Sprint notes for sprint 31 - new research pages, study content improvements, search engines

Research pages

We've been working with an external agency on a redesign of our research pages, to be launched early next year. So far we've had a collaborative sketching session where we explored ideas for the research homepage, and the agency have delivered a set of wireframes which we've given feedback on. We'll be receiving the finished designs later this week, and then quickly moving on to implementation and content population.

Study web content

• Country pages for international students - Tasha has been populating the new first batch of the new country pages, which will be live in sprint 32.
• Digital style guide - the team has all fed back on the guide, which will be available to view on the wiki shortly after some final amends.
• Prioritising our projects - we've agreed a list with Student Recruitment and Admissions for which aspects of the study web content we're going to be working on next.
• Course finder audit - Tasha has been making sure that all of the results in our course search link to actual course pages (some link to department homepages) and Paul has been reviewing the search terms that people enter that don't return any results.

New search engine

Dan and Paul met with Funnelback, who will be providing the new search engine for our website. Funnelback are currently setting up the software, and we plan to launch in early December.

Embiggening the campus map

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed a small addition to the online campus map: you can now switch the map to full screen mode, allowing you to see a lot more of the campus at once.

Hopefully this will make it easier to navigate around our ever-expanding campus.

We know that there's still a lot of other functionality that you'd all like added to the map - like being able to search for rooms and buildings - we're hoping to work on some more of these kinds of features in our upcoming sprints, so stay tuned.

This week's screening: Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug

Next up in our regular series of lunchtime digital screenings is a usability test demo by Steve Krug, author of Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability and Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-it-yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems (both essential reading!).

In this short video (25 minutes) Steve will run through an example usability test - if you've ever thought of running a usability test yourself but aren't sure what types of questions to ask, this is a great place to start.

Everyone welcome, feel free to join us in HG17 Heslington Hall this Wednesday at 1pm.

Sprint notes for sprint 30

Course pages

Paul's work coding the newly designed course pages is close to completion, as is the first batch of content which is being developed. We're hoping the first pages will be ready to publish by the end of our next sprint (and we're quite excited!).

Digital content principles

As part of developing a consistent style for the University's digital content, Tasha has published six crucial digital content principles (internal only), available on our wiki pages.

A more detailed digital style guide is in the pipeline awaiting one final review.

Excellence Hub events

We've streamlined the process for adding Excellence Hub events, making it much easier for the Universities of Hull, Leeds, Sheffield and York to publicise events for high-achieving school and college students.

Currently there are 280 places available for subject taster sessions at York for students in years 7 - 11, and further sessions for sixth-formers at Sheffield and Hull. More events will be added throughout the year.

Site Manager survey

It's not too late to give us your feedback on the Web CMS! We'll keep the survey open until the end of the month, but don't delay, fill it in now!

Quick wins

Some of the smaller improvements we've made this sprint include:

• Setting up the shortcuts you'd expect to be in place - e.g. york.ac.uk/hr. This should make a significant impact on the number of 404 errors we receive each month.
• Moving more of the remaining old-style homepage layouts into the new multiple-columns format. It's so much easier to edit your columns!

And finally...

Don't forget to come to our Digital Screening and Show and Tell sessions (internal only), to learn more about what we've been up to.

Sprint notes for sprint 29

Sprints seem to go by in a flash lately. We've just wrapped up another busy two weeks, so here's what we've been up to...

Course pages

We've continued our work with an external agency on a new design and content for course pages. In the first instance these are for five departments, but in time the new design will be available for everyone.

The design of the page is done, so in this sprint just gone Paul has been busy building the code. In the sprint we're starting now, we'll hopefully finish that work and start integrating with the CMS.

In parallel with the coding work, we're also working on the new content for the course pages. It should all come together in the next few weeks...

Country pages

Following on from the focus day last sprint, Paul and Tasha have forged ahead with new country-specific pages for prospective international students.

Paul's been working on the details of the design and implementing it in the CMS. Tasha has worked with colleagues in the International Office to plan content development.

