It’s all about Digital!

As it’s three months since I started in my role as Head of Digital Marketing and Communications I thought a contribution to the team blog was long overdue. So, a very belated… hello!

The introduction of my role, at the University of York, signals a change of direction for the former Web Office, who are being re-named Digital Marketing and Communications (or the Digital Team if you prefer). In a nutshell the focus is shifting from supporting departments to deliver digital communications to leading on the strategies to deliver them.

So what’s been happening in the last few months?

A significant part of our time has been spent preparing for a redesign of the York website. This is something that has been in the pipeline for some time but we have developed a plan to roll-out the new look and feel in a ten-phased project which starts this October. We didn’t want to wait to get everything ‘done’ before we started implementing changes so we’re taking an iterative approach; you’ll see the first changes next month after which we’ll blog about it here to explain what we have changed and why.

University of York staff can also follow the progress of the project on our wiki and find out what’s coming up next.

Speaking of the wiki we have spent some time developing a space to support Digital Marketing and Communications across campus. Within it staff can find information on Social Media, the Visual Identity inc. tone of voice, guides and resources to develop effective content, forms to request our support and details of the projects we’re working on.

Alongside the above we’ve also;

• Developed and launched the Welcome pages for new Undergraduates, in collaboration with our colleagues in the Marketing and Communications office.
• Developed a new process for managing the stories on our homepage (in preparation for the new one!)
• Held some really engaging workshops with Content Strategist, Relly Annett-Baker, and as a result started work to define our tone of voice and developed guidance (available from the wiki) to develop and manage our content.
• Revised the way we run projects (not substantially as Dan and Paul had some excellent processes in place) but we’ve recently gone back to Sprints and started to rotate support so that Amanda has more opportunities to get more involved in project-work.
• Started the re-brand of our Social Media accounts to create a uniformed look and feel (see UniofYork and UoYStudy) and developed guidance around ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ accounts.

All of the above has been happening alongside providing support to colleagues across campus, training staff to use the Web CMS and being involved in the many strategic discussions about the future of digital at York. So, all in all, it’s been a very busy summer!

What we’ve been up to, Spring 2013

Oftentimes it’s hard to know what other teams are working on and easy to miss interesting developments that get released without a big launch. With that in mind, we thought an occasional series of updates about things we’ve been working on might be of interest.

Festival of Ideas

One of the biggest things we worked on throughout May was the 2013 Festival of Ideas website, including listings and ticket bookings (via EventBrite) for over 150 events.

 

History of the University - a timeline

Built as part of our 50th Anniversary site, our interactive timeline of the University’s history features well over 100 entries, with videos and imagery to help tell the story.

Food and drink on the web

We’ve started a project working with Commercial Services to move catering and bars information into the Web CMS. There’s not much to see just yet, but work is underway to create a dedicated section of the website for catering and drinking outlets on campus, which should be coming soon.

Updating the campus map

The campus map page now has more location pins available, including a dedicated section for venues being used for Festival of Ideas events, in order to help those who may not be familiar with the University to find their way around.

Also pretty cool, but not one we can take the credit for (that belongs with IT Services and Estates), is internal mapping of campus buildings starting to roll out on Google Maps. If you zoom in close, internal mapping information for most buildings on campus is starting to appear. It’s early days, for both us and Google (they’re using us as a pilot for universities in the UK), so we’re not shouting about it yet but this should be really handy once everything’s in place.

York Research Database and the University search engine

We launched the York Research Database back in February, but it took us another couple of months to test and integrate results into our main University search engine, but they’re there now. The big challenge was not indexing too many pages - the research database contains such a vast amount of data that indexing all of it would have overwhelmed the search engine.

Foursquare

We’ve done a small piece of work to establish ourselves on Foursquare. After taking ownership of all our locations a few months ago, we’ve been updating them with accurate information, up to date imagery and links to additional resources.

Updated Twitter widgets

Twitter are in the process of retiring their v1 API, which meant that that our custom Twitter widget available in the Web CMS was about to stop working. We've updated the template to now use the updated standard Twitter widget and it’s working well.

Improving our YouTube channel and notes on video

If you’ve been following our YouTube channel you may have noticed that some of our videos now have a unified thumbnail scheme. This helps in maintaining a brand identity across the institution - we’ve used departmental colours on the bands across the thumbnails in order to better fit them in. We’ve also been doing something of a spring clean on the channel, deleting some old playlists and updating others.

