It’s that time again – here’s an update about what we’ve been working on over the last two weeks and what’s coming up.
Go Mobile programme
We relocated to the Dove Marine Lab in Cullercoats on Tuesday 11 May for our Go Mobile Away Day. The day consisted of taking stock of the project, pooling our collective experiences of Go Mobile so far and planning the next few months of the programme. It also involved a bit of team kite flying!
We’re currently evaluating the first two batches of sites in the new CMS (T4) to ensure that the pre-migration tagging has worked as expected. This will inform developments for migrating sites in batches three and four.
Linda has been working through a sitemapping exercise. She’s been mapping current undergraduate T4 components to the new ones. This will make sure the undergraduate site can be migrated (and gets a bit of a spring clean as we go).
Steve has been working on the Biology website ready for migration.
Technical developments
We re-launched the postgraduate website after migration to T4 and checked it looked as it should in a range of the most popular browsers.
We also migrated the first seven sites from the Go Mobile programme into T4 ready for content work to begin.
Design
Andy is in the process of creating additional content type examples for our new demo site. They will illustrate quality photography relating to the following themes, and how best to position subjects within the photo:
- undergraduate
- postgraduate
- research
- sense of place
- student experience
- teaching and learning
Training and support
Linda and Emma C delivered the first Writing and Planning Web Content session as part of the Go Mobile programme. It went well. There was particular interest in the Site Purpose and Core Model ideas (look out for blog posts on these topics soon). Our editors seemed to enjoy the day, which was good!
Anne (with support from Linda!) delivered a pilot of the T4 training as part of the Go Mobile programme. There are things to change, but the editors seemed to find the CMS easy to use. Result!
We built a demo site to allow editors using T4 to:
- see the new design elements
- understand the new content and page types
- see our content standards in context
We’ve received 23 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 4 of them.
Campaigns and web developments
There’s still a lot of business as usual!
- Planning for Clearing is ongoing – there’s work underway on developing pages to support some subject-based campaigns
- Emma C has updated and restructured our style guides (University login required)
- Steve has embarked on an audit of web resources across the SAgE Faculty
- Lisa is working on developments for the Open Day site for the next Undergraduate Open Days
- Jane met with the Postgraduate Marketing team to discuss how to start to pull together the results of a whole raft of research completed for the postgraduate website, including:
- user testing by ‘What Users Do’
- comprehension tests
- expert evaluation by Fluent Interaction
- one to one interviews
- Google analytics
Plans for the next few weeks
- We will be reviewing and developing the Go Mobile training materials
- Steve will look at updating the International Connections map
- We will be developing a Newcastle University London microsite
- Our editorial team are meeting to plan future content for this blog – let us know in the comments if there are any topics you’d like us to cover
That’s all for now. See you next time!