Content development toolkit

Producing web content isn't as easy as it looks. It's easy to put text and images on a page of course, but making that content effective is much tougher.

Tasha has continued work on a content development toolkit which will help us and everyone else at York to create consistent and compelling content.

We've finished some big-picture digital content principles this sprint. In the new sprint we're working on a nitty-gritty digital style guide, then hopefully we'll be ready to publish.

Site Manager survey

We've published a survey asking for your feedback about the web CMS and would really like as many people as possible to fill it in. We'll keep the survey open until the end of the month, but don't delay, fill it in soon!

New post in the team

Also this sprint, we've been working on a job description and advertising particulars for a new post in the team.

Watch this space for details coming soon...

Bits and bobs

There have been lots of small(ish!) jobs this sprint too - everything from amends to Study at York pages to scoring big piles of tender documents. If you're interested, you can see more on our wiki (UoY only).

Don't forget to come to Show and Tell (UoY only) and our digital screenings (UoY only) to find out more about what we're doing and learn with us.

Sprint notes - sprint 28

What we've been working on in our most recent two-week sprint.

Study pages

In our last sprint notes we mentioned that our whole team would spend a day working together on the country-specific pages on the main Study site. We did this as a focus day, with the whole team working in the same room, without meetings, phone calls or emails!

It was a great experience to work with the whole team concentrating on one task. It was also good to get a chance to share our progress with the International team about halfway through the day. While we didn't get everything done, we've made good progress on this area, and have since demonstrated more work to the International team. We also learnt a thing or so about setting realistic goals!

We've also been working with Student Recruitment and Admissions on factual changes and updates to the Study site as the recruitment cycle has moved on for both prospective UG and PG students.

Open days and social media

The September open days happened during sprint 28. Many of us were involved in meeting and greeting students and their parents throughout the day as well as ensuring our digital presentations were updated and ready to wow.

On the social media front we managed tweets throughout the day, not only to explain what events were happening but also responding to questions and observations sent via Twitter. We wrapped up with a photo album for Facebook and created a summary of social media updates during the days.

We've also started the process of communicating with arriving students via social media, and will continue this through arrivals weekend in sprint 29.

Updates to interactive maps

We've updated our interactive maps ready for the new year: especially important for new students in Constantine College! 

Reminders about other updates

We're just about ready to send our second email update. Join our web-cms-users email list if you'd like to receive these monthly updates.

We've also made some changes to our Show and Tell schedule so take a look at our new dates and get them in your diary. These sessions give us an opportunity to show you what we've been doing, and give you an opportunity to ask questions about the work afterwards.

• Show and Tell (internal only)
• Digital Screenings (internal only)

Sprint notes - sprint 27

What we've been working on in our most recent two-week sprint.

 Responsive design

Following on from sprint 26's work Paul has been performing tests with Foundation in the Web CMS. He gave a presentation (internal only) at the Show and Tell that demonstrated some of his work as well as illustrating what it might mean for content in the Web CMS. 

Study pages

Tasha has been working on parts of the study site, including updating content ready for the September Open Days. We've also started planning how to update the country-specific pages in the Study site: in sprint 28 we will be devoting a day for the whole Digital Team to update these pages. 

YouTube videos

In a previous Show and Tell we mentioned the new captioning policy. Tom has worked through our YouTube videos and made sure that anything other than graduation had captions. 

YorNight

The European Researchers Night will also take place in York for the first time later this month. We've helped with their website in this sprint by providing some design and code advice. While you're on their website have a look at their competitions!

Websites moving into the Web CMS

IPUP have now successfully moved their website into the Web CMS and gone live. We'd also like to welcome their new web author, who was trained in the Web CMS recently. 

Communicating with you

We've carried on our work on improving communicating with web authors around the University. The first email update has now been sent, and the Show and Tell sessions and digital screenings are continuing. Join our web-cms-users email list if you'd like to receive our email updates. 

