Current Progress

As of February 2026, two-thirds of the 158 websites hosted on www.bates.edu have been migrated to the new theme. The goal is to have all remaining sites transitioned in the coming weeks and months.

Functional Changes

The updated theme replaces legacy templates with full embrace of a block-based framework designed for standard screen resolutions and mobile devices. Key technical changes include:

• More Responsive Layout: Automatic adjustment for mobile and tablet views.
• Revised Typography: Updated styles for improved text legibility.
• New Content Blocks: A library of standardized components for site editors, including announcement and events, featured content, and photo galleries.

Implementation Schedule

Migration will continue through the spring. Offices whose sites have not yet been updated will be contacted as their phase of the rollout begins. No immediate action is required from site editors until they receive a notification from the Web Team.

What鈥檚 new

• A simpler header
  Header images are now off by default, reflecting feedback that they often distracted more than they helped.
• Happening Today
  The curated Featured Announcements section has been replaced with a dynamic list of events taking place on the current day, ensuring timely visibility without manual promotion.
• A clearer announcement layout
  Reminders and regular Announcements now appear together, with dates displayed more prominently. Announcements include image thumbnails for easier scanning, with full details available on click.
• Improved Announcement Dashboard
  The announcement creation interface has been improved to make posting clearer and more intuitive.

If you have questions or comments, please reach out to askbatesnow@bates.edu.

Thank you for your thoughtful use of 乐播传媒 Now and for helping keep it a useful shared resource for our community.

You don鈥檛 need to update your site every week 鈥� but reviewing your content regularly? That鈥檚 essential.

Maintaining web content that鈥檚 accurate, relevant, and up to date builds trust with your audience. It helps visitors find what they need, and it reflects well on your department, office, or program. On the flip side, outdated or redundant pages can create confusion, send the wrong message, or even misrepresent your work.

That鈥檚 why we鈥檙e launching the Outdated Content Report 鈥� a new automated email sent to site managers on a regular basis. Each report shows what percentage of your pages haven鈥檛 been updated in three years or more, and highlights the oldest content on your site, including the last modified date and quick view/edit links for each.

The report also lists all the site managers for your area, so you can easily coordinate updates with your team. And if a page is no longer needed? It’s completely fine to archive it. Not every piece of content needs to stick around forever 鈥� and clearing out what鈥檚 outdated makes it easier for your audience to find what matters most today.

You can dive deeper by clicking View Full Report in your email, where you’ll see additional site details, learn how to exclude pages from future reports, and more.

Need help? We鈥檙e here. Just reach out to webteam@bates.edu.

Let鈥檚 keep our digital spaces just as vibrant and current as the community they represent.

As you may know, 乐播传媒, led by ILS, has partnered with Goodkind, an AI chatbot, to improve the user experience across our website. This new tool uses our site鈥檚 content to provide quick answers and assistance to users 鈥� all in the chat format they’re increasingly looking for.

Early Access for You
Before the full launch, you can try out the chatbot now at . 

Launch Plans
Our goal is to roll out the chatbot on  next week, followed by a more extensive public launch across  and  in the weeks to come.

Keep Your Content Current
Because the chatbot relies on website content, it鈥檚 essential to continue your work in keeping pages and uploads accurate and up-to-date. Here are two tips to help with that work:

1. Use the聽Content Age Report聽to identify pages that haven’t been edited in years. To find the report, visit your site’s dashboard and scroll halfway down the page.
2. Check the聽Media Library聽(sort by upload date) to identify out of date PDFs.

This chatbot isn鈥檛 perfect, but it鈥檚 improving all the time. The more accurate and up-to-date our site content, the better it will perform, creating an improved user experience for everyone.

If you have any questions about using the chatbot, updating content, or the rollout timeline, please don鈥檛 hesitate to reach out.

Thank you for your contributions to  鈥� your work plays a vital role in making this new tool a success.

Best,
Nick
Senior Director of Digital Marketing
乐播传媒 Communications and Marketing

We are excited to share with you recent changes and accessibility improvements that have been made in WordPress this morning, as well as an offer of personalized WordPress training. 

Update to 6.6

This morning, we updated the instance of WordPress running  to the most recent version, 6.6. Most of this update鈥檚 changes are under the hood, though you will notice visual changes in the right sidebar panel when editing pages, namely to features like Publication status, Featured image, and Revisions. Honestly, it took me a moment to find where the Trash option had moved, but all the options are still there.

Block Accessibility

In August our partners in Accessible Education and Campus Life flagged for us that the Foldaway and Expandable Section blocks weren鈥檛 performing as intended on certain screen readers. We looked into it and discovered that these two blocks required some new code; now they鈥檙e both fully accessible.

Image Accessibility

One of the most powerful ways we can improve the accessibility of our website is the聽creation of Alternative Text for images. Alternative text, or alt text, is a concise text description conveying the content or purpose of an image. Of our website鈥檚 36,000 images, many are missing alt text 鈥� therein lies our opportunity. This morning we introduced a feature in WP that will remind site managers to provide alt text for their images before publishing new content. This reminder prompt will help us get closer to our accessibility goal of 100% of images having alt text.

Next Steps

If you have any questions or concerns about these updates or WordPress in general, or if you would like to schedule an individual WordPress training, you can reach us at webteam@bates.edu.

Thanks!

Nick and Jake

What’s Alt Text? Here’s an Example.

