Author Archives: Anne

Team update: 17 – 30 September

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Our Go Mobile Phase 1 sites are now live!

Go Mobile programme

We’ve now made 17 Go Mobile sites live, including the University Homepage:

Stay tuned for more updates about the next phase of the programme, coming soon.

The Undergraduate site is back in T4, Linda has been checking the import and building new grid-based landing pages to the UG Team’s specification.

Design and Technical developments

Finalising Press Office News template build to include feeds to Plasma screens, social meta data and theme based news. As part of the Go Mobile clean-up old scripts and systems that are not required by the Press Office team have been noted for removal and other systems to be kept for archive purposes only.

External homepage build is complete with news scripts and site manager connection added to the revised mobile layout.

Training and support

Emma C is busy writing our new training module – Website Media Management. This session will cover finding and editing images, best practice for documents and uploading to the T4 Media Library.

Anne’s working on some bespoke T4 CMS training for the Press Office.

We’re busy planning the next phase of training for Go Mobile. More sessions are scheduled through October-December ready for the next batch of editors.

We’ve received 29 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 17 of them.

Campaigns and web developments

Lisa has been working with the editor of the Open Day site to carry out post-event updates

We’re trialling some new software to help us monitor our position in search rankings (on desktop and mobile) for targeted keywords.

Emma B has launched a new site for the Newcastle University Humanities Research Institute  and been working with her editors in APL and Law to iron out any post go-live glitches in the sites.

Plans for the next few weeks

We’re now turning our attention to Phase 2, in which we plan to take the rest of the external facing website through the Go Mobile process (University login required). Phase 2 is planned to take place between January and December 2016.

The order in which we tackle sites is being prioritised by Faculty Steering Groups and central senior management. Once the order and timescale for each site is agreed, we will publish our plans on our website.

Feedback

Let us know what you think about our new mobile responsive websites – leave a reply.

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Find Content Inconsistencies Quickly and Easily using Siteimprove Policy

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Use of consistent language and terminology helps to raise the reputation of your website.

We have content standards and style guides in place for the University.

But, with over 100 websites and many editors, communicating and maintaining standards is a challenge.

We use Siteimprove, a quality assurance software, to help us find and fix broken links and misspellings on our websites.

Use Siteimprove Policy to remove unwanted content

Siteimprove also has a Policy function that we’re using to inform our editors about:

  • terms we don’t want on the website – such as ‘click here’
  • content changes – eg name of an Academic Unit or Service, or highlighting content that has changed its address
  • reinforcing a standard term – eg Newcastle University not University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Siteimprove does the hard work of finding and listing the content that needs fixing. This makes it easy for editors to follow our content standards.

If you’re a University web editor already using Siteimprove you can start using the Policy tab today.

How it works

You can find the Policy tab in the Services drop down menu:

Siteimprove - how to find the Policy function

Here you’ll find a list of policies created by the web team, and the number of violations on your website:

Policies list in Siteimprove Web Governance Software

Clicking on a policy description reveals:

  •  a policy summary
  • advice on what the editor needs to do
  • a list of all pages where a violation occurs

Siteimprove policy summary and location of violations

You know where the errors are, now let’s get those violations down to zero!

Create your own policies

You can create local website policies for terms that are specific to your content. View the Siteimprove Policy video tutorial to get started.

Access to Siteimprove

Request access to Siteimprove (University Login required) to get started on your website content clean up.

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Team update: 9 – 22 July

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It’s time again to find out what we’ve been up to over the past couple of weeks.

Go Mobile programme

Work continues on the Undergraduate migration project – with more research into:

  • content types and requirements,
  • content design on course profiles and
  • auditing of how the site works

There’s a lot of planning (and work) ahead for both the Web Team and Undergraduate marketing.

Emma C has been working with the editor from the Information for Schools and Colleges website. She’s had her training and is now getting stuck in to editing the site in T4.

We’re putting the final touches to the Go Mobile demo site after moving it into T4. We’ll use it to test the go live process over the next couple of weeks.

Design and technical developments

We’ve built a range of boxes to create the layouts for home pages and landing pages.

Different combinations of columns, colours and content will give each website a unique look. We’ve started applying the layouts to sites in T4 and they’re looking good!

This latest addition completes the major set of components needed to build most websites.

Training and support

Go-Mobile – we delivered two-days of training for eager editors from:

  • Marketing and Student Recruitment
  • Social Renewal
  • Biology
  • Institute of Neuroscience

We’re continuing to get great feedback from the sessions – one editor said:

“I’ve found myself thinking about the website in a completely different way!”

Anne and Emma C also ran a drop-in session for Go Mobile editors.

We’ve received 27 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 14 of them.

Campaigns and web developments

That business as usual is still coming in….

Linda provided advice to HR on how they can improve their web content. They are planning a review and revamp of their core content.

The Clearing website has bee re-launched with a new look and feel. The campaign design runs through the website and social media activity.

Linda’s written a couple of blog entries around improving your calls to action. Coming up in the next week or so – ‘why you shouldn’t use ‘click here’ in your text’; and ‘5 ways to improve your calls to action’.

The new international pages went live on the Pre-Arrival website.

Lisa has been looking at the analytics for the Open Day website to help inform developments for the new site in the Go Mobile programme. To learn about her findings read her post Improving Web Content with help from Google Analytics.

Plans for the next few weeks

It’s holiday time, so the team will be running at reduced capacity for the next few weeks – but there’s still plenty to do.

We’re running weekly Go Mobile drop-in sessions from now until the end of August. These sessions will support editors who are working on sites in T4 CMS, as part of the migration project.

There’s also a Contribute workshop scheduled for next week.

See you next time!

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Fix Broken Links and Misspellings with Siteimprove

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Broken links and misspellings in content harm the credibility of your website. They have an impact on – search rankings, user experience, and visitor traffic.

So, it’s important that you check and update your content on a regular basis.

We’re using Siteimprove quality assurance software to help web editors do this. It’s reporting on our external Academic Unit and Support Services websites – 60,500 pages !

How it works

Siteimprove crawls your website each week, highlights issues and sends you a report that:

  • checks every page and PDF on your site for broken links
  • checks for spelling errors and potential misspellings on every page
  • highlights elements on the page for you so you see errors in context

There’s also an inventory of all media files, documents, email addresses, and phone numbers. This makes it easy to audit your website and keep things up-do-date.

Siteimprove won’t fix broken links and misspellings errors on your website but it does make it easy to find them.

Improve the quality of your web content – get rid of those broken links and misspellings  and start using your Siteimprove report!

Access to Siteimprove

You can request access to Siteimprove (University Login required).

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Introduction to Tools

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Our web editors currently use Contribute web publishing software and an in-house database (Site Manager) to publish content on over 20,000 external facing web pages. We provide training and support in the use of these tools. Find out about training on our website (University Login required).

In the coming months the Go Mobile programme will see us migrating to a new Content Management System. This will support our editors in the production of content that is mobile responsive.

Tools topics

We’ll give you tips to help you use Contribute and Site Manager and  introduce you to our new Content Management System.

We’ll also tell you about some useful tools you can use to:

  • find broken links and misspellings on your website
  • grade your content for readability on the web
  • see how your content looks on mobile and tablet

Suggest a topic

If there’s a topic you’d like us to cover – get in touch via the comments or via our website. – (University Login required).

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