Team Update: 25 April – 6 May 2016

Posted on 6 May, 2016 by

Go Mobile programme

We’ve welcomed Fen Felton-Pitt to the team as a Web Content Officer. Everyone’s been involved in her induction. We’ve thrown her straight in to work on the Go Mobile programme, beginning with auditing sites for our next batch.

Jane had an initial meeting with the working group from Accommodation. There was lots of discussion, ideas and interesting proposals. We’re looking forward to seeing how the plans develop.

Linda met with the Business School to kick off plans for their Go Mobile development.

Catherine organised an intense two days of training and meetings while the NUMed staff were in the UK. And Emily’s been busy getting their site ready for migration into T4.

Emma C has done pre- and post- migration checks on the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology site. It’s now ready to hand over to the School’s web editor to work on the content.

Lisa carried out an audit of the Faculty of Medical Sciences website.

After a week enjoying the sunshine in Devon, Andrew has been doing a bit of restructuring of the Mechanical and Systems Engineering website as part of its T4 post-migration process.

Design and technical developments

We’re coming up with some designs and working prototypes for the Clearing site. This covers a course search and a way to highlight which courses are in Clearing.

The Google Analytics tracking code has been updated to Google’s latest version, Universal Analytics.

Catherine has been looking at the technical requirements for the first batch of sites to make sure we can accommodate all of their content needs.

Campaigns and other developments

Linda attended a half-day demo of a new system that the Advancement Team are investigating to manage events and alumni information. There will be some implementation on our website a bit further down the line.

Lisa wrote a blog post on our standards for using expandable content on websites.

Gareth met with Bill Chaudhry to scope out a new website for the Cardiovascular Research Centre

Training and support

Some lucky Training Team members (Anne, Emma, Linda and Lisa) can now use the Training and Events Management module in SAP. This means we can manage our training requests more effectively.

Jane created some bespoke Writing for the Web training for Careers editors. Who will only be focusing on News and Events.

Emma C ran another Media Management session. Following up on feedback from the attendees she is producing a guide of image specifications for photographers.

Emma B created and delivered a half-day training session for the team on Agile/Scrum project management methodology, which was more fun than it sounds! We’ll be thinking hard now about how to adopt some of the principles into our work.

Anne delivered a Contribute workshop, and also did some bespoke T4 training with Fen, our new Web Content Officer.

We’ve received 31 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 19 of them.

Plans for the next few weeks

We’re halfway through our current batch of Go Mobile sites. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be supporting web editors in schools and services as they work on their content. By the time of our next update, we’ll have a handful of shiny new sites to show you.

A Quick Guide to…Expandable Content

Posted on 3 May, 2016 by Jiajun

Expandable content allows you to show and hide information on a webpage.

This content type can be useful to reduce page length; particularly if content is only relevant to a specific audience.

An example of this can be found on the Open Day website. Expandable boxes have been used on the travel page to allow users to quickly access information relevant to their chosen mode of transport. This saves them from reading information about all of the ways to travel to the University.

The biggest drawback with an expandable box is that it’s an extra click to see information so I’ve summarised our standards for using them in our quick guide to…

Expandable content

You should never hide essential information inside an expandable box as you can’t guarantee that users will click to see the content.

When adding expandable content to a page you should:

include a descriptive title – you need to encourage the user to expand the box
keep the title to a maximum of 30 characters
make sure content within the box is shorter than the main content of the page
include no more than 100 characters within an expandable box
make sure the content is written for the web

You should also try to use expandable boxes at the end of a page as they act as a visual break in the content. We found in user testing that people often don’t expect content to follow expandable boxes and so they stop scrolling.

For more advice on when to use this content type see my post: Hide or not to Hide: When to use Expandable Content.

Big and (now) Beautiful

Posted on 27 April, 2016 by nueconsoc

The Careers website is a vitally important part of the University’s web presence, and we’ve just finished a huge, six month long Go Mobile redevelopment.

New home page

It’s a big University service with multiple audiences, including:

prospective and current students
parents
old and new graduates
our academics and staff
employers

And these users have any number of different tasks they want to complete. From checking opening times, finding out about Recruitment Fairs or CV workshops, psychometric tests, researching occupations, and advertising jobs….

When one becomes four

The site was so big it’s now four separate websites. Why? Because like it or not, big isn’t normally beautiful on the web.

‘Big’ often means content has simply grown over the years, with more information added, and added…..and added. Simultaneously, moving or navigating around a big site is generally harder too. (And yes you’ve guessed, it’s even harder to navigate on a smaller mobile screen.)