• Show and Tell (internal only)
• Digital Screenings (internal only)

Sprint notes - sprint 26

What we've been working on in our most recent two-week sprint.

Confirmation, Adjustment and Clearing

Tasha and Amanda worked with Student Recruitment and Admissions to provide a comprehensive list of vacancies for Adjustment and Clearing on A level results day, and to keep this up-to-date throughout the busy phase of Adjustment and Clearing. We also worked on social media to congratulate students confirming their place and to provide supportive messages from current students and alumni. 

Responsive design

Paul has been investigating ways to move the University website to a responsive design. At the Show and Tell Paul gave a presentation on what work this involves (internal only)  and a glimpse into the possible approaches we can take. 

Course pages

We're continuing to work with an external agency on the design and content of our course pages. After providing feedback on wireframes we've received a design proposal which we are considering and will send feedback on.  Alison gave a presentation on the background, and the progress so far, in the latest Show and Tell. 

Websites moving into the Web CMS

The Planning Office and Electronics have both started the process of migrating into the Web CMS. While moving the Planning Office pages we'll be looking at ensuring they sit in audience facing areas of our site: especially useful for users who are not familiar with the University's offices. There has also been a reorganisation with PRDU now sitting outside of the Politics website, helping to support the University's goal of increasing PRDU's inter-disciplinary activities. 

Setting up a regular email update

As part of our efforts to keep web authors informed of what's happening that might affect them, we've started a newsletter. Amanda will be sending out the first newsletter by the end of the week. 

Show and Tell

Don't forget you can come along to our regular  Show and Tell sessions to see quick presentations about what we've been up to lately and ask us questions. They're every fortnight on a Wednesday lunchtime and the next one is on 10 September.

Sprint notes - sprint 25

This is our second post in which we tell you about the things that we've been working on in our most recent two-week sprint.

Confirmation, Adjustment and Clearing

Tasha has been leading the team though a lot of work to improve our content for students who will be joining us after receiving their exam results. As well as work on our listings page of clearing vacancies, we've also developed new content to guide students through the confirmation process, and have worked on other supporting pages within the study site to ensure that we're presenting York in the best possible light. We've introduced a new undergraduate study landing page and have improved our content around careers and sport.

Search engine

We now have an instance of Google Custom Search Engine ready to use in case our primary search engine fails. 

York Researchers Night

Dan and Paul have been helping the Events team with the branding and launch of the website for the York Researchers Night which is coming up in September.

Course pages

We're continuing to work with an external agency on the design and content of our course pages. We've provided feedback on the first set of wireframes and will continue to work closely with them through the design phase.

Accommodation applications system

Dan has been continuing to work with IT Services and Accommodation on the design and user experience of the new system that students will use to book their accommodation.

Video captioning

Following on from a request from the Disability and Accessibility group, Paul has been looking at firming up our policy on video captions on our YouTube channel. Although a lot of our videos were already captioned, it wasn't being done as a matter of course. We've decided that from now on, everything that goes on our YouTube channel will be captioned, and we've been looking at the captioning services available that will let us do this most efficiently. See our notes on publishing video for details, along with other things to bear in mind when using YouTube.

Festival of Ideas analytics reports

Tom has worked on the analysis of the stats from this year's Festival of Ideas. We tracked a lot more data this time and made use of goals in Google Analytics so we have some good insights into what worked best when it came to getting people to actually register for events.

Show and Tell

Don't forget you can come along to our regular Show and Tell sessions to see quick presentations about what we've been up to lately and ask us questions. They're every fortnight on a Wednesday lunchtime and the next one is on 27 August.

New team member - Christine Comrie

Hello!  I’ve recently joined the team as Digital Editor for Students.  It’s my job to improve the ‘digital experience’ for students whilst they’re at York - so that means I’ll be making sure all information students need whilst they’re studying with us can be easily found online and that it looks pretty.

I’ve crossed the border from the University of Leeds, where I was Information Officer for the Jisc Regional Support Centre based there.  Hopefully, I’ll be putting some of the work done by Jisc on the ‘digital student’ into practice.

