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.