It’s all about Digital!

As it’s three months since I started in my role as Head of Digital Marketing and Communications I thought a contribution to the team blog was long overdue. So, a very belated… hello!

The introduction of my role, at the University of York, signals a change of direction for the former Web Office, who are being re-named Digital Marketing and Communications (or the Digital Team if you prefer). In a nutshell the focus is shifting from supporting departments to deliver digital communications to leading on the strategies to deliver them.

So what’s been happening in the last few months?

A significant part of our time has been spent preparing for a redesign of the York website. This is something that has been in the pipeline for some time but we have developed a plan to roll-out the new look and feel in a ten-phased project which starts this October. We didn’t want to wait to get everything ‘done’ before we started implementing changes so we’re taking an iterative approach; you’ll see the first changes next month after which we’ll blog about it here to explain what we have changed and why.

University of York staff can also follow the progress of the project on our wiki and find out what’s coming up next.

Speaking of the wiki we have spent some time developing a space to support Digital Marketing and Communications across campus. Within it staff can find information on Social Media, the Visual Identity inc. tone of voice, guides and resources to develop effective content, forms to request our support and details of the projects we’re working on.

Alongside the above we’ve also;

• Developed and launched the Welcome pages for new Undergraduates, in collaboration with our colleagues in the Marketing and Communications office.
• Developed a new process for managing the stories on our homepage (in preparation for the new one!)
• Held some really engaging workshops with Content Strategist, Relly Annett-Baker, and as a result started work to define our tone of voice and developed guidance (available from the wiki) to develop and manage our content.
• Revised the way we run projects (not substantially as Dan and Paul had some excellent processes in place) but we’ve recently gone back to Sprints and started to rotate support so that Amanda has more opportunities to get more involved in project-work.
• Started the re-brand of our Social Media accounts to create a uniformed look and feel (see UniofYork and UoYStudy) and developed guidance around ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ accounts.

All of the above has been happening alongside providing support to colleagues across campus, training staff to use the Web CMS and being involved in the many strategic discussions about the future of digital at York. So, all in all, it’s been a very busy summer!

What we’ve been up to, Spring 2013

Oftentimes it’s hard to know what other teams are working on and easy to miss interesting developments that get released without a big launch. With that in mind, we thought an occasional series of updates about things we’ve been working on might be of interest.

Festival of Ideas

One of the biggest things we worked on throughout May was the 2013 Festival of Ideas website, including listings and ticket bookings (via EventBrite) for over 150 events.

 

History of the University - a timeline

Built as part of our 50th Anniversary site, our interactive timeline of the University’s history features well over 100 entries, with videos and imagery to help tell the story.

Food and drink on the web

We’ve started a project working with Commercial Services to move catering and bars information into the Web CMS. There’s not much to see just yet, but work is underway to create a dedicated section of the website for catering and drinking outlets on campus, which should be coming soon.

Updating the campus map

The campus map page now has more location pins available, including a dedicated section for venues being used for Festival of Ideas events, in order to help those who may not be familiar with the University to find their way around.

Also pretty cool, but not one we can take the credit for (that belongs with IT Services and Estates), is internal mapping of campus buildings starting to roll out on Google Maps. If you zoom in close, internal mapping information for most buildings on campus is starting to appear. It’s early days, for both us and Google (they’re using us as a pilot for universities in the UK), so we’re not shouting about it yet but this should be really handy once everything’s in place.

York Research Database and the University search engine

We launched the York Research Database back in February, but it took us another couple of months to test and integrate results into our main University search engine, but they’re there now. The big challenge was not indexing too many pages - the research database contains such a vast amount of data that indexing all of it would have overwhelmed the search engine.

Foursquare

We’ve done a small piece of work to establish ourselves on Foursquare. After taking ownership of all our locations a few months ago, we’ve been updating them with accurate information, up to date imagery and links to additional resources.

Updated Twitter widgets

Twitter are in the process of retiring their v1 API, which meant that that our custom Twitter widget available in the Web CMS was about to stop working. We've updated the template to now use the updated standard Twitter widget and it’s working well.