The featured playlist is now a focus on our History Project, including a new series of oral history videos. If you’re interested in a more multimedia-based history of the University there’s some really interesting content here.

We also added some new tips on producing video for the web which are well worth a read if you’re considering adding video content to your site.

Welcome pages

The undergraduate welcome pages will be seeing a big overhaul for the 2013 intake of students. As well as cutting down on the number of pages, we’ve redesigned them to mesh more closely with the welcome booklet sent out to all new students. The pages will be going live in July, in time to help a whole new generation of students settle in at York.

Website redesign

In more behind-the-scenes news, we’ve been doing a lot of work on preparing for a big website redesign. If you’ve had a look at our 50th site you’ll have already seen an idea of what it’s going to look like, but there’s still a lot more to come!

Web office lunchtime screenings

Last summer we started running monthly lunchtime sessions in the Web Office where we'd watch a recording of a talk from a conference or a virtual seminar on a web-related topic (design, development, UX, content strategy, social media, etc).

We've had a bit of a hiatus, but we're now up and running again and are opening them up to anyone who'd like to come along.

Our next screening will be 'Content Strategy: Maximizing a Business Asset' at 12.45pm on Friday 14 June in HG21 Heslington Hall. This is a recording of a virtual seminar by Kristina Halvorson, one of the leading names in the growing discipline of content strategy.

If you'd like to come along then you just need to turn up on the day, and feel free to invite others along too.

If you're interested in finding out about future screenings you can join our Google Group to receive updates.

History of the University - an interactive timeline

Recently we published an interactive timeline on which you can explore the key milestones, facts and figures of the University's 50 year history. There are over 150 entries, including historical images, newspaper clippings and videos of the University's past, all in an easy to use and attractive interactive format.

Building the timeline

The timeline was built using Tiki-Toki, an cloud-based timeline product. We tested quite a lot of alternatives and nothing really compared; it's a great product.

Users can pan, zoom, enlarge and browse stories quickly and easily, including on tablets and smartphones. The timeline can be filtered to just show a particular category of story or searched for keywords. We've been really pleased with the response so far - everyone who has seen it seems to like it.

The Tiki-Toki authoring interface

From the creator's end, too, it is incredibly easy to use, requiring only a date and some text in order to place a story on the timeline. The software automatically places an entry in the relevant spot and manages the spacing of multiple stories. The ability to embed images, audio and video is also helpful, and has allowed us to develop a rich gallery alongside the textual information presented.

Top 10 press releases, features and public lectures on the web in 2012

While it may be April, there are always things we can learn from evaluating past years, so we’ve decided to have a look over the most popular news, features and public lectures were on the University website in 2012.

Press releases

The University’s Press Office published over 200 press releases in 2012, resulting in media coverage around the world. The top stories on the University website were as follows.

10. Yoga: a cost-effective treatment for back pain sufferers?

Published mid-August, this story of the UK’s largest study of the health benefits of yoga describes how specialised classes could be a cost-effective way of treating back pain. The story had a second spike in visits in mid-Autumn as interest picked up again on Facebook.

9. University of York formally joins the Russell Group today

This article from August announces the University’s joining of the Russell Group, following its acceptance to the organisation earlier in the year.

8. University of York students celebrate success

Graduation was in the second week of July. A lot of traffic here came from Google, Twitter and Facebook.

7. Academic leaders help York to mark its 50th year

For its fiftieth anniversary, the University appointed sixteen new professors, as detailed in this article from July 4th.

6. Scientists discover new clue to the chemical origins of life

Published in January, this story describes a process which hints at how life on Earth first formed. Almost a quarter of the article’s traffic came through the University’s RSS feed.

5. Pioneering archaeology wins Royal award for University of York

On February 24th the Queen presented the University with an award for its archaeological research.

4. Gender equality influences how people choose their lovers

This article from September covers a study from the Department of Psychology on how increased gender equality has reduced gender differences in mate selection.

3. “Trust” provides answer to handaxe enigma

Almost three quarters of the hits on this piece from November 21st are attributable to links from archaeological news aggregator archaeologica.org. It covers research by the Department of Archaeology which suggested that paleolithic handaxes showed bonds of trust between specimens of homo erectus, challenging earlier theories of dominance and aggression.