I’m looking forward to meeting colleagues and getting your ideas on the kinds of improvements we can make.  Please do get in touch!

Christine

Show and Tell, Wed 13 August 2014

Just a very quick reminder that we'll be running our second Show and Tell session tomorrow lunchtime (1pm, D/L/036) and we'd love to see you there.

In case you missed it last time, Show and Tell is a new fortnightly meeting run by the Digital team where we give snappy 5-minute presentations on recent projects or topics of interest.

Coming up tomorrow, we have presentations about:

• Using personas
• Building and measuring the success of the Festival of Ideas website
• Social media at Graduation
• The perils of Analytics

Details and automated alerts about upcoming events are available to staff and students via our Show and Tell wiki page.

Digital screening - Experiencing Delightful Content by Jared Spool

As mentioned in last week's sprint notes, we're starting up a programme of screenings of recorded conference presentations or virtual seminars on topics related to all things digital.

Our first screening will be Wednesday 6 August at 1pm in H/G17 (that's tomorrow lunchtime - sorry for the short notice!) For our first event we've picked Jared Spool talking about Experiencing Delightful Content, recorded at the UX Immersion conference last year. A summary of the talk is available on the conference site.

These screenings will run every two weeks on a Wednesday lunchtime and are open to anyone in the University who would like to join us. Full details are on the digital screenings wiki page (uni folk only) and if you watch the wiki page (Tools > Watch) you can get automatic email updates when we announce future topics.

Hope to see a few people tomorrow and at future screenings.

Welcome to sprint notes - sprint 24

Welcome to the first of our new regular updates on things we've been working on recently.

Over the past couple of years our team has gradually adopted a number of techniques drawn from the Scrum framework. Key amongst these are working in two-week sprints and doing regular reflection on our work through retrospectives. We're keen to be more open about what the team is working on, so we're joining ranks with teams at Edge Hill, Bath and Sunderland (quite possibly more) in regularly publishing a summary.

Graduation

Over 3,500 students graduated between 16-18 July in three sunny and cheerful days on campus. Tasha and Suzy helped spread the word and encouraged online participation with lots of coverage on social media. They did lots of photography and video, more than we've ever done before, and we had a 3,000% bump in engagement on Facebook as a result. Dan updated the web pages on which we broadcast live streams of all ceremonies (all credit to the fine folk in the AV department who arrange the actual streaming). Viewers in over 60 countries tuned in to watch.

Search engine changes

For the last 10 years or so we've used Google Mini boxes to provide website search for the University. Google have discontinued the product line, so we need an alternative. Paul has been leading on implementing a backup solution based on Google Custom Search Engine in case our old box goes wrong. Dan has led us through a selection process to choose a longer-term provider of search technology. We'll be able to say more about that in a few weeks once we finalise the contract.

Welcome pages for new students

Paul's been working with Ali in Internal Comms on putting the final touches to our new welcome pages for new postgraduates. These go alongside well-received pages that we launched a couple of years ago for undergraduates, so we hope these pages help new PGs find their feet too.

Accommodation system

The University is changing the way students apply for University accommodation and Dan has been working with the project team and supplier to offer a Digital perspective. We've been advising on design and usability and things are looking good.

Adjustment and Clearing

Tasha is leading work to prepare for Adjustment and Clearing so that we're ready for results day on 14 August. In addition to preparing a list of courses available, we're sprucing up our core pages for prospective students too.

Launching Show and Tell and digital screenings

In parallel with starting up these sprint notes, we're also starting Show and Tell meetings so people on campus can come and see in person what we've been up to.
We've also scheduled, but not yet announced details of, regular screenings of digital-related conference presentations or virtual seminars to help us and anyone else interested keep up with what's new in the industry. Look out for a blog post soon with more details.

Starting up Show and Tell

We're starting up a regular event where the Digital team will share what we've been working on or learning about recently. The sessions will be every two weeks on a Wednesday lunchtime, with the first one this week, and anyone at the University is welcome to attend. Details including venue and agenda are on our Show and Tell wiki page (University network only).

