Psychology goes live

The Department of Psychology has a new website within the Web CMS.

The Department was one of the first to agree to move their site over and its size and complexity gave the team some useful integration challenges - experience which has improved the service for future users.

The migration is phased, so much of their content aimed at staff and students is still on the old site and will be moved later in the year as part of Phase 2 of their project.

Halifax College

The new Halifax College website went live today in the Web CMS.

This marks the half-way point in the Colleges project, with three more colleges working away in the system and another due to go live next week.

Update to freqently asked questions CMS template

If you're a CMS user you might have spotted that pages generated using the FAQ template have changed slightly in their appearance and behaviour, which should increase their usability a bit.

Before

Here's how they used to look. Clicking a question reveals the answer.



After

Here's how they look now:



Have a look at a live example on the Department of Physics website to see the full effect.

What's changed

• The answers now slide into place rather than instantly appearing. With the previous instant reveal there was always a chance of "blink and you'll miss it", and not quite noticing that the answer had appeared.
• The background colour and borders should help to tie the question and answer together - in the previous style it wasn't always clear where one answer ended and another question began, especially when the answer contained headings, or when FAQs have been used amongst normal page content.
  
• Minor change to font size and removal of underlines on headings to increase readability.
• The whole width of the question area is now a link, so there's a larger link target for people to hit.
  

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

Wentworth Graduate College goes live

The new website for Wentworth Graduate College went live this morning.

As well as being the University's graduate college with specific IT and social facilities for postgraduates, Wentworth also hosts Active Arts, the University-wide facilities for staff and students who want to begin or improve their skills in painting, drawing, photography, printmaking and ceramics. Three well-equipped studios are run by the Tutors in Art, who also teach classes.

Wentworth is the third college to go live in the Web CMS. Four more colleges are working hard on their sites so it's a race to see who goes live next.

New videos - international and postgraduate student life

We've recently put up a couple more of the videos that were created for the University by video company Spectrecom.

Both videos are published using our video streaming service, with the player code generated using our media player wizard.

International student life

Postgraduate student life

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.