We’ve been a bit thin on the ground over the past couple of weeks, but there’s still been lots going on…

Go Mobile programme

Linda has been working on the specification for migrating the Undergraduate website into the responsive design in T4. Writing processes and planning the schedule for such a complex site is taxing to say the least.

Lisa has been carrying out post migration checks on the Institute of Neuroscience’s website to get it ready to hand over to the site editor. She’s also been working with the editor from the Open Day site to plan and edit content.

Design and technical developments

We’ve got boxes, grids and image sliders coming out of our ears. Work on the homepage designs for sites in Go Mobile has opened the flood gates. There are still some things to sign off but we’re getting close!

Training and support

We’re running weekly Go Mobile drop-in sessions to support those editors whose sites are part of the Go Mobile programme. If you’re busy editing your new site and have any questions or just need some dedicated time to work on your site feel free to pop along.

Thanks to all who’ve provided feedback on our T4 and Writing and Planning Web Content training. You’ve seemed to enjoy the sessions (so did we!) and have left armed with new ideas and plans for your websites.

We’ll be making some changes based on your comments like providing more targeted, shorter sessions. We’ll also be adding new training as we develop the responsive design and T4. Watch this space!

We’ve received 34 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 22 of them.

Campaigns and web developments

Lisa has been re-structuring a section of the Sports Centre website.

Industry conferences, workshops & training

Emma C attended this year’s Institutional Web Managers Workshop. The two main themes were working in an agile way (and how this applies to content development) and developing a digital culture across the institution. She’s come away with lots to think about and we’ll see how we can implement some of it to improve the way we work.

Plans for the next few weeks

• Designing and building homepages for the sites in Go Mobile
• Checking and proofreading the new sites
• Reviewing content standards for new content types
• Running some Clarity Grader reports so the Postgraduate site editors can keep on top of their readability

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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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Time sure does fly when you’re having fun. I can’t believe it’s time for our fortnightly update. Here’s what we’ve been up to…

Go Mobile programme

Linda has been planning the Undergraduate migration project. As well as needing design work and content development, this website has the added complexity of being in T4 but not using the Go Mobile content types.

We’ve been finalising post-migration work on the Schools and Colleges, and Open Day sites. This is to get them ready to hand over to their editors later this month.

Jane has been working with her editors for the Research website. Exciting times – both have now had their training and are using their new skills to get stuck in with T4. Stop press: for the first time we have a site purpose for the Research website.

Technical developments

Linda has reviewed the pre-migration template and tagged up some test content for the Undergraduate migration project. We should be testing this out this week.

Training and support

We ran another T4 show and tell session which covered:

• what happens when you delete a section that is linked to from other sections
• some end user sign off (events and publications)
• an update on the T4 in-line help we’ve been adding to the system

Anne ran a T4 training session, with support from Emma C, for editors from Schools and Colleges, and the Press Office.

We’ve received 36 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 10 of them.

Campaigns and web developments

Alongside Go Mobile we’re still working on business as usual. In the past two weeks we’ve been busy.

The Clearing website first phase is nearing completion – Linda has been working with the Clearing content editors on the site.

Jane was very proud to attend a presentation of the results for the Postgraduate Web Research and Evaluation. It showcased the results of in-depth user testing, external experts review and competitor analysis. And the results show that we have an outstanding website, that performs exceptionally better than the previous one – with the stats to prove it! So it was worth all the hard work then…

Emma C updated the external facing Engagement website and made further updates to the website for our London campus. She also met with colleagues from Marketing and Student Recruitment to plan homepage messaging up to the start of the new academic year.

Lisa is finalising the new international pages for the Pre-Arrival site which are scheduled to go live at the end of the week.

Jane and Gareth met with the University’s Research Impact Officers to discuss our plans for the Research website as part of Go Mobile. They were also really interested in ways to get research active staff online using social media.

Steve updated the Science Central pages to include content on Newcastle as a future Smart City.

We sent out our monthly blog round-up for June. If you’re not receiving this and would like to then you can sign up to our mailing list from our website (University login required).

Plans for the next few weeks

We’re getting into peak holiday season with schools breaking up at the end of next week. So while we’ve still got our full complement of staff we’ll be:

• running the next round of Go Mobile training
• reviewing our content standards
• designing custom homepages for Go Mobile sites
• testing the go live process for sites in Go Mobile

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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

Linda ran Clarity Grader reports on the undergraduate courses to help their team with improving the readability of their website.

