Team update: 14 – 27 May

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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

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!

Experts to Inspire You

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We like to keep ourselves up to date with the latest developments in the web industry by reading. A lot.

We read books, articles, websites and blogs and thought we’d pick some of the quotes we really, really like. Hopefully you can spot why…

Usability

“When I look at a web page it should be self-evident. Obvious. Self-explanatory.

“I should be able to ‘get it’ – what it is and how to use it- without expending any effort thinking about it.”

Steve Krug
Don’t make me think

“It is very important that your website is visually pleasing. However it is much more important your website is useful.”

Gerry McGovern
Killer Web Content

Your content is important

“Language is at the heart of communication, and the only purpose of a website is to communicate.”

Seth Godin
The First Rule of Web Design

“Your writing is important. At the end of the day, you’re a person communicating with other people.”

Nicole Fenton and Kate Kiefer Lee
Nicely said. Writing for the web with style and purpose

“If the heading is the hook, the summary is the line that pulls you in. The summary gives readers all the information they need to decide whether to read on or not.”

Gerry McGovern
Killer Web Content

“A person who produces content without understanding the tasks the content needs to support is a dangerous person indeed.”

Gerry McGovern
The Stranger’s Long Neck

“With the limitations of the mobile screen as a guideline and a barrier, you’d naturally have to write differently.

  • You’d get to the point.
  • You’d put the most important information up front.
  • You’d remove all the marketing jargon and fluff.
  • You’d write short declarative sentences.
  • You wouldn’t use a long word when a short one would do.
  • You’d make every word earn its place.

Writing this way isn’t just good for writing for mobile. It’s good writing for everyone.”

Karen McGrane
Content Strategy for Mobile

Going mobile

“Use going mobile as a lens to make all our content better regardless of platform.

“It’s a big chance to create a better user experience by improving the quality of our content. Let’s not waste it.”

Karen McGrane
Content Strategy for Mobile

“The work you do now, to structure content for reuse and get it ready for mobile, is going to also make that content more prepared for wherever the future takes it.

“Considering all the different devices on which your content may be displayed forces you to focus – to take stock of what’s really important and to get rid of things that aren’t.”

Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Content Everywhere

Your messaging

“Messaging is the art of deciding what information or ideas you have that you want to give to – and get from- your users.”

Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach
Content Strategy for the Web

“Use the mobile screen’s constraints to help prioritise your primary, secondary and supporting messages.”

Karen McGrane
Content Strategy for Mobile

“You must have an ending to your content that is a call to action. Good web content is always task-focused, and the best ending allows your customers to go about completing their tasks.”

Gerry McGovern
Killer Web Content

A final thought…

“Today, many websites are damaging the reputation of the organization. Every time someone finds the wrong content or clicks on a broken link, the brand is hurt.”

Gerry McGovern
Killer Web Content

Feel inspired

So, do you feel inspired? And can you tell why we like these quotes?

These experts all advocate good writing practice to improve the website experience for all.

They all absolutely, utterly agree on one thing: content is king.

You don’t have to be a designer or a developer to create a useful, successful website at the University (we’ll do that for you) but you do have to care about your content.

References

Top 5 Tips