Team Movember

If you've had any meetings with us or popped into Web Office HQ recently, you'll have noticed that the male members of the team are currently sporting moustaches.

It's all in aid of Movember, to raise awareness and funds for men's health issues in the month formally known as November.

If you'd like to make a donation, or just admire our progress, head over to our Movember team page.

Making meta data 'descriptions' more visible

We've recently made an update to the way meta data is published by the CMS which makes entering good meta data for University web pages much more worthwhile.

Getting people to enter good meta data into pages can be a losing battle, but hopefully I'll persuade you that it's worthwhile! I'm as bad as anyone at forgetting to do it, so I'm going to try to take my own advice too :)

Meta descriptions in search results

The change we've made means the University's internal search engine will now use the description field as the default text in search result snippets if it exists. External Google will also use the data, though it's a little less predictable (it tries to judge whether your description is 'good' or not, which is pretty subjective).

This increased visibility of descriptions leads to two recommendations:

1. If you don't have meta data in your pages, you really should add some
2. If you do have meta data in your pages, it's worth making sure it's informative and well written

Writing good meta descriptions

Google provide plenty of information about how to write good meta descriptions (see the latter section of that page, but while you're there you should read the top section about titles too!) and sites such as SEOmoz have good coverage too.

The key is to be descriptive: Tell someone enough about what's on the page to help them decide whether that's the page they should look at or not. Don't just state the obvious - saying 'Department of XYZ homepage' tells users that it's your homepage, but nothing else. 'The top XYZ department for student satisfaction in the UK. Discover more about our undergraduate and postgraduate courses plus world-leading research.' is more much more informative.

How long should a description be?

We recommend between 100 and 150 characters.

Google displays between 150 and 160 characters, so going over that risks your description being truncated.

At the other end of the spectrum though, if your description is particularly short Google may supplement it with content pulled from the page. This has happened with our maps page:

The first line in the snippet is our 'description'; the second is pulled from page content

Since you can probably write a better description of your page content than Google can automatically generate, it's worth providing enough content to stop it deciding to supplement what you provide.

Adding descriptions in the CMS

In addition to making meta descriptions more useful when published, we've made it easier to add them in the CMS too.

Meta data is added in the same place as always - the 'Meta' tab in the Modify Section screen - but we've removed all the other fields apart from description and keywords so it's much easier to get straight to the correct field to fill in. Any Moderator can add or amend meta data fields and there's no approval needed of any changes; they'll go live with the next publish automatically.

Seeing the effects

Search engines take a while to re-index pages, so if you change your meta descriptions don't expect search results to update instantly. Give it a few days, maybe up to a couple of weeks, and you should see the effect of your change.

Happy meta data updating!

Linking to individual tabs on tabbed content pages

We've recently made some changes to how our tabbed content templates work in the CMS, so it's now possible to link directly to an individual tab, whether that's the careers tab on a course page or the publications tab on a staff profile.

This change also means that as you navigate through multiple tabs on a page, pressing the back button in your browser will now take you to the previous tab you were viewing, rather than the previous page.

Saying goodbye to Internet Explorer 7

I was digging around in Google Analytics last month and noticed a slightly worrying trend: while IE6 usage has gradually been gradually falling to an almost insignificant amount, the number of visits from IE7 users has been showing hardly any sign of waning over the last year, holding steady at around 6% of all our traffic.

Surprisingly, a very large chunk of the IE7 traffic was coming from devices on the University network, even though most people are running either IE8 or 9. It turned out that this was because there's a setting in IE9 to 'Display intranet sites in Compatibility View' (where Compatibility View makes IE9 behave as if it's IE7), and this was enabled by default for york.ac.uk.

A couple of quick emails to IT Services later, and a change was pushed out to all supported desktops to turn this setting off (unless the user had manually set it).

The change was immediate:

Change in internal IE7 traffic after disabling Compatibility View for intranet sites (the regular dips are weekends)

We're now down from 18% to 6% for our internal IE7 traffic, and overall it's come down a couple of percentage points from 6% to 4%.