Improving our YouTube channel and notes on video

If you’ve been following our YouTube channel you may have noticed that some of our videos now have a unified thumbnail scheme. This helps in maintaining a brand identity across the institution - we’ve used departmental colours on the bands across the thumbnails in order to better fit them in. We’ve also been doing something of a spring clean on the channel, deleting some old playlists and updating others.

The featured playlist is now a focus on our History Project, including a new series of oral history videos. If you’re interested in a more multimedia-based history of the University there’s some really interesting content here.

We also added some new tips on producing video for the web which are well worth a read if you’re considering adding video content to your site.

Welcome pages

The undergraduate welcome pages will be seeing a big overhaul for the 2013 intake of students. As well as cutting down on the number of pages, we’ve redesigned them to mesh more closely with the welcome booklet sent out to all new students. The pages will be going live in July, in time to help a whole new generation of students settle in at York.

Website redesign

In more behind-the-scenes news, we’ve been doing a lot of work on preparing for a big website redesign. If you’ve had a look at our 50th site you’ll have already seen an idea of what it’s going to look like, but there’s still a lot more to come!

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.

New Centre for Lifelong Learning site goes live

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


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New Languages for All site goes live

The redeveloped Languages for All site is now live, powered by the Web CMS.

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New Centre for Housing Policy site goes live

The redeveloped Centre for Housing Policy site is now live, powered by the Web CMS.

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Enhancing our website for current students

We've been busy over the last couple of months working on improving our website for our current students, which we're planning to launch at the start of October.

The existing site for current students

The enhancements are going to make the site more personalised and dynamic, giving students quicker and easier access to the content and systems they need, and will have a distinct design to set it apart from the University's external facing web content.

You may have heard this being referred to as the Portal project - we're trying to avoid using the "P" word though, as there are already a lot of other portals around the University.

We've set up a dedicated blog about the project, where we've been posting updates and background info. We've just posted an August 2011 progress update, so you can see how things are shaping up.

New English and Related Literature site goes live

The redeveloped Department of English and Related Literature site is now live, powered by the Web CMS.

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New sites for prospective undergraduates, postgraduates and international students

Yesterday, we launched our new student recruitment websites, for undergraduate, postgraduate and international students.

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What's changed?

More obvious next steps and calls to action

In the old design, key tasks like booking on an open day or ordering a printed prospectus were a bit buried in long and complicated menus. We've hopefully made it a lot more obvious how to complete these essential tasks.

Quicker and clearer paths to course information

Our research showed us that a lot of people were having trouble finding out if we even offered the course that they wanted to study. 

On the old site, you'd have to go through roughly the following process to find a course:

Finding a course on the old site

The problem wasn't only the number of steps involved, but also the fact that you're thrown off the scent when you go from the programme listing to a departmental homepage, and then have to navigate through a departmental website to find the course again.

On the new site, you can now search straight from the undergraduate homepage, by course title, keywords or UCAS code. The search results will take you directly to course information on departmental sites, rather than homepages.

Content about the city of York

One of the big attractions of coming to study at York is the fact that you get to live in a rather nice historic city, that's also got plenty going on. Our old site didn't really reflect this at all, so we've expanded on the images and content we have about the city, working in partnership with Visit York.


New colours

The colours used on the web now match the colours used in the printed prospectus, so the two now look a lot more related to each other.

Videos

The set of official videos are now a lot more visible in high profile spots around the site. In places we've also linked through to video content created by the Students' Union. In future phases we hope to expand on the amount of student-generated content we have on the site.

More to come

That's just a taster of some of the new content. There's a lot more besides, and more planned for future phases. We'll continue to work with colleagues in Student Recruitment and Admissions on expanding and improving on the site over the coming months.

Two years and 25000 web pages

It’s been a slow start to the blogging year in the Web Office, but I’m happy to belatedly start the ball rolling for 2011 with a quick update on what we've been up to recently.

