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

Go Mobile programme

Linda is coming up with a specification for migrating the undergraduate website into the new responsive design types – it’s complicated!

We’ve updated our processes so the pre-migration template works better for us when moving sites into T4.

Technical developments

We’re exploring how best to make sure everything built in T4 works for our end users – closing the gap between build and training. This will make editing easier for our web editors.

Design

Development of the Press Office and Research design mock-ups is ongoing.

Andy has been developing the Clearing subject landing page for use on a social media campaign.

Training and support

There’s been a lot of training going on:

• Jane and Linda delivered the second Planning and Writing Web Content session
• Anne delivered a bespoke T4 CMS training session to the Postgraduate Marketing team
• Steve delivered a concentrated Writing for the Web session to the SAgE Faculty marketing team

We’ve received 36 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 19 of them

Campaigns and web developments

There’s still a lot of business as usual!

There have been developments to the Undergraduate Open Day site including:

• updates to the Google Map
• new video embeds
• social media sharing links
• call to action buttons

Lisa and Emma C are building a new microsite for Newcastle University London.

Steve and Peter have set up an internal site for the School of Chemical Engineering and Advanced Materials (CEAM).

Plans for the next few weeks

• Our monthly blog roundup will be going out to our community of web editors later this week
• Jane is writing an upcoming blog post about top tips for assets; how to best use photos and videos on our websites
• Ongoing work in T4 on the first two batches of sites in Go Mobile

See you next time!

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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!

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Here we are again – read on to find out what we’ve been working on for the last two weeks.

Go Mobile programme

We’ve been updating our plan and confirming task are on (or ahead of!) schedule. We’re starting to look beyond the end of the first cycle and to sketch out plans for the rest of our sites.

Emma C has been reviewing our style guides and content standards to make sure we’ve covered all the new content types. And we’re building a demo site to showcase the new design and best practices.

Technical and design developments

We met to finalise the layout/design options for central sites in Go Mobile. Andy is creating visual mockups for various page types in the new template.

We’ve been testing and refining the migration process further. Catherine is looking at the requirements for staff web profiles in the MyImpact system.

Training and support

The editorial team trialled their new training programme on the rest of the team. The feedback was positive and they’ve given some suggestions for additions and improvements.

Anne has been busy as always, in the last two weeks she:

• delivered a quick access T4 CMS training session to some of the Postgraduate editors
• has been developing more in-depth CMS training for editors involved in the migration of sites into T4
• trained 7 web editors in the use of Contribute to manage their websites

Emma C has been investigating free, browser based image editing tools. Keep an eye out for her recommendations in an upcoming post.

We’ve received 39 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 18 of them.

Campaigns and web developments

Alongside Go Mobile we’re continuing with business as usual.

We’ve updated our website (University login required) to provide information on service developments, including:

• Siteimprove for checking broken links and misspellings
• ways to check and improve the readability of your content
• a standard dashboard in Google Analytics to report on the performance of your site

Steve and Lisa have launched the new NEXUS facility website.

We’ve written blog posts to help with structuring content and fixing broken links and misspellings. Emma C has reviewed the analytics for our first two months. The figures show that we’re getting lots of return visitors who are reading multiple posts at each visit.

Clearing 2015 planning is underway. There’s some content design and tech set up needed to support colleagues in Marketing and Student Recruitment.

Plans for the next few weeks

We’re getting out of the office for a day to take stock of how far we’ve come through Go Mobile and plan for the next few months.

Our monthly blog roundup is ready to go out to our community of web editors tomorrow.

The first training sessions on Planning and Writing Web Content and T4 take place on the 7 and 8 May.

That’s all for now. See you for our next update in a couple of weeks.

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It’s time for a team update about what we’ve been working on over the last two weeks and what’s coming up.

Go Mobile programme

• Tagging sites ready for migration –  batch one, including Research, Law School, Press Office, Institute for Sustainability is complete. And batch two is nearing completion for; Open Day, Information for Schools and Colleges, and last but not least About
• A lot of detailed planning of the steps in the migration process itself and scoping out potential go-live dates for the first batches of sites
• Calculating the time taken for each task to give us an accurate picture of the resources involved in the programme overall
• Updating our giant whiteboard, on which we are tracking our progress in migrating batches one and two

Technical developments

• The tech team (Catherine, Pete, Andy and Paul) have been moving the final template and components to its permanent home on the live server
• They’ve also been making final preparations for the migration of the PG site into T4
• We have also been getting ready to migrate batch one (four sites) into T4 and looking at the individual template requirements of each site

Training and support

• The editorial team have been finalising training materials for the new Go Mobile programme
• Anne is still working on training for the T4 CMS
• We’ve received 24 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 7 of them

Campaigns and web developments

There’s still a lot of business as usual!

• Emma C has been working with colleagues in Marketing and Student Recruitment to plan homepage messages for the next few months
• Steve has developed some external research pages on the Sage Faculty website
• Emma C attended a demo of the remote user testing platform What Users Do
• Jane has been reviewing some videos of external user testing of the PG website, and also writing a blog post about how much we hate FAQs (it’s true)

Travel-tastic

• We enjoyed some time off for the Easter bank holidays – some team members travelled as far afield as Copenhagen, America, London and even good old Yorkshire

Plans for the next few weeks

• Refining layout/design options for sites in Go Mobile
• We’ll be carrying out post-migration checks on the first batch of sites in T4
• Our editorial team are meeting to plan future content for this blog – let us know in the comments if there’s any topics you want us to cover

See you next time!

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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!

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