Our Digital team manager, Alison, ran successful similar events at the University of Bath where they continue to run them still. We hope our version will help keep everyone at York who's interested up to speed with what we're doing and why.

There's no need to tell us you're coming, just turn up on the day. Hope to see you there!

Fancy working with us?

If you're excited by the kind of work we do and looking for a change then we have a new vacancy that might interest you.

The Marketing and Communications Coordinator post is the first is what we hope will be a number of new positions based on the 'hub and spoke' model. These positions will work with a department or service to identify marketing objectives and with central Digital Marketing and Communications to deliver the appropriate solutions. This combined approach will mean you'll work in our offices some of the time and, in this case, with the Accommodation Services team too.

Learn more about this role on the University website and give me a call if you'd like to have a chat about it.

Making it easier to embed YouTube videos in your web content

We've just made some changes that will make it easier to add YouTube videos to pages in the CMS. You can now add videos to any content type that allows you to insert links, including standard page content, tabbed content, news and events.

To add a video, all you need to do is paste in a link to a YouTube video and assign a class to it of 'youtube-video-embed'. Your published page will then include the embedded video. The screenshots below show the steps in detail.

1. Paste in a link to a YouTube video

2. Use 'Insert/edit link' to set the class of the video to 'youtube-video-embed'

3. Done!

If you preview your page you'll now see your video embedded in your page. It will automatically resize to fill the width of your page.

A page preview showing the embedded video

As an added bonus, if you use this in a column that's too narrow for the embedded video to comfortably fit - for example in a three column layout or in a right hand column - then the video will be replaced with a thumbnail image instead. Clicking the thumbnail will take you to the full size video on YouTube.

A video in a narrow column automatically replaced with a thumbnail image

The old methods of embedding videos will still work. Full details can be found in the Web CMS Guide Wiki.

Hello from a newbie

I've recently joined the team as Digital Editor for Recruitment. My main responsibility is to look after the content for the study section of the University website in collaboration with colleagues across the University. One of my first big tasks is to do a content audit of the study section. I'm a big fan (sadly)of content audits so I'm looking forward to getting started on this.

Prior to joining York I worked at the University of Bradford for three years as a web content editor, and before that I worked at Leeds Metropolitan University. As you can tell I love working in higher education. In terms of digital my interests lie in Content Strategy, IA and user experience. I'm really excited to have joined the team at York and I'm looking forward to working on some interesting content projects.

Improving reliability of CMS publish

We've recently made a few changes to the way the Web CMS publishes updates to the website.

Publish speed

A few months ago we upgraded to a new release of Site Manager and were able to change how we output files as part of the publish. This change meant we shaved about 30 minutes off the publish duration and a full publish cycle now takes around 90 minutes. We hope to make further improvements later this year.

Publish reliability

Regular website contributors will know that occasionally the publish will fail and updates won't go live as part of the normal schedule. Last week we made a change which should significantly reduce the frequency of this happening. Changes should go live on schedule more consistently as a result.

Deletions and failed publishes

The most likely cause of a publish failure now is a deliberate failsafe built into our process which is worth a reminder.

If we detect a large number of deletions from the website as part of a publish, we don't publish any changes from that publish cycle until we've had chance to check whether something has gone wrong. One of the most common accidental causes of large numbers of deletions is renaming an output URI or Media Library category; this changes the URI of all pages or files in that branch of the site and thus deletes all the old ones.

If you're deliberately deleting a large number of pages or files (ie. 100+), it's always worth letting us know in advance and we can work around the automated failsafe.

Checking when publish last happened

If you're wondering why a change you made hasn't gone live, you can check when the most recent successful publish completed on the main Site Manager dashboard.

If you're sure your change should be live and yet you are still seeing an old version, make sure your browser is loading the latest copy by bypassing the cache. If it still doesn't show up, give us a shout and we'll help figure out what's happened.