If not diligently reviewed, big websites often suffer with duplicated or out of date information. More pages are added, so more navigation is needed. It’s a vicious circle.
But by the very nature of this information-led service, the Careers website had to hold a massive amount of content.

OK, but surely the most popular pages were easy to find? Well…no. it was big you see, so really hard to find some good stuff.

Alright, but it looked like it was part of the University right? …Oh dear.

The return of the 1980s

It’s fair to say the old Careers Service website was looking a bit….well, 1980s. And nothing like the rest of the University online. It was seriously overdue for a redevelopment!

Old home page

Because the site used an old template, they were also cursed with some of the longest webpages ever seen on planet earth. I kid you not.

This one example had a word count of 1,607. That’s FIVE A4 pages worth of content on one webpage.

Before:

Screenshot of old careers page which was very long

Old CV page

After:

Screenshot of new careers page which is much shorter

New CV page

While some pages are still quite long, the content is easier to scan read and navigate around using mobile.

So our Go Mobile project actually involved a major information architecture evaluation and wholescale restructuring, audience identification, and four separate website rebuilds.

Followed by extensive re-writing, editing, layout and format changes.

Oh, and then we made it responsive for mobile.

Now we have four new websites. Our external sites now boast tailored, audience specific content and fully responsive templates:

And information for Staff? Well that’s now an internal website of course (login required).

The Content Audit: Step 1 for Improving Your Website

Posted on 26 April, 2016 by

The Go Mobile process begins with a content audit. I’m here to share with you what that involves and how it informs everything that follows.

The audit process

We start by taking an inventory of all the pages on a site. One of our web content officers systematically goes through it to collect information for each page, such as:

the page title
its level in the site structure
when it was last updated
its overall content quality (measured against our content standards)
whether there’s any content embedded or being fed in from elsewhere
whether it’s linked from the menu
if it links to any documents

We make an assessment of each page and recommend whether it should be retained, improved or deleted.

For pages marked for improvement we’ll also provide some context, or a recommendation for how the page could be built using the new content types.

The resulting spreadsheet is a riot of colour…

Acting on the audit

When the audit is finished, the auditor sits down with the project manager to go through the findings.

The project manager uses the outcome of the audit to work with the site’s owners and editors to agree the next steps.

The information gathered in the audit helps us to:

restructure sites
inform work needed before migration into T4
identify where we can improve content

The audit also provides a snapshot of the size and complexity of a site at a specific point. Having this information gives us a benchmark we can compare the new site to after it’s been through Go Mobile.

How you can help

Editors of websites due to go through the Go Mobile process can help us out with a bit of spring cleaning.

For tips, read Lisa’s post ‘Decluttering Your Website: How to Prepare for Go Mobile’

Team Update: 11 – 22 April 2016

Posted on 22 April, 2016 by Neil

Go Mobile programme

Project manager Jane was elated to see the new Careers and Careers Occupations websites go live – marking the end of a six-month project.

It was a massive achievement by our team (it did involve most of us) and Careers, which has significantly improved a vital University service online.

Lisa wrote up specific handover notes to help Careers manage their busy events schedule in T4.

Both Lisa and Andrew were on hand for go live, giving Jane smelling salts/support/sugar when needed.

Lisa also set about auditing the Medical Sciences site before taking a well-earned holiday.

Catherine, Emily and Emma C met with NUMED colleagues to talk through proposed updates to their site.

Emma C is working with Marketing and Student Recruitment on a new process for making student profiles re-usable across different sites and in different contexts.

The Alumni, Giving and 1834 Fund websites have merged to become a brand new site for Alumni and Supporters.

Andrew audited sites for Mechanical & Systems Engineering, Pre-Arrival, the Northern Institute for Cancer Research and Civil Engineering & Geosciences.

Design and technical developments

The team is currently working on the requirements for MyImpact profiles in T4.

They have further developed the course search and identifying courses in Clearing and Adjustments on the UGP website.

They have created pre-migration templates for batch one websites:

NUMed
Marine
GPS
Accommodation
Medical Sciences

Training and support

Jane and Emma C ran sessions on planning and writing web content for editors with sites currently going through Go Mobile.

Anne ran a T4 CMS Basics workshop and bespoke T4 session for editors with sites going through Go Mobile. This week she’ll deliver a session for Careers staff looking at news, events and staff lists in T4.

We’ve received 30 support requests through NU Service Helpdesk and resolved 21 of them.

Plans for the next few weeks

We’ve got a Media Management training session next week.

Jane starts her next Go Mobile project. Look out Accommodation, here we come!

Go Mobile Blog