pexels, and Google Images.

Optimizing Marketing Campaigns with UTM Parameters

Marketing campaigns are about more than just effective landing pages. They're also about reaching your audience in the right places. Learn how to use UTM parameters to track performance across channels and refine your strategy for better results. 

Is Mobile-First Design for You?

Learn why optimizing your website for mobile is crucial for better user experience and higher search engine rankings. Discover steps to implement mobile-first design and the benefits it brings.

Create Accessible Tables Using These Five Tips

When it comes to accessibility on your website, there is a lot to keep track of. Iowa State University has set a policy for all public-facing websites to achieve a 95% overall accessibility score by August 1, 2025.

The Basics of Keyword Research

Many people talk about keywords and how they can be associated with your website, but what does this mean, and how is this process done? This post will guide those looking to be more strategic about their website content and the traffic from search. 

Building Your Free Faculty Website with Enrollment Success in Mind

Is your department utilizing faculty websites to their full potential? The CALS/LAS Web Team supports ISU faculty websites across the university, and you can have one (for free)! 

Getting More from Your Website Analytics: Using the Online Dashboard

Access to the Matomo analytics dashboard can help you gain insights into these questions and more. In this blog post we'll introduce the dashboard and then walk through some frequently asked questions about website analytics.

Addressing Common Accessibility Errors

Using technology to showcase your work can be a powerful tool for recruitment. However, you may be missing out on top candidates if the website you’ve built isn’t digitally accessible.

SEO: Steps to Improve Your Rankings

If you've been paying attention to the tech world lately, you're aware of the rising emergence of artificial intelligence (AI). It's impacting on most industries in one way or another, including search!

Content Planning for the New Year

Like many projects, websites start strong with strategy and planning. Many site owners come to us with a clear website purpose and build page content out to support their goals, then sit back and watch as their newly launched site begins to generate traffic and leads. Where we see many goals fall flat, however, is with the content creation after a site launches. As projects begin to pick up speed, other demands take over, and there is less time to focus on content creation.

Designing Your New Homepage Using the iastate22 Resources

The CALS/LAS web team continues to roll out the iastate22 Web Theme update to the Sites+ platform.

Transitioning Sites to the iastate22 Theme

Learn more about the process from the CALS/LAS web team to implement a new website theme provided by the university with the goal of creating a consistent user experience across all university websites!

Best Practices for Optimizing Images for the Web

Properly sizing your images on the web can feel like a big undertaking! Many people think the larger the image, the better quality they will have when showcasing it; however, this is not the case for websites. That's because images larger than 1 MB are known to slow down your webpage's load time. If a visitor has to wait for your images to load, they may move on from your website and try another! While best practice is to post high-quality images, it's important to find the balance between quality and load speed.

Your Siteimprove Dashboard Explained

At the beginning of each month, CALS/LAS website owners receive a Siteimprove Monthly Accessibility Report by email, giving an update on the health of their sites. To help our website editors with a lot on their plates, we've broken down the report into sections and encourage those who can to take it one improvement at a time! Scroll to the corresponding month and get to work!

How to Update your Website with Confidence

Do you feel nervous or anxious when you edit your website? Does the pesky negative self talk get started just thinking about a website change? Are you comfortable making website updates but only get time when everything is “on fire”? Good news - it doesn’t have to feel scary, annoying, or chaotic.

Thankfully, there are some easy tips to help you through website content management. In this post, we’ll explore a few easy concepts to help you understand, manage, and organize your website editing. Let’s get started!

How to Audit Your Website Content

Whether you have a newly launched website or a site whose content has seen fresher days, it's a great time to assess what information your visitors want, need, or aren't using and take appropriate action to improve it. For those not so "Type A" website owners who aren't as excited about "getting organized" and wondering if this post is relevant to your website, answer this simple question: Do you know exactly what content lives on your site and who owns it?

Understanding Your New Monthly Analytics Report

Building websites takes a great deal of maintenance and a deep understanding of users and their goals. So how do you, as a content editor, know what the user wants? The first step is understanding your monthly analytics report. We break down each section of the Matomo analytics report to give you insight into what the data can tell you. 

How to Start Goal Tracking for Your Website

One of the first steps to building a website is to determine what the goals for that site will be. Every website's content and structure should be built with the intent of getting the visitor to the desired action, or goal! Follow along for a step-by-step guide to getting started with goals.