Team Movember

If you've had any meetings with us or popped into Web Office HQ recently, you'll have noticed that the male members of the team are currently sporting moustaches.

It's all in aid of Movember, to raise awareness and funds for men's health issues in the month formally known as November.

If you'd like to make a donation, or just admire our progress, head over to our Movember team page.

Making meta data 'descriptions' more visible

We've recently made an update to the way meta data is published by the CMS which makes entering good meta data for University web pages much more worthwhile.

Getting people to enter good meta data into pages can be a losing battle, but hopefully I'll persuade you that it's worthwhile! I'm as bad as anyone at forgetting to do it, so I'm going to try to take my own advice too :)

Meta descriptions in search results

The change we've made means the University's internal search engine will now use the description field as the default text in search result snippets if it exists. External Google will also use the data, though it's a little less predictable (it tries to judge whether your description is 'good' or not, which is pretty subjective).

This increased visibility of descriptions leads to two recommendations:

1. If you don't have meta data in your pages, you really should add some
2. If you do have meta data in your pages, it's worth making sure it's informative and well written

Writing good meta descriptions

Google provide plenty of information about how to write good meta descriptions (see the latter section of that page, but while you're there you should read the top section about titles too!) and sites such as SEOmoz have good coverage too.

The key is to be descriptive: Tell someone enough about what's on the page to help them decide whether that's the page they should look at or not. Don't just state the obvious - saying 'Department of XYZ homepage' tells users that it's your homepage, but nothing else. 'The top XYZ department for student satisfaction in the UK. Discover more about our undergraduate and postgraduate courses plus world-leading research.' is more much more informative.

How long should a description be?

We recommend between 100 and 150 characters.

Google displays between 150 and 160 characters, so going over that risks your description being truncated.

At the other end of the spectrum though, if your description is particularly short Google may supplement it with content pulled from the page. This has happened with our maps page:

The first line in the snippet is our 'description'; the second is pulled from page content

Since you can probably write a better description of your page content than Google can automatically generate, it's worth providing enough content to stop it deciding to supplement what you provide.

Adding descriptions in the CMS

In addition to making meta descriptions more useful when published, we've made it easier to add them in the CMS too.

Meta data is added in the same place as always - the 'Meta' tab in the Modify Section screen - but we've removed all the other fields apart from description and keywords so it's much easier to get straight to the correct field to fill in. Any Moderator can add or amend meta data fields and there's no approval needed of any changes; they'll go live with the next publish automatically.

Seeing the effects

Search engines take a while to re-index pages, so if you change your meta descriptions don't expect search results to update instantly. Give it a few days, maybe up to a couple of weeks, and you should see the effect of your change.

Happy meta data updating!

Linking to individual tabs on tabbed content pages

We've recently made some changes to how our tabbed content templates work in the CMS, so it's now possible to link directly to an individual tab, whether that's the careers tab on a course page or the publications tab on a staff profile.

This change also means that as you navigate through multiple tabs on a page, pressing the back button in your browser will now take you to the previous tab you were viewing, rather than the previous page.

Saying goodbye to Internet Explorer 7

I was digging around in Google Analytics last month and noticed a slightly worrying trend: while IE6 usage has gradually been gradually falling to an almost insignificant amount, the number of visits from IE7 users has been showing hardly any sign of waning over the last year, holding steady at around 6% of all our traffic.

Surprisingly, a very large chunk of the IE7 traffic was coming from devices on the University network, even though most people are running either IE8 or 9. It turned out that this was because there's a setting in IE9 to 'Display intranet sites in Compatibility View' (where Compatibility View makes IE9 behave as if it's IE7), and this was enabled by default for york.ac.uk.

A couple of quick emails to IT Services later, and a change was pushed out to all supported desktops to turn this setting off (unless the user had manually set it).

The change was immediate:

Change in internal IE7 traffic after disabling Compatibility View for intranet sites (the regular dips are weekends)

We're now down from 18% to 6% for our internal IE7 traffic, and overall it's come down a couple of percentage points from 6% to 4%.

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.

Welcome to new undergraduates

We've just launched a set of web pages to welcome new undergraduates, giving them easy-to-digest information about everything they need to know before they arrive, that they can dip into as and when.

What looks like a simple set of pages has actually taken about nine months to put together, given the huge amount of content planning that was needed before the web team could start building web pages. 

A small group of people in the Academic Registry spent weeks reviewing what is sent to new undergraduates, when and who by, in an effort to reduce the amount of paper that's posted out and tell people what they need to know in a way that doesn't overwhelm them. The results were translated into a web structure and content by our Internal Comms team.

We want give students a warm welcome before they get to campus, so there are eight short welcome videos from student reps and members of staff - people who new students will regularly hear from or meet when they get here.

But by far the most popular video on the site is the 'Unofficial official guide to the University'. This came from an idea originally suggested by Tim Ngwena while he was YUSU president. He realised that most students don't understand the way the University is organised and how they fit in, and wanted to do something about it. This cartoon is the result.

Put together by Tim (now working for the Alumni team) and talented student cartoonist Hugo Brook, it's been scripted to give a short, friendly, informal guide around the University's structure. Something that could be a very dull read has been brought to life - we think it's brilliant, and we hope you enjoy it too.

The Social Web Team

You can now hear the latest tales from the basement of Heslington Hall on our official Twitter account.

We’ll use it to keep our followers updated about new and current projects we’re working on, the latest news and information from the team, and our thoughts on web issues and developments.

Support queries and requests for work are tough to answer in 140 characters, so please send those to web-office@york.ac.uk as normal.

You can follow us at @UoYwebteam

You can also see the latest University news on the University's official twitter, @UniofYork, and Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/universityofyork.