September 11, 2024 - Web Priorities Notes

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Web Priorities Notes - Sep 11, 2024

Updates

DTO Topic page update

• Beta version out since 2020
• We’re releasing the stabilized version soon
• The patterns will be familiar to most of you
• New guidance for Contributors
• Main changes:
  • Decommissioned two patterns
  • Changed byline with Contributors pattern
  • You can make Services and Information header only visible to screen readers if you chose
• We will be sending out an email to explain the changes more fully, along with a slack message

Q&A

What is the direction for AEM?

A: Principal Publisher: We’ve prepared technical guidance to explain how to implement the changes in AEM.

Q: Any guidance to avoid overusing Topic pages?

A: We don’t have guidance specifically - it must be used for the first two levels of topics. We’re moving to a model of breaking out templates into components so that you can mix and match for other pages to build what you need.

Lisa Fast - DTO - A/B tests on homepage

• This latest test builds on a series of tests
• With Test 2 we were looking at using shorter pages
  • Replaced 12 links with a button that led to the all services page
  • This didn’t harm top task click throughs
  • When people went to “all services”:
    • The clicks to the 6 top themes rose significantly
    • Top 3 themes lost 1,200 visitors, so we are adding them back to the next test
• Test 3: Adding Life events option:
  • Main point is to test how the Life events options performs
• So far we are learning:
  • As long as you put the most popular links at the top of the page, it doesn’t cause problems to have a page with many links
  • There can be less popular items below on the page that don’t have a negative effect

Q&A Popular vs Important

We see the homepage as the way to help most people - but if people are looking for very specific programs that are important to them, they will most likely find it using Google.

And to increase the chance people can find you, ensure you have good strong Metadata - which is increasingly important with AI.

Q: How are you determining above the fold priority service positioning?

A: Purely based on the most popular/most visited pages.

Roundtable

Wage

• Gender Equality Week 2024 content is live (the digital toolkit should be posted by the end of the week
  • https://www.canada.ca/en/women-gender-equality/commemorations-celebrations/gender-equality-week/gender-equality-week-2024.html
  • https://www.canada.ca/fr/femmes-egalite-genres/commemorations-celebrations/semaine-egalite-sexes/semaine-egalite-sexes-2024.html