Our new homepage

After lots of design iterations, development work and usability testing, we’re pleased to say that the new version of our homepage is now live.

The homepage now uses the same new responsive design as the study and research areas of the site, so it’s optimised to work across a range of device sizes from small phone screens to large desktop monitors.

The homepage is optimised to work across a range of device sizes

As well as the change to how the page looks, we’ve also made changes to the content of the page and the navigation that surrounds it. This includes:

More links for internal audiences
We used data from Google Analytics to look at what staff and students were searching for when they visited the homepage. As a result we’ve added several links that haven’t been included on the homepage before, such as timetables and the library. These can all be found under the ‘Staff and students’ menu at the top of the page.

More content about campus and city life
In the previous design there were only four slots available to feature content in, which were also used to feature news and events, so campus and city life could only be included from time to time. This is very important content for prospective students, and we’ve put a lot of effort into revamping our student life content recently, so we decided to give it a dedicated space.

More links to factual content
Lots of visitors to our site just want to find answers to basic queries like when our term dates are, or how to get to campus, so we’ve added these too.

Behind the scenes, we’re using a new system that makes it easier for us to manage the content (Contentful, for those of you that are interested). We’ve also produced a content guide, to help us ensure that any everything we put up is on-brand and conveying the right message.

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.

Building the York Research Database

Today we launched the brand new York Research Database to the public. This is a web view of all York's research activity, as stored in Atira's Pure, the University's CRIS (Current Research Information System). It's been a long time in gestation while the data has been cleaned and updated, but I think it's been worth the wait.

Encouraging discovery

Initially the Web Office's involvement was just to help skin the public view of the data that shipped with the product. We did that, but something felt lacking - if you knew what you wanted then you would find it, but then what? We wanted people to explore and discover the breadth and depth of the research going on at York, and our first implementation didn't quite nail that.

We worked closely with our local Pure project team and the team at Atira to build features that would encourage a deeper dive into the data. Development work was being handled by Atira so we went through several rounds of generating ideas, building mockups and then liaising with them about implementation. It was a great process, covering everything from adding big features to me being very pedantic about micro-copy in the pages, and the whole team at Atira were brilliant throughout.

Eureka

I confess I was sceptical when I first looked at web views of research data, both York's and at other Universities; they never really held my interest. My 'eureka' moment with our system came when I was testing the latest iteration of our work with Atira one day and realised I'd stopped testing and was just browsing computer science research. If the system could distract me from nitpicking about the design and features, I was confident it would encourage others to dig deeper too.

Features to help exploration

A few of the things we added to the vanilla product which I think make a big difference:

• 'Refine your results' links, with indicators to show how many results you'll get with that refinement applied, on search results pages. These just apply advanced search filters, but make them much more visible and easier to toggle on and off.
• 'By the same authors' and 'From the same journal' sidebars on publications pages. These are great for following a trail of related content.
• 'Recently viewed' links in the footer of every page. Each record in the database that you look at during a visit to the site stacks up in a series of lists in the footer of every page so that you can easily get back to the things you've seen already.

Links from staff profiles and department pages

Now that the York Research Database is live, we've enabled a field in the staff profile template in the CMS to make it easy to link to your profile page. There are more details on the Pure web pages for staff, including images to use to make links from departmental research pages and elsewhere too.

Measuring success

I'll be poring over Google Analytics in weeks to come to see whether we've managed to make the site as engaging as I hoped. You can let us know what you think in the comments, by tweeting us @uoywebteam or by emailing me direct at dan.wiggle@york.ac.uk.

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.

New Centre for Lifelong Learning site goes live

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


Before:

After:

Writing tip - stress the benefits, not the features

When writing content that needs to be persuasive (whether that's to encourage a purchase, sign up for a course, attend a lecture, etc) it's important to appeal to the emotions of your reader. You need to be answering the question "What's in it for me?", by telling your readers how they will benefit, rather than just listing features.