We attended a PG Web Research session that detailed the user research and analytics results for the new postgraduate website, so far it’s been a complete success.

Technical developments

We’ve set standards around building news, events and staff lists in T4 to introduce greater consistency across our websites. We’re planning to introduce this through the T4 migration process.

Continuing to sign off components in T4 and as we apply these new components to real content we realise we need to update things again…

All the top 20 websites have been imported into T4 and are ready to be edited – Go team!

Design

Base style sheets have been added into the T4 CMS:

• Research
• Press Office
• Undergraduate
• About
• Study
• Open Day
• Schools and Colleges
• Law School
• Architecture, Planning & Landscape
• Ageing
• Social Renewal
• Sustainability

Training and support

Jane and Lisa delivered a Planning and Writing Web Content training session on Monday 22 June, that’s 10 customers who left all fired up about writing well for the web!

Anne with support from Lisa delivered a T4 training session on Tuesday 23 June.

Ongoing updates are being made to our training materials.

We’re also aiming to provide a few lines of help beside each field in T4. This will help our end users as they add content in the system.

We’ve received 44 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 19 of them.

Campaigns and web developments

That business as usual is still coming in….

Emma C met with colleagues from the PARTNERS team to plan a new student focused site for the Assessed Summer School.

Lisa is working on international content for the Pre-Arrival site.

Emma B has been working with colleagues in Philosophical Studies and SACS to overhaul their websites as well as setting up a new internal site for the School of English and continuing to work on the Go Mobile programme.

Steve is working with Mechanical Engineering on setting up an internal site and helping to make changes to the Science Central pages. He is also continuing to meet with Schools within SAgE Faculty to look at their web provision and support.

Plans for the next few weeks

Exciting times for Go Mobile – the newly trained Web Editors for the Research website will be given access to their new site to get editing, using all the knowledge from our training.Supported by Jane, their Project Manager they will get to grips with prioritising what work needs to be tackled first.

We have a Web Communications Strategy Group meeting this month, where Gareth will provide a progress report about the Go Mobile project.

Jane and Gareth will be meeting with the Faculty Impact Officers, with members of the Press and Digital Marketing team to discuss how to raise the profile of our research impact.

Lisa will be holidaying in the lovely Lake District – better pack those waterproofs…

See you next time!

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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

We’re working on the sites from batches 1 and 2 which have been migrated into T4. There’s a bit of post-migration fixing to get them ready to hand over to our web editors. Editors will then have an opportunity to work on their content, using the new content types.

Batch 3 has been migrated into T4 and we are about to start importing batch 4 later this week.

We’ve updated our website to include details of the first group of sites in development and outline the stages in the development process (University login required).

Technical developments

We are currently signing off the components that our editors will be using regularly once their website has been handed over to them to edit.

More complex components (such as image galleries and grid layouts) will be worked on soon after this.

Design

Press Office and Research design mock-ups are now complete. Batch 1 and 2 base stylesheets to be developed further for roll out within T4.

Planning is underway to migrate the Undergraduate site into a responsive design.

Training and support

We received our first official feedback on our Writing and Planning Web Content workshop.

We got some great comments on the session – so we’re happy.  People seemed to really like:

• two facilitators to break up the presentation
• the exercises and tasks we set

We’re continuously developing our training as we learn more.

We’ve introduced a T4 show and tell session for our own team to help us understand the CMS as we start using it.

We’ve received 45 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 25 of them.

Campaigns and web developments

There’s still a lot of business as usual!

Linda has worked with our International Marketing team to review plans for a restructure of their content over the summer.

Discussions/sites are in the pipeline with HR, Clearing, Careers and our Assessed Summer School.

Emma C has been monitoring our performance in search rankings. She’s also looking into better ways to report and display our analytics data.

Emma C and Lisa launched the new Newcastle University London website.

Plans for the next few weeks

We’re busy preparing for our next batch of Go Mobile training.

We’re always planning and writing blogs – let us know if there’s a topic you’d like us to cover.

Holiday season is underway. A couple of our team are over in Malaysia at the moment. They took the opportunity to visit our medical campus: NUMed Malaysia while they were there. That’s dedication!

See you next time!

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