Launch of You@York, the University's applicant portal

On 31st October York launched its applicant portal, You@York. The portal is for post-offer undergraduate applicants and is aimed at persuading them to accept their offer of a place.

This is a large and complex project with involvement from staff across the University: Admissions, Student Recruitment, the Student Systems Development Team, the Web team, the Planning Office, IT Services, the E-learning Development Team, Student Support Services and others.

Applicants are sent a username and password along with their offer letter. When an applicant logs in, it recognises who they are and displays some information that is personalised. The navigation bar contains SSO links to sections in e:Vision where they can manage their personal details, book a visit and apply for a Tier 4 Visa certificate. The look and feel is the same in e:Vision and the website, so the user experience isn't interrupted either by a logon screen or by different interfaces.



The applicant name is pulled in using ColdFusion, while departmental content is pulled in from a custom database. The Careers section also presents some information related to the applicant's department - a graduate profile, destinations link and a careers adviser name and contact details - which is pulled in from a Careers database.Because the VLE doesn't work with Shibboleth yet, and we didn't want to make applicants log on a second time, it wasn't possible to provide applicant-only content in the VLE for launch. So the three modules in the VLE (Money matters, and introduction to the Colleges and an introduction to Academic integrity) are all open-access, but only linked through You@York.

The next phase of the project involves researching what applicants need from their department. This will inform the development of departmental VLE modules for applicants. Alongside this we will be reviewing postgraduate transition sites to see what is the best way of providing this information for postgraduate applicants, and launching a postgraduate version of You@York in October 2012.

• More about You@York for applicants
• More information for staff about You@York and the applicant portal project

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!