Web Support Desk

You can submit a ticket through this online form, which is powered by our ticket system called Freshdesk. You can also submit a ticket request by emailing support@usfsm.freshdesk.com -- your email will automatically populate a ticket request in the system and you can continue to respond to our questions and comments via email. Please include details regarding exactly what you would like to update, as well as the URL and any PDFs you wish to include in the update.

We aim to resolve tickets as fast as possible. Some of the smaller requests can be taken care of as quickly as 24 hours; however, other more extensive web projects may require a meeting with the Communications & Marketing team and may take up to a few weeks to complete depending upon the project scope.

Our main website is primarily targeted at prospective students and current students who either want more information about our programs or are looking for resources available to them here on campus. This means that the main purpose for a bulk of the content on our website should be directed to these audiences in a way that is engaging, helpful and easy to understand.

We do, however, have secondary audiences. These include faculty, staff, community partners, donors and alumni, which is why we have worked to organize the information needed for these audiences in sections of the website that would be most useful for them.

Our website structure has been optimized for the best user experience based on evidence and data from Google Analytics. Should you have any questions about the menu structures, placement of resources, etc., please contact the Communications and Marketing department.

First, upload the documents or folder containing multiple documents to your Box account at usf.box.edu. Then submit a ticket with links to those documents, and we'll take it from there. 

Please keep in mind you only have to send us the link once- after that, you can update the document or folder contents as often as you need and the Box link will still work. 

You can submit an event through the Event Request Form. 

Yes! There are a lot of factors that go into creating and publishing great content for the web. Here are some of the most important things to consider when sending us content you'd like to be placed on the website.

Accuracy

Before sending us written content for the USF Sarasota-Manatee campus website, please ensure all of your information is accurate. This includes everything from dates/times of events, to address and phone numbers, and names/places. Be sure to proofread for these types of errors prior to submitting a ticket.

Quality

Is the content written in an engaging way? Is this information useful for the general public or for current/prospective students? If you need help generating creative, thoughtful, engaging and high-quality written content for the website, please don't hesitate to reach out to our Communications & Marketing Team. We can set up a meeting with you to gather information that may need to be placed on the website, but assist in presenting the information in a way that will have the greatest impact and be most useful for our website visitors.

Conciseness

Sometimes less really is more! When it comes to the web, people prefer to scan for the content they need and typically don't spend a lot of time reading a page that has a dozen or so paragraphs. Especially with the new trend of increased users visiting our website from mobile devices, it's important that we keep a majority of our webpages brief and concise.

Use of White Space

When there is a need for more lengthy content, utilizing more white space (the blank space on our webpages between paragraphs and line breaks) is highly important. This can allow users to digest the information more easily without being overwhelmed.

Readability

Avoid jargon and technical terms whenever possible. Also be sure to write in clear, easy-to-read sentences and break up longer sentences with punctuation. If you are used to writing at a higher technical level, consider asking us to assist in rephrasing what you'd like to say or ask yourself this question while writing: "How could I write this in a way that even a 5th grader could understand?"

References & Hyperlinks

If you are referring to other partner institutions, local/national organizations, companies or government websites, it's extremely helpful to include hyperlinks within the text to those resources for our website visitors to refer to. This is especially important for any web content that refers to statistics, studies or any other websites where we may be getting our information from. Plagiarism isn't only for traditional texts -- we should watch out for it in the digital world, too!

Subheaders

If you have a page with a few key parts that add up to more than a couple paragraphs on a webpage, subheaders can be a huge help to guide the reader through the text and give them a sneak preview at what the next section of text will be about.

Call-to-Action

As we strive to provide as much information as possible to our website visitors, it's extremely helpful to provide them with a call-to-action on nearly every webpage they visit. This can be as simple as guiding them to call/contact someone within your department for help, or suggesting that they continue to explore other resources we offer on the website. The idea here is to guide website visitors to do something upon reading each page.

One of the most important steps we can take when placing new images on the website is ensuring they are quality images, properly sized and the appropriate file type.

Whether they are photographs or graphic design images, they should be at a minimum of 72 DPI (dots per inch).

They should also be sized appropriately for the website. Images larger than 2000 pixels in width/height may take up a lot of space on our website and may cause certain pages to run more slowly, causing a poor user experience for anyone browsing our website.

Photographs should be saved in a JPEG or JPG file type, while graphic design pieces (such as flyers) should be either in PNG or PDF format.

If you do not know how to adjust the settings for your photo, please let us know and we can help adjust these as necessary.

For any updates that go beyond simple updates of webpage information, we want to make sure someone from the Communications & Marketing web team meets with you in person. This includes any requests for new landing pages, new sections (multiple pages grouped together) for the website, changes in menu structure, etc.

Contact Danielle McCourt at 941-359-4770 or dmccourt@usf.edu to set up a meeting.