New staff homepage

Following the launch of the improved current students site last October, we’ve been working on making a lot of the functionality from the student homepage available to staff too. Due to go live mid-September, the new staff homepage will include:

• Personalised content including your timetable, library record and news from YorkExtra. This will be particularly valuable as the desktop widget for YorkExtra is no longer available for PCs that have been upgraded to Windows 7.
• Upcoming public lectures, latest press releases and the University Magazine.
• Quick contacts search and quick links to core services.
• A refreshed design throughout the staff site, providing quick access to frequently used services and content from every page.
• Improvements to the search facility to bring you more relevant results.

Content from the current site can now be accessed from the left-hand menu and footer. We hope that the homepage will be a useful starting point for staff, giving them an overview of what’s going on at the University.

Links on the current homepage are now available via the left-hand navigation

The development for this is continuing alongside development of the student site as a collaboration between the Web Office and IT Services.

Your feedback is essential to us creating an effective site for staff. You can send it to us via email to web-office@york.ac.uk or, once it’s launched, via feedback form.

Welcome to new undergraduates

We've just launched a set of web pages to welcome new undergraduates, giving them easy-to-digest information about everything they need to know before they arrive, that they can dip into as and when.

What looks like a simple set of pages has actually taken about nine months to put together, given the huge amount of content planning that was needed before the web team could start building web pages. 

A small group of people in the Academic Registry spent weeks reviewing what is sent to new undergraduates, when and who by, in an effort to reduce the amount of paper that's posted out and tell people what they need to know in a way that doesn't overwhelm them. The results were translated into a web structure and content by our Internal Comms team.

We want give students a warm welcome before they get to campus, so there are eight short welcome videos from student reps and members of staff - people who new students will regularly hear from or meet when they get here.

But by far the most popular video on the site is the 'Unofficial official guide to the University'. This came from an idea originally suggested by Tim Ngwena while he was YUSU president. He realised that most students don't understand the way the University is organised and how they fit in, and wanted to do something about it. This cartoon is the result.

Put together by Tim (now working for the Alumni team) and talented student cartoonist Hugo Brook, it's been scripted to give a short, friendly, informal guide around the University's structure. Something that could be a very dull read has been brought to life - we think it's brilliant, and we hope you enjoy it too.

The Social Web Team

You can now hear the latest tales from the basement of Heslington Hall on our official Twitter account.

We’ll use it to keep our followers updated about new and current projects we’re working on, the latest news and information from the team, and our thoughts on web issues and developments.

Support queries and requests for work are tough to answer in 140 characters, so please send those to web-office@york.ac.uk as normal.

You can follow us at @UoYwebteam

You can also see the latest University news on the University's official twitter, @UniofYork, and Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/universityofyork.

New Centre for Lifelong Learning site goes live

The redeveloped Centre for Lifelong Learning site is now live, powered by the Web CMS.


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Web CMS Upgrade Coming Soon

We're upgrading Site Manager to Version 7 in June, so here's a quick rundown of the improvements that make it much easier to use.

Big improvements to the look and feel

When you log on to the new version of Site Manager you'll notice a difference immediately. The layout and menus are much clearer and easier to use. You can navigate down into the section you're working on without losing your place, as it no longer refreshes the page. And there's no more Tools menu - you'll find the Media Library under the Content menu.

Improved media library

You can upload an image while you're editing text: just go to the media library from the content edit screen and you'll see a new option there.  It's much easier to find out where photos and files are being used - select a 'usage' tab in the individual media item and you'll see a list of locations.  And find media much more easily by adding keywords when you put them into the media library - you can search on them now.

Drag and drop to move sections

It's really easy to move content around: just pick up a section with your mouse and drag it to where you want it to be. All the links will update automatically.

Save as draft

You can now save a piece of content as a draft - anyone using blogging software will know how handy this is. This means draft content doesn't appear in the approvals queue, so it can't accidentally be published.

Easy to preview your content

There's now an option to preview your page from the drop down menu in the content tab, meaning you don't have to preview while editing the content itself.

We are really excited about these changes because we know they will solve a lot of problems for you.

So when is all this happening?

We are testing the software at the moment and subject to no unforeseen problems, we will work on the upgrade from 09:00 on Monday, 25 June until the evening of Wednesday, 27 June, 2012.  It's a major upgrade and the Web CMS will be out of action for three days: we're giving good notice so you can plan around it and let us know (web-office@york.ac.uk) straight away if the dates clash with a major event within your department.  During the upgrade, all pages produced by the Web CMS will remain visible on the website.  However, it will not be possible to edit content.