Think of a glass of water - you could describe it in terms of features (wet, cold, transparent) or benefits (thirst-quenching, refeshing, healthy). What sounds more appealing?

The Apple website is an excellent example of benefits over features. Although they produce electronic gadgets which by their very nature are packed with features, the main focus of the site is about the benefits for the purchaser. The iPhone and iPod pages are all about benefits: you can take your whole music library with you, keep up to date with your friends by being able to use Facebook anywhere, find a nearby restaurant when you've got a pizza craving, etc.

The specific details of the features are all there too (you need to be able to back up any benefits you claim) but that's not the first thing you see. If I really want to know, I can look at the technical specifications page to find out that it has a 480 by 320 pixel screen with 163 pixel per inch resolution, but most people won't know or care what that means - they want to know the benefit: that their photos will look fantastic.

Even something as dull as a wireless keyboard can sound more exciting when you focus on the benefits (your desk will be clutter-free) rather than the features (it uses Bluetooth to connect to your computer wirelessly).

If you only focus on features, you risk two things:

• Your audience might not make the leap from the feature to how they will benefit from them, especially if the features are technical or use a lot of jargon.
• They might make the leap, but you've now given them an extra uncessary step of making the mental connection between the features and what's in it for them - you've made them think.

So how are you selling your department / course / college? Are you stating the benefits or just the features?

Learn more

Interested in learning about writing effective web content? Come along to one of our Writing for the Web sessions on 30 April or 24 May 2010 for more practical tips.

Higher Education websites - made to stick?

What is it about some ideas that make them catch on and stick in our memories, while others are instantly forgettable? Why do we have no trouble recalling the details of urban myths but often have difficultly remembering vital facts that could benefit our health?

In their book "Made to Stick", authors Chip & Dan Heath argue that while there's no secret formula for coming up with a good idea in the first place, it will have a much better chance of sticking if it is:

• simple
• unexpected
• concrete
• credible
• uses emotion
• tells a story.

You may have spotted that spells out SUCCESs (which they openly admit is about as clichéd an acronym as you'll ever get - they could have used some different words and changed the order but CCUCES wouldn't have been quite as memorable).

What's that got to do with the web?

Although it's not a book specifically written about the web, the techniques that it describe can be applied to any form of communications, whether that's giving a presentation, contributing to a discussion, or indeed, writing web content.

The issue of simplicity was the one that resonated the most initially - as anyone who has attended a Writing for the Web session will have heard - simplicity is a vital part of producing web content that is easy for your readers to take in. So that means avoiding jargon, discarding any content that isn't essential to your core message, providing one clear call to action instead of seven vague ones, putting the most important information up front, etc.

Reading this book happened to coincide with some work we've been doing that has involved us looking at some of our competitor's websites. Amongst the more memorable ones I started to notice more aspects of the stickiness model at work:

Unexpected

I definitely didn't expect to see exploding buildings (Boston) or claims of the benefits of teenage pregnancy (LSE) on the homepage of a university website. They definitely caught my attention and encouraged me to read more.

Concrete

There's a greater chance of ideas being memorable if they contain concrete things that people can relate to, like names, actions, faces and places.

One challenge that universities face is making academic research understandable and appealing to a general audience. Many do this well by showing how it relates to real world problems that people can identify with, rather than using more abstract language that doesn't carry as much meaning amongst a general audience.

Take this example from Carnegie Mellon, which uses the act of making a cup of coffee as a "hook" that helps you to understand research about the world's water resources.

Credible

Most universities can claim to be the best at something or other, but it sounds a lot more believable when it's coming from someone else. Realistic quotes from staff and students can often be a lot more believable than anything that comes directly from the institution.

Using emotion

Sites such as Imperial are very good at using emotive language that helps you to imagine what it would be like to come to study there - "be inspired" and "an Imperial degree is something special" rather than just presenting a list of facts.

So, plenty of food for thought. I'll definitely be keeping my eyes out for more ways to make web content that "sticks".