Job opportunity - come and join us!

Web Projects Assistant: (Ref: 2052)

The University is in the midst of a major redevelopment of its website, including migration to a web content management system and development of numerous supporting web applications.

One important strand of this work is the development of a completely revised student-facing website. The enhanced student site will provide personalised news, alerts and links to relevant content in addition to a full range of information to support students throughout their University lives. A one year temporary post has been created which offers exciting opportunities to play a key role in this ambitious project.

The purpose of this role is to provide support to team members working on the student website and other projects. This will involve working closely with the team and colleagues in the Web Office on iterative design, implementation and assessment of web-based products and working with internal customers to support their web-based activities.

We are looking for someone with experience of producing high quality, professional and engaging websites. You should have the ability to write and edit high quality web content and a solid understanding of HTML, CSS and basic JavaScript.

Excellent communication skills and a keen interest in the web are a must.

Salary within the range: £22,971 - £28,251 per annum.

Closing date for applications: Monday 24 October 2011.

Further information is available via http://www.york.ac.uk/jobs/

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.

100,000+ content items in the Web CMS

Sometime at the end of last week we reached quite a milestone in our rollout of TerminalFour's Site Manager web CMS - 100,000 approved content items are now managed in the system.

We average around 3 content items per page, so our 100,000 content items are generating roughly 30,000 pages.

Growth of content in the system

We started rollout of the CMS at around the beginning of 2009 and the chart below shows the growth in the number of content items in the system since then.

There was good steady growth in the number of content items held in Site Manager for the first year of implementation, followed by a sharp increase in the growth rate from the start of 2010 when we added three web CMS migration assistants to our team.

Onwards and upwards?

We're still working on lots of migrations and new sites in the CMS so for the forseeable future this chart will keep trending quite steeply upwards. Eventually I expect the growth will slow, but I wouldn't be surprised if I'm posting about having reached 200,000 content items 18 months from now.

Social media and graduation

The University's class of 2011 graduated over three days of ceremonies on campus just over a month ago.

For the first time, we made just a tiny effort to coordinate some social media activity around the event. The media would have us believe that everyone and their dog are using Twitter and such like to document their every move, so a big day like graduation would surely be all over social media. Wouldn't it?

What we did

We actually did very little to encourage or promote the use of social media. We did kick around ideas such as asking Greg Dyke, Chancellor of the University, to ask the ceremony audience to take photos and submit them, but we didn't want to run before we walked! So in the end, we just did the following:

• Posted a few tweets on the University's @uniofyork account announcing the official hashtag, #UoYGraduation
• Posted a message encouraging sharing on Facebook and mentioning the hashtag
• Added the hashtag to our digital signage displays around campus

Did anything happen?

There were 50 or so tweets featuring the hashtag, quite a number of which were retweets and a number of those were from other University accounts (see an archive on the #UoYGraduation TwapperKeeper record). We also kept a look out for @uniofyork mentions and combinations of keywords including york, university, graduation and graduate. Here there were quite a few more graduation-related updates, but still only in the dozens rather than the hundreds.

Intriguingly, there were mentions of lots of photos being online, but very few surfaced publicly so I suspect these all reside in private albums on Facebook. A few photos and a couple of videos have shown up on Flickr and YouTube respectively, but that's all.

Was it worth it?

I think it was worth a try. It was all very last-minute and we really didn't do very much to get the word out, so our expectations weren't particularly high but nor did it take much of our time. What was a bit of a surprise was the relative lack of unprompted activity. For all the media hype, it seems our recent graduates and their families are mostly not keen Twitter-ers.

Graduation on Storify.com

Despite the relatively low volume of activity, I stitched together a Storify.com story of the day which I think is actually quite neat. Check out the University of York Graduation 2011 on Storify to see for yourself.

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.

Before:

After:

IWMW and sharing what we're up to

I was away for a few days last week at the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2011 conference (IWMW) , where lots of like-minded web folk from universities around the country get together to share experiences and ideas.



As ever, there were some interesting presentations and workshops (videos are online) but the stand-out benefit of attending was once again the conversations with colleagues at other universities that happen between sessions and in the bar in the evening. Of course, being an annual conference means there can be a lot to catch up on, so it was great to see a couple of outcomes this year which should help keep us in touch more regularly.

Regional meetups

There was a resurgence of interest this year in resurrecting some of the local web meetups that have happened in the past but, with the exception of the Scottish web folk, seem to have largely fizzled out. Between a few of us University folk in Yorkshire, we're hopeful that we might manage a local get together before too long.

A higher-ed blog aggregator

Since getting together in person is always going to be a once-in-a-while activity, the surprise unveiling of an institutional web teams blog aggregator was great to see. It should help all of us discover what one another are up to on an ongoing basis.

I've probably got RSS feeds for most HE web teams pouring into Google Reader already, but this makes them much more visible, saves me having to discover new blogs myself (I can use a single feed from here to pick up everything) and adds a handy search feature.

Hopefully the increased visibility will inspire both us and others to post more frequently!

Emotional intelligence and the student portal

Part of the first phase of requirements gathering for the student portal involved focus groups with students. We wanted to identify what students used most frequently on the website and what they found hard or easy, in order to identify and prioritise the functionality developed for the portal.

One of the exercises we did in the student focus groups was based on some research by Paul Adams, lately of the Google user experience team and now of Facebook, published in a Slideshare presentation called The real life social network.

Paul found from his research that in 'real life', most people are careful to distinguish the information they share with different groups of people - this is considered a normal social skill. (See slides 53-84 for a fuller explanation. It is clear how much this research has influenced the development of Google Plus.)

Yet online, one of the usability issues with Facebook (for example) is that users end up with one huge list of 'friends' and no way of easily targeting status updates or other posts so you share different content with real friends than with family, work colleagues or housemates.

We wanted to see if this also applied to the type of channel that people chose to communicate with, so when we ran this exercise with students, we also asked them to identify the methods they used to communicate with each group. Although the student portal is a different type of application to Google Plus or Facebook, in that it is not primarily a social network for connecting with people, we found a fairly consistent set of preferences emerged for the channels people wanted to use in their role as a student. These results were reinforced in the student survey, with a much larger response rate of 2300.

Users expressed a strong preference to keep Facebook for communications on a social level, eg with friends or housemates, and to use University channels such as the VLE for communication with teaching staff and their department. This makes sense: most people don't communicate in the same way - or with the same group of people - on a dating website as they might on LinkedIn or the VLE; the people who do really stand out.

Of the top ten pieces of content / functionality that students wanted to to be available in the student portal, the tenth was access to social networking.

But giving students access to social networking tools or features, such as a 'like' button on an event which might show how many of their Facebook friends are attending, is a different thing from providing content on Facebook or Twitter. The objections to this are less that the University is not cool, than that the University has a formal relationship with students and it is 'socially inept' to use personal or social spaces for formal communication.

These findings have implications both for the content of the student portal and the University's work in social networking sites, one of the key points being that the channel you use is as important as the way you communicate.