We're revising our help pages and training notes, so these will be available for you at the time of the launch of the new software.

New Languages for All site goes live

The redeveloped Languages for All site is now live, powered by the Web CMS.

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New team member - Helen Fisher

Two weeks ago I started as Web Project Assistant in the Web Office, and as a new member of the team I’ve been asked to write a blog post as a short introduction to myself.

I’ve worked with web content and various content management systems for the past six years. My last role was as a Web and Project Assistant at the University of Leeds. I’ve been involved with most parts of the web life cycle but have a particular interest in information architecture and content strategy.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be starting to work on a variety of projects which I’m looking forward to getting involved in. I'm still learning my way around and getting to grips with a new place to work so feel free to say hello and help with directions!

Behind the scenes of our new map

Last week we quietly released a preview of the University's new online map.  Our map launch blog post introduces the map's features and some future developments. This follow-up post delves a little deeper to examine how we put the map together.

Early sketches of the interactive map

There are a few components all stitched together to make the map work: map data, map tiles, a map user interface and some York-specific data which we drop onto the map. We'll go through each in turn.

The map data

Map data is drawn from OpenStreetMap.org. This is basically the Wikipedia of maps, and we're able to add and edit buildings, paths and more as the campus develops. As Paul mentioned in our earlier post, we're really grateful to the folk who worked on the YUSU iPhone app last year because they did a lot of work getting OpenStreetMap data up to scratch for their map features.

The campus on openstreetmap.org

You can see the campus on openstreetmap.org directly, but if you do you'll notice that it looks quite different to on our version. That's because we're using custom map tiles...

Custom map tiles

The map starts to get a bit cluttered if we include absolutely everything from OpenStreetMap, so in order to emphasise the most important features of campus we use a custom map style which we developed using tools from CloudMade.com.

CloudMade's Style Editor allow us to choose which types of elements to display on the map, and what colours to use for each element.

The CloudMade Style Editor

Every month or so CloudMade take a snapshot of OSM data, which is then used to generate map images (tiles) using the rules defined in our custom style, which we use on the website.

The monthly updates might not sound ideal, especially for a rapidly developing campus such as ours. But when balanced against the ease with which we can make updates and the flexibility that these methods offer us, we think it's the right choice and will allow us to build a better online map than any of the alternatives.

The map user interface

Hopefully when you browse and zoom the map it feels instantly familiar. If it does, that's  because it works exactly the same as Google Maps. Indeed, it is Google Maps, at least in terms of the controls you use to interact with it.

The Google Maps API is the set of programming tools Google provide to let anyone have a go at building something with their technology. It has a relatively little known feature which allows map tiles from any source to be loaded into their interface. So, we can load our OSM map data, which we've transformed to a York-tailored style with CloudMade, directly into a familiar Google interface.

Using Google's maps API brings some other benefits too. We get satellite view, which although it hasn't kept up with developments on Heslington East too well, gives an interesting aerial perspective on campus. We also get StreetView, so you can drag the 'pegman' onto campus and see what it looks like at ground level. But possibly  most importantly, at least for those of us working on building the map, we get to use some of the most robust and widely used mapping code around, which is invaluable when feeling your way through a project like this. Which brings us neatly to...

York's custom data

A draggable, zoomable overview map of campus would have been a big improvement on the previous static version even without anything extra. But, if there's one thing we've learned from our own use of the map, reports from other people and, most tellingly, from watching other people in usability tests, it's that finding somewhere you've never been before can be incredibly frustrating. A nice 'slippy' map doesn't help much if you don't know where to look.

Alongside the map we load a list of locations, and clicking any one drops a pin to show you exactly where that is. We know there's more to do - search and directions are features we hope to add in the future - but as a first step we think this should prove pretty handy.

We maintain our list of locations in a Google Spreadsheet, which we publish to the web for anyone to see if they know the link (take a look at the map location data). Doing this allows us to retrieve the data in some other formats using Google's data API. Unfortunately none of these formats are much use for loading straight into a web page. Fortunately, the web can do magical things, and we can use Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) to fetch our location data from Google in CSV format and translate it into a JSON data object. We load and process the JSON data using a bit of JavaScript and populate the list of locations alongside the map.

