Responsive 'quick-fix' live

In February we unveiled our plans for a responsive 'quick-fix' for key web pages. Our aim was to improve user experience across a range of devices, while avoiding the laborious process of rebuilding thousands of pages.

We're pleased to announce that the first pages to use the new designs went live at the end of March.

The About the University pages are now more usable on phones and tablets. They also present a more coherent user journey alongside the newly rebuilt Study branch.

We've begun to roll out these new templates to departments. Many are well underway checking existing pages to make sure they translate cleanly into the new designs.

If you're interested in moving your departmental pages into a responsive layout then contact us at digital-marketing@york.ac.uk to get started. You can even book time in our (very grandly named) Device Lab, to help speed the process along!

More information on responsive designs:

• Introducing a quick(ish) modernisation of the website
• Preparing for and opting in to new responsive designs for CMS pages

Going mobile, one small step at a time

Earlier in the year I wrote a post on Mobile browser trends into 2010, where I looked at how traffic from mobile devices had be steadily rising from around a thousand visits per month in April 2009, to seven thousand visits per month in April 2010.

I hadn't been paying too much attention to these figures lately, but I was quite shocked to see that mobile traffic had rocketed up to twenty thousand visits per month. Perhaps a bigger shock was that this increase had been much less gradual than over the previous year. Growth had remained steady until September this year, but then the start of the new academic year saw a doubling of visits - hello to our new intake of smartphone-carrying students.

Smartphone traffic to york.ac.uk, 24 December 2009 to 24 December 2010. The huge leap is the start of the new academic year

So will 2011 be the year that we start to make some headway into the mobile world? Hopefully we can make some time alongside the other projects that we've committed to for next year.

Making our blog mobile-friendly

How the blog now appears on an iPhone

My actual reason for writing this post, before I got distracted by looking at graphs, was to say that this blog now has a mobile enabled template, so should be much easier to read on a smaller screen.

(Aside - if you're a blogger user, this is really simple to enable for your own blog. See New mobile templates for reading on the go - Blogger in draft.)

While we may not have a mobile version of the university website for the twenty thousand people who look at it each month on their mobile, the small band of followers of this blog can now enjoy a better mobile reading experience.

Merry Christmas everybody!

UCAS release iPhone app for tracking university applications

UCAS have recently released an iPhone application,  which allows students to track the progress of their university applications. According to UCAS, it allows you to:

See which universities have offered you a place, and view any replies you've made. You can find out the key dates in the UCAS calendar and get the answers to your questions in the FAQ section. 

What's it like?

There's not really anything to say on the content or functionality of the app, as you can't get past the first screen without a UCAS username and password, but it sounds like a good idea.


UCAS on the App Store

Mobile browser trends into 2010

Who doesn't love a good graph?

Following on from Dan's post about Browser Trends into 2010, I though it would be interesting to look at all smartphone traffic to the site over the last year.

A year ago we had just over a thousand visits per month from iPhones, Androids, Blackberrys, etc. We're now up to almost seven thousand. Still small numbers in the grand scheme of things, but a huge increase percentage wise.

For anyone who's interested, this graph was created using an advanced segment in Google Analytics, configured to include traffic with a browser or operating system that matched the regular expression:

android|black|HTC|iphone|ipod|lg|nokia|
palm|samsung|sonysymbian|vodafone|treo|xda|netfront