2. Scientists “record” magnetic breakthrough

Our most-visited science article for the year was this one, detailing how physicists at the University were able to use magnets in a way which could potentially have big impacts on hard drive transfer speeds. The discovery was cited on tech news website engadget.com, where it inspired a spirited exchange in the comments thread.

1. The University of York is to become a member of the influential Russell Group of leading UK universities

The University’s invitation to join the Russell Group in March 2012 was by far the most viewed news story of the year, receiving almost three times as much traffic as the second place story (see the huge spike in the chart above). Over 10% of viewers came from Facebook.

Features

In addition to press release stories, we also publish feature articles which either delve deeper into academic work taking place at the University and tell other interesting stories. These were the most visited last year:

10. Ant behaviour tracked by tiny radio receivers in pioneering scientific study‌

After fitting one thousand ants with radio receivers, scientists at York tracked them to discover how they network and live.

9. York wins Outstanding Engineering Research Team award

While the article concerns the Times Higher Education Awards 2011 and was published in November that year, this article continued to receive significant numbers of visitors throughout the first half of 2012

8. You@York

Applicants who received an offer to study at York gain access to You@York, a personalised site providing information from the University and departments. The traffic patterns are interesting here, declining slowly over the year and spiking on A-level results day in August.

7. University of York wins Times Higher Education Award for Support for Early Career Researchers

The University won the award mentioned above, while several departments were shortlisted for other awards. The feature detailed the steps the University has taken in order to qualify, as well as information on the awards ceremony itself.

6. York celebrates ‘ideas’ with events for everyone

The annual York Festival of Ideas provided many experiences and exhibitions under the theme of “Metamorphosis”.

5. HRH The Princess Royal opens Diamond Wood at the University of York‌

HRH Princess Anne visited York to open the Diamond Wood at Heslington East in September 2012

4. “It’s behind you!” A look into the history of pantomime

An interesting entry on the history of pantomime, this was originally published in January 2011 and saw consistent hits throughout the year followed by a significant boost in the run-up to Christmas. Almost all hits were directly from Google, where the page ranks highly in searches for “pantomime history”.

3. Welcome to the University of York!

This feature provided links to resources that new students at the University would find useful. Most of its attention was focussed very clearly on the week running up to Welcome Week.

2. Public in the swim at York Sport Village

The £9m York Sport Village opened in August, featuring a swimming pool for both students and the public. The opening of such a large development generated a lot of interest, with the bulk of traffic coming directly from Google searches.

1. The Times Higher Education 100 Under 50

When the University was named one of the top ten “young” Universities in the world in May 2012, this feature summarised our achievement and the areas in which University excels. The page received almost eight times as many hits as our number two feature, including a large spike on first publication but then a steady stream of additional visits throughout the year (the page was linked prominently from most web pages using our standard design).

Public lectures

The University puts on a large number of free public lectures each year, attracting many people from both within the University and from the local community. The lectures cover all sorts of topics and are well worth attending - look out for the summer programme for this year coming soon.

In 2012, the most visited public lecture web pages were:

10. Sounds which can't be heard: The hidden secrets of an MP3 player

Professor David Howard from the Department of Electronics gave this lecture on the compression techniques used to shrink MP3 files.

9. Did Twitter save Bletchley Park?

As part of the Athena Swan programme, Dr Sue Black from University College London delivered this lecture on the efforts to save the World War Two codebreaking headquarters at Bletchley Park from decay.

8. Music and Physics

Professor Peter Main from the Department of Physics gave this lecture on the intermeshing of science and art, receiving a lot of attention in February.

7. Divided Britain: The causes and consequences of income inequality in the UK

On the theme of economic trouble, former Director-General of the Council for British Industry, Sir Richard Lambert delivered this lecture on the causes and consequences of the wealth gap in the UK. Interestingly for a lecture, this received fairly consistent traffic throughout October and November, instead of a large rise then fall.

6. Remembering the past: Protecting the future

York’s own Dr Jane Grenville delivered this lecture as a part of the events surrounding Holocaust Memorial Day

5. The Public Secret

Royal Holloway College’s Professor Robert Eaglestone delivered this lecture about public awareness of genocide as a part of Holocaust Memorial day.

4. Austerity or stimulus? How Keynes and Hayek shape our economic debate

This economics lecture was delivered by journalist Nicholas Wapshott and discussed how modern economic theories impact the global economy. Traffic to the page gradually rose before the event itself, before falling once it was over.