Check out the highlighted Alternative Text field in the right side of the screenshot below, “A piece of comb, oozing with wild honey.” Optimal alt text is descriptive, but also concise. For images that also have captions, the alt text can be simpler, to avoid redundancy. Alt text doesn’t appear visually on the frontend of the website, but it still provides value to the overall user experience.

Who is Asking for Alt Text?

Two of the largest advocates for alt text are the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) 鈥� the main international standards organization for the web 鈥� and the United States Department of Justice 鈥� the government department tasked with the enforcement of federal law.

Who Benefits From Alt Text?

The short answer is, “everyone.” But here’s a more specific breakdown of who benefits from alt text.

• Users of search engines, including the new generation of AI-fueled tools.
• Users wanting more information about an image.
• Users of screen readers, text to speech software, and non-graphical browsers.
• Users not loading images.

Alt Text Creation Tips

Again, alt text is a brief text description of an image. But more specifically, this description should focus on the content of the image as it relates to the overall content of the page it’s on. In other words, you’re not obligated to describe all of the elements of the image, only the elements that are relevant to your page’s content.

Tips

• Describe the image’s content within the context of a page.
• For images that are link to other pages, describe the purpose of the link. e.g. “Follow us on Instagram.”
• Keep it concise. A few words; a sentence at most. 125 characters is a good guide.
• Don鈥檛 start with 鈥渋mage of,鈥� but do specify medium if not photo. Ex. Illustration, painting, logo, etc.
• Minimize redundancy by avoiding duplication of surrounding text. E.g. caption or page text.

Alt Text Edge Cases

Since multiple factors inform what optimal alt text is, it’s hard to prescribe absolute rules for the creation of alt text. Here are a few examples that demonstrate how alt text rules can break down.

The rare case when alt text isn’t required

Practically speaking, all images need alt text. Per the W3C guidelines, though, there is one small exception: decorative images. And while it’s ultimately more accessible to implement decorative images with CSS rather than HTML, the W3C does allow the practice. In these rare instances when decorative images are implemented with HTML, the most accessible option is to keep their alt text fields empty.

What’s missing in bulk alt text and accessibility reports

Conversely, just because alt text exists, that doesn鈥檛 mean that it conveys the 鈥渃ontent or purpose鈥� of the image. If a site manager is populating alt text fields with irrelevant content such as “Image,” then their web pages won’t be accessible, even though their alt text fields are populated. The practice of populating alt text fields just to populate them will get your content to pass most bulk accessibility tests, but it won’t make your content more accessible to your audiences. For this reason, regularly reviewing your images’ alt text individually (and not in bulk) is recommended.

Choose concision over detail

More descriptive alt text isn鈥檛 better; concise alt text is better. When detailed descriptions are needed, rely on your primary page content and image captions. While it’s true that businesses optimizing their content for search engine results do rely on long, descriptive alt text, they are valuing traffic volume over web accessibility. Since we’re elevating accessibility, we can choose concision in our alt text.

Conclusion

One of the most powerful ways we can improve the accessibility of our website is the creation of alt text for images. We have the opportunity to create alt text for many images on www.bates.edu. Thanks for your help in moving us closer to our accessibility goal of 100% of images having alt text.

Additional Resources

Emergency Example

Our Emergency Banner is the one banner option that defaults to presenting open (it can be minimized by clicking the X). The status and content of the banner itself are driven by our cloud-based Emergency website, emergency.bates.edu. The text elements, timestamp, and click-through link of this banner can all be customized, with the click-through usually pointing to the blog on the Emergency website.

Use case: Emergencies.

Announcement Example

Use cases: Inauguration, Commencement, MLK Day, livestreams.

Notification Example

Use cases: Non-urgent campus and community notifications such as snow days and partial closures.

Great Day Fundraiser Example

Year-end Fundraiser Example

The Webteam would like to draw your attention to two new features we recently added to WordPress which are likely to be useful for you. 

Block Patterns

Do you have a bunch of information, but are not sure of the best way to present it? Block patterns give you the ability to insert a custom-designed group of blocks that make it easier to improve the layout/design of your page. These patterns were designed by the 乐播传媒 Webteam to give you a head start when putting together a page. There are currently seven, but expect more to be added in the future. Read more

Scheduled / Expiring / Hidden Content

This has been a request for a long time, and it’s finally here! By wrapping your content in this block, you can schedule it to appear or disappear at some point in the future. The block can be used anywhere within the page (multiple times if you’d like), so you can schedule/expire certain parts of your page without modifying the rest. This block can also be used without a date, which will hide its contents except for logged-in WordPress users. This would be a great way to modify a page and elicit feedback from a colleague before going live.聽Read more

We hope you enjoy and let us know what you think!

A big thank you to Mei Kane ’23 for writing up the detailed usage guidelines at the above links. 

Wrapped into the launch of was a decision made by the folks at WordPress to make the new Block Editor the default editor, replacing the Classic Editor.

To help site managers at 乐播传媒 continue to use the Classic Editor, we installed the Classic Editor Plugin. Thanks to the Classic Editor Plugin, site managers at 乐播传媒 have had the option to edit their content either in the Classic Editor or the Block Editor.

Future

Seeing that the Block Editor has been in place at 乐播传媒 for over 4 years, we can safely say that the Block Editor is now the current status quo. On April 20, 2023, we started to fully embrace the Block Editor by working through each site and turning off support for the Classic Editor.