It’s now two years since the first Web CMS-published website went live, and six months since my previous round-up post. Quite a few more sites have gone live in that time:

• Centre for Immunology and Infection (September 2010)
  
• The Borthwick Institute for Archives (September 2010)
• Department of Language and Linguistics (September 2010)
  
• Campus Development (October 2010)
  
• Humanities Research Centre (October 2010)
  
• Department of Biology (October 2010)
  
• Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies (October 2010)
  
• Graduation (October 2010)
  
• Community pages in the About the University site (November 2010)
  
• Department of Sociology (November 2010)
  
• Creative Technology Centre (November 2010)
  
• The Ron Cooke Hub (November 2010)
  
• Department of Theatre, Film and Television (November 2010)
  
• Department of Politics (December 2010)
  
• Department of History of Art (February 2011)

Quick stats

The amount of content now being published by the CMS is vast: over 25000 web pages and almost double that number of related files. That’s over 7Gb of data, published by more than 500 people who have been trained to use the system.

Coming up

There’s more still to come too, including in the near future:

• A complete revamp of student recruitment sites
• Lots of staff- and student-facing content from the Academic Registry
• New pages from the Accommodation Office
• New Finance Department pages

Other projects

I should add that I had virtually nothing to do with any of the sites above and almost all the credit belongs with other folk in the Web Office team. I’ve been kept busy with a few other things, including:

• developing a public-facing view of Pure, the University’s new research database
• building an online community site for alumni and friends of the University
• bringing a CMS-perspective to plans for an integrated digital signage system for campus

Despite the slow start to the year on the blog, there are hopefully more posts to come and I’ll cover these projects in more detail in future posts.

New website for the Ron Cooke Hub

A brand new website for the Ron Cooke Hub went live last week, powered by the web CMS.

New website for CREMS

The redevelopment of the website for the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies went live earlier this week, powered by the web CMS.

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New Humanities Research Centre website

A brand new website for the Humanities Research Centre went live earlier this week, powered by the web CMS.

New Borthwick Institute for Archives site live

The redeveloped Borthwick Institute for Archives website is now live, powered by the Web CMS.

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New Centre for Immunology and Infection website

A new website for the Centre for Immunology and Infection has gone live today, powered by the Web CMS. The site is live in time for the Centre's inauguration of their new research building which takes place on Friday.

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CMS rollout - 18 months in

Almost exactly 18 months ago the University Library was the first Web CMS-managed site to go live. We’ve come a long way since then, so here’s a quick list of the sites currently powered by Site Manager:

• University Library and Archives (February 2009)
• Communications (April 2009)
• News and events (April 2009)
• Department of Chemistry (May 2009)
• Alcuin College (May 2009)
• Goodricke College (September 2009)
• Department of Physics (September 2009)
• Student Support pages, including housing and money and support, welfare and health (October 2009)
• York Concerts (October 2009)
• The York Management School (November 2009)
• Department of Computer Science (December 2009)
• Centre for Medieval Studies (January 2010)
• Information for staff about supporting students (February 2010)
• York Environmental Sustainability Institute (February 2010)
• Department of Archaeology (February 2010)
• Wentworth College (April 2010)
• Research and Enterprise sites (public research pages, staff research information and Working with the University pages) (May 2010)
• About the University pages, including new Governance and Management information (May 2010)
• Department of Health Sciences (May 2010)
• Department of Psychology (May 2010)
• Halifax College (May 2010)
• Vanbrugh College (May 2010)
• School of Politics, Economics and Philosophy (June 2010)
• Department of History (June 2010)
• Stockholm Environment Institute at York (June 2010)
• Environment Department (July 2010)
• Centre for Health Economics (July 2010)
• James College (July 2010)
• Derwent College (July 2010)
• IT Services (July 2010)
• Langwith College (August 2010)
• Department of Educational Studies (August 2010)
• Department of Economics and Related Studies (August 2010)

And of course there are many more to come...

Web Redevelopment Project Update

Just in time for Christmas, a general update is being distributed to University staff about project progress. 2009 has been a really busy year for the Web Office and I am sure that 2010 will be the same.

Wishing everybody a very Merry Xmas and a Happy Hogmanay.