Location data stored in a Google Spreadsheet

We cache a copy of the JSON data rather than fetching it live from YQL every time, but that's just for speed and to reduce the number of possible points of failure. Even with the caching, managing our locations list like this means we can add or amend a location in a few minutes.

Putting it all together

Taken together, we think the combination of OSM data, Cloudmade custom-designed map tiles, the Google Maps API, a Google Spreadsheet, a simple YQL query and a sprinkling of homegrown JavaScript (although actually, even that uses JQuery and an onhashchange plugin so isn't completely our own) make for a pretty decent version 1 of a new online map.

We've got a big list of future feature ideas, most of which we're confident we can build on top of the foundations we've laid with this first release. All things considered, we think it's not bad at all for zero budget and just a few odd days of effort grabbed here and there.

Missed anything that you're interested in? Feel free to ask in the comments and we'll be glad to fill in any gaps.

Introducing our interactive campus map

We're really pleased to unveil our new interactive map of campus, which we've been working on over the last couple of months.

Easily find your way around campus with the new interactive map

With the new map, you can really quickly find any department, building or any of around 150 locations across campus. As well as departments and buildings, you can also see University services and facilities, colleges, cafés, bars, restaurants, shops, cash machines and car parks. So no more excuses for being lost around campus.

Within each category you also have the option to see all locations, useful for things like cafes and cash machines where you just want an idea of what's nearby.

"Show all" lets you see all the locations for any given category. Here's all the places to eat and drink on Heslington West

Anyone who has used Google Maps before will be familiar with the interface, which allows you to easily pan and zoom around the campus, and works great across all sorts of mobile devices.

Because we're using the Google Maps interface, you can switch to a satellite view of the campus and see what it looks like from above.

Looking down on the University lake with satellite view

In some parts of campus, you can also drag the orange "pegman" onto the map to enter Street View and see what the buildings look like.

Street View of Heslington Hall, home to Web Office HQ

Other improvements

We've made improvements to the rest of our maps and directions pages too, giving them a general tidy-up and have added a journey planner to campus, powered by Google Maps.

Get driving directions to campus from pretty much anywhere 

Still to come

This is the first version of the interactive map, and there's plenty more to come in the near future. At the top of our list we've got:

• Searching for locations by typing in their name, rather than browsing a list
• Walking and cycling directions between any two locations on campus
• Clickable pins to provide extra information about a location - such as an image of the building, links to websites, opening times
• Bus stops with live information about when the next bus is due

We're keen to hear what you all think would be most useful, so please let us know in the comments or via our feedback form.

We're really grateful to YUSU for sharing some of the work that they did for the map in the YUSU iPhone app. This gave us a great head start and meant that we could do this a lot quicker than we would have done otherwise.

Check back soon for our second post about the new map, where we'll go into the technical details of how it all works.

New Centre for Housing Policy site goes live

The redeveloped Centre for Housing Policy site is now live, powered by the Web CMS.

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We're hiring!

Web Projects Assistant  (Ref: 2165)

The University is in the midst of a major redevelopment of its website, including migration to a web content management system and development of numerous supporting web applications.

One important strand of this work is the development of a completely revised student-facing website. The enhanced student site will provide personalised news, alerts and links to relevant content in addition to a full range of information to support students throughout their University lives. A one year temporary post has been created which offers exciting opportunities to play a key role in this ambitious project. 

The purpose of this role is to provide support to team members working on the student website and other projects. This will involve working closely with the team and colleagues in the Web Office on iterative design, implementation and assessment of web-based products and working with internal customers to support their web-based activities.

We are looking for someone with experience of producing high quality, professional and engaging websites. You should have the ability to write and edit high quality web content and a solid understanding of HTML, CSS and basic JavaScript.  Excellent communication skills and a keen interest in the web are a must.

The role would be ideal for a recent graduate.  It will also be of interest to other candidates looking to gain experience of working on a large, high traffic site.

Previous applicants for this post need not apply.

Salary will be within the range £23,121 - £28,401 per year.  The post is available immediately for a period of up to 12 months.

Further information is available via http://www.york.ac.uk/jobs/