Phew! so we’ve pretty much finished phase 1 of Go Mobile, and we’re already busily planning and refining work for phase 2 ….read on.
Go Mobile programme
The whole team got together for an away (half) day. We reviewed all the stages of the programme so far and worked out what went well and what we needed to improve.
It was great to get all our team together to share experiences, our success and of course a bit of cake! We’ll use the notes from the day to help plan the next phase of the programme.
Feedback on the new sites
We put a feedback form on the University’s homepage (and all sites in the new template) when we launched the new responsive design.
We’ve had 23 responses (with the majority coming from University staff). Staff feedback focuses on tasks associated with working at the University eg the location of the people search and accessing internal services like Human Resources and the Safety Office.
The staff homepage contains all of these links – it’s our recommended starting point for staff seeking internal information.
You can access the staff homepage from the global top menu: Staff & Students
We’ve also had some comments on the design of the search box in the top right so we’ll be improving that over the coming weeks.
Design and Technical developments
Finishing touches are being made to the new Press Office website, due for launch on October 19.
Certainly not ones to sit back – the tech team is already working on the latest iteration of the University homepage. We’re adding dynamic menus to the top level menu. This will help people to find other parts of the University’s website, and also reduce the number of clicks it takes to get there.
Training and support
Anne’s developed some bespoke T4 training for the Press Office. This is so they can get to grips with their new website, and also the new ways of publishing and writing press releases on the web.
Some fairly detailed hand-over notes are being prepared for the editor of the Research website. With a new Research Impact campaign already in the initial stages, it will soon be all-change for the current impact case studies on the website. So those big visual boxes will change to reflect the new case studies coming along.
We are still working on developing our next phase of training for Go Mobile. We’ve got some sessions in November and December ready for the editors of phase 2 sites, and catching back-up editors from phase 1.
Emma C delivered the first of our new Website Media Management training sessions on 12 October. The sessions were well received, one participant said: ‘I thought the session was extremely helpful. Very interactive and easy to follow’. We’ll be running more sessions for Go Mobile editors in the coming months.
We’ve received 30 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 12 of them.
Campaigns and web developments
Steve has launched a new site for the Institute for Agri-Food Research and Innovation (IAFRI).
Catherine has launched a new site for the Newcastle Academic Health Partners.
Lisa wrote this month’s newsletter for the blog and is writing a post about improving page titles/headlines.
Plans for the next few weeks
Continuing work on our evil plan… oops sorry Phase 2 of Go Mobile!
Phase 2 is scheduled to start January 2016 and finish December 2016, the next batch of sites are still being prioritised and agreed by Faculty Steering Groups and central senior management – so watch this space.
Feedback
Let us know what you think about our new mobile responsive websites – leave a reply.