3. What do animals think?

This Royal Institute of Philosophy lecture was delivered by Cambridge’s Professor Tim Crane and focussed on questions of consciousness and existence.

2. Unemployment in recession

This topical lecture from Professor Christopher Pissarides of LSE covered modern thoughts on unemployment and its causes. Traffic followed a U-shape, peaking both when tickets became available and on the day of the talk itself.

1. Paradox: The nine greatest enigmas in science

Professor Jim Al-Khalili of the University of Surrey delivered this lecture on mysteries and questions that people have about science. As expected for a popular figure in science education, demand for tickets drove traffic particularly high in the weeks preceding the talk.

Campus Investment redesign

We've been working on a redesigned Campus Investment section of the website, trimming down a lot of the content which was either out of date or no longer relevant, leaving us with a significantly more streamlined set of pages.

All projects have been organised into categories - past, present and future - for those which have happened and are archived (such as Goodricke or Langwith colleges), those ongoing (such as the Chemistry redevelopment) and those yet to begin (such as College 9).

We hope you enjoy browsing through the listings; they've got a lot of pictures which are more prominent than before, giving a much clearer insight into how the University's campus is developing.

Are homepage carousels effective? (AKA the Brad Frost Carousel Challenge)

After reading Brad Frost's blog post about the effectiveness of carousels a couple of months ago, I decided to take up his challenge and see just how well the carousel on the University homepage was performing.

We put a lot of effort into producing a steady steam of features to go into the carousel, but does anyone actually read them?

The University of York homepage, complete with carousel in the top right

Our carousel is of the auto-advancing variety, with controls for pagination and pause / resume provided below. We didn't previously set a limit on the number of items that could be displayed in the carousel, but there were often eight or nine items to cycle through at any one time.

The results are in

We started tracking clicks on the carousel slides towards the end of February, along with clicks on the pagination and play/pause controls below. Technical details of the tracking setup can be found towards the end of this post.

For the first two weeks of tracking (20 February to 5 March), the distribution of clicks on the carousel slides looked like this:

Click distribution on carousel slides, 20 Feb to 5 March

It didn't come as too much of a surprise that the slide in first position got the most attention, but I wasn't expecting to see such a large skew. Around half of the clicks were on the first slide, with numbers dropping off rapidly after that. The poor slides in position eight were barely ever seeing the light of day.

The pause / resume button is rarely used, with less than 300 events registered (257 pauses, 36 resumes) since we've been tracking it. This suggests that the button is probably not noticeable enough.

Fewer carousel slots = more clicks?

Given that the items in positions outside the first few slots weren't getting much attention, we decided to reduce the number of items we have in the carousel to a maximum of five.

Total numbers of carousel clicks, 20 Feb - 27 March

We reduced the number of slots to 5 on around 15 March. Since then we've seen consistently more clicks on the carousel than we did when there were more features to choose from.

A possible explanation is that some of stories that we've had in the carousel over the last couple of weeks have been a bit more high-profile than usual (the announcement of our new Vice-Chancellor, BBC Question Time being broadcast on campus and our China graduation ceremony), which may have generated more interest anyway.

A more interesting theory is that we're seeing the paradox of choice in action - that giving people more choices creates anxiety and results in them not choosing anything. By reducing the number of items available to choose from, it's easier to make a choice and click on something.

We'll come back to this in a few weeks and see if we're still generating more clicks with fewer features.

The technical bit

If you're interested in how we're tracking this, read on.

Clicks on each of the carousel slides are tracked as events in Google Analytics. Analytics requires three values when tracking an event (category, action and label), which we're tracking as follows:

• Event Category: Carousel
• Event Action: slide-N clicked 
• Event Label: Destination URL

So an example event might look like:
'Carousel', 'slide-1-clicked', 'http://www.york.ac.uk/50/events/china/'

The call for each event is automatically assembled with jQuery, so there's no manual tagging required each time a new item is added to the carousel.

Categorising events in this way seems to work well as it allows us to view the data in quite a lot of different ways within Analytics.

Look out for

Something that tripped me up at first was that not all of the clicks on the carousel were registering with Analytics, and were appearing as 'cancelled' requests within Chrome's inspector panel.

Look out for cancelled requests (shown in red) in Chrome's inspector panel

The simple solution to this is to delay the request by a fraction of a second so that the event has time to register before the destination page starts to load. See Google's documentation on tracking outbound links for how to do this.