Welcome to our first ever Team Update.
We’ll be publishing updates every two weeks to showcase what we’ve been working on and what’s coming up.
Go Mobile programme
We set ourselves a deadline of Easter for a number of things related to Go Mobile on the basis that it was far enough away not to worry about it. Well, here we are, almost at Easter: what have we done?
There’s been a lot of liaison with the editors and owners of sites going through the Go Mobile programme. Sites coming up include: Postgraduate, Undergraduate, Press Office, Research, Institute for Sustainability, Institute for Ageing, and the Law School.
Technical developments
As we move towards applying the new responsive design to sites migrating into the T4 Content Management System, there’s been some tech set up needed. The server now supports the new template – all the stylesheets, fonts and JavaScript that run the content design are functioning.
Postgraduate components
The tech team (Andy, Catherine, Peter and Paul) have been importing the Postgraduate responsive template HTML into T4 and have broken it down into reusable components. These will form the building blocks for all the other sites going through Go Mobile.
Catherine has also been working on some new things such as making the image galleries and staff lists responsive.
site Migration planning
We’ve now got some resilient migration scripts meaning we can port over sites from where they live now (unix accounts) into T4. We tested this out last week on a small scale example website and everything seems fine.
It’s not all automated unfortunately, we have to prepare sites for migration by tagging them up in a pre-migration template. There’s also some fixing needed in the CMS once the site is in there.
The project leads in the web team have been working on tagging up sites ready for migration. Emma C and Lisa also audited each site’s content, reviewing site depth, structure and content quality.
Undergraduate site migration
The undergraduate site already uses T4 – but doesn’t use our new content components. We’ve been working with the Undergraduate team and NUIT to map out the specifics of moving this website into a responsive design (it involves a horrible spreadsheet of about 8000 cells).
Training and support
There’s a lot of development going on around our new Go Mobile training package. We’ve pulled together sessions to support our web editors in all aspects of website management:
- Anne is developing training in the T4 CMS
- Emma C and Linda have developed training to help you manage your site: planning content, setting site purpose and measuring success
- Jane and Lisa created the writing for the web part of the training including top tips on structuring content, cutting out the waffle and optimising for search
We’ve also:
- received 34 support requests through the NUService Helpdesk and have resolved 18 of them
- trained eight web editors in the use of Contribute to manage their websites
Campaigns and web developments
There’s still a lot of business as usual!
- Jane has been working with the Postgraduate team to set up and run external user testing, run content clarity tests, and review website changes following the results of earlier user testing
- Emma C and Lisa have written a usability report for user testing carried out on the new responsive design: Lisa has written a summary of our key findings for the blog
- Steve has developed some research pages on the internal Sage Faculty website
- Steve has developed some content on The School of Biology’s Ecology and Conservation Research Group
- We’re investigating brokering support from external suppliers for three project websites
- There have been various content updates to Newcastle University London
- We’re planning changes to our Engagement and International websites
- Pete has been exploring the use of the Google Tag Manager to improve access to Google Analytics tracking code. This should make things easier in the future as it reduces the need to wrangle with HTML
Plans for the next few weeks include:
- Testing out our new Go Mobile training on the rest of the Web Team (wish us luck – they’re a tough crowd)
- Migrating the first batch of sites into T4 – Press Office, Institute for Sustainability, Law School and Research – we’ll see you on the other side!
- Coming up with some further layout/design options for sites in Go Mobile
- Moving internal-facing content and sites to internal.ncl.ac.uk
See you next time!
