Introducing Digital Drop-ins

As we mentioned before Christmas, we’re planning to run a monthly clinic for CMS users and departmental marketing folk to ask us anything about their digital marketing.

The first Digital Drop-in will be next Monday, 29th February from 10am to 12pm. It will take place in V/122, the seminar room on the first floor of Vanbrugh. You can use our fantastic room search to see where it is on a map and to get directions.

If you have a question about how to plan for the new responsive templates, how best to organise your content or your community of web contributors, or anything else that you’d just like a chat about, sign up for an appointment.

The Digital Drop-ins aren’t replacing our usual support channels, so if you need some help with content in the CMS, you can call x4127 or email digital-marketing@york.ac.uk.

We have limited space available next Monday, so if you’d like some advice, sign up now and book your spot.

Preparing for and opting in to new responsive designs for CMS pages

Before reading this post, hopefully you’ve been to the test site, toggled the responsive styles on, and had a look around. If not, see our accompanying post introducing a quick(ish) modernisation of the website.

If you create and maintain content on the university website you’ll hopefully want to know when we can put these styles live on your pages. This post describes what you and we need to do in order to do that.

Opting in

Departments and sections can opt in to adopt these new designs for their section of the site. There are a few criteria we need you to fulfill to be able to do this:

1. A commitment from you to check all the pages in your section of the site to ensure they display correctly (more details on this below). Note that we’re expecting to enable the new design at a root-section level rather than small sub-sections lower in the hierarchy (ie. all of a department’s pages will switch at once, not a few at a time).
• If it’s really impossible for you to do this checking, and this will be a blocker to you adopting the new design, let us know. We’ll try to help in as many cases as we can.
2. Understanding that, for now, the new design doesn’t include departmental colours. Options for colour will be re-introduced in the future, but we don’t have a timescale for that yet.
3. Ensuring you have the backing of your department to make the change and the authority to sign it off before going live. 

If you can meet those criteria and would like to get involved, get in touch at digital-marketing@york.ac.uk and we’ll add you to our list.

Testing your pages

Before we switch a section of the site to the new design, we’ll need you to check every page in that section and provide feedback on any issues you can see. We’ll provide tools and guidance to help you do this.

Once we kick off a project to switch your area of the site (but not yet - for now just have a look around and use the feedback tool to alert us to anything obvious that you spot), the kinds of things that you’ll need to check for on a page-by-page basis include:

• Does it look right?
  Ensure there isn’t any overlapping text, or strangely over- or undersize images. Check that the submenu is right and that your images are loading properly.
• Is it working?
  On many pages there are Twitter lists, scrolling banner images, tabs, accordion boxes or some other added functionality. Is this still working? Let us know if there is any unexpected or broken functionality.
• Does the content read properly?
  Part of the work we’ve done is to reorder the content slightly, in those cases where the content at the top of a column comes too far down the page. Scan through the content on the page and make sure it makes sense and is in the right order

We’re aware that some of you may be responsible for hundreds of pages in the CMS so this isn’t a trivial task. But if you split the site down into manageable chunks it’s possible to get it done in a relatively short time, and certainly much faster than rebuilding the pages in a new template. It’s also a good opportunity to make sure that the web pages you have are up-to-date, relevant and useful.

Next steps

If you’re interested in adopting the new design, here’s what should happen next:

1. Have a good look around your pages on the test server so you have a good understanding of what the change will look like.
2. Discuss the opportunity in your department and, if you need it, get the buy-in of your senior manager.
3. Let us know you’re interested and when you’d like to do the checking of your pages - email us at digital-marketing@york.ac.uk - and we’ll agree some dates to start on and aim to finish by.
4. You check your pages, give feedback on anything that’s broken and we either fix it or advise you on how to modify the content so that it works.
5. Once all pages are checked and signed off, we’ll apply the change to your live pages.

All of that might sound quite complex, but we think it should actually be fairly straightforward and we’re here to help. If you’d like to discuss it with us, feel free to call Dan on x2047, or look out for another blog post in the next few days about upcoming content clinics where you can come and chat in person.

Introducing a quick(ish) modernisation of the website

Five years ago the proportion of people visiting the university’s website on a mobile or tablet device was just 2%. It’s now over 25%. The need for our website to work better on a range of different devices is obvious.

One of our aims for this year is to update the current site to be responsive: that is, to fit to whatever screen it is displayed on whether that’s a mobile, tablet or computer. We blogged before Christmas about our plans for rolling out new responsive page templates and what we’re introducing today is part 3 of that plan - an incremental improvement to existing pages that can be applied to all CMS pages.

The new study pages, as they appear on different sized devices

We’ve developed new styles for existing CMS-published web pages which do two key things. First, they now work better on smaller devices. Second, they incorporate new fonts and colours to make for more cohesive user journey around the site. At this time we haven’t incorporated departmental colours, but options for colour will follow in the future.

Give us your feedback

We have a test version of the website at which you can preview the new design and send us your feedback. To access the test site, which is available on the University network only (including via the VPN if you’re off site), go to the page you are interested in on the main website and replace the www in the website address with cmsmigrate. So, for instance, if you want to try out www.york.ac.uk/about/ you would change the address in your browser to read cmsmigrate.york.ac.uk/about/.

Once you’re on the test site and looking at a CMS-published page that’s affected by the new designs, you’ll see a toggle switch in the top right-hand corner. Clicking it will turn on the new styles for you.



If you make your browser window narrower or wider you’ll see the layout adapt to the size of the window.



If you visit cmsmigrate.york.ac.uk on a mobile or tablet and turn the new styles on you’ll see that the content automatically adapts to the size of the screen.

Have a look around and let us know if you spot any issues by clicking the ‘Leave Feedback’ button in the bottom right-hand corner.' We’d really value your input.

What next?

We’re hoping to start rolling out these new designs very soon on an opt-in basis for the different sections of the site. If you’re involved in maintaining your department’s web pages, we have a separate blog post for you about preparing for, testing and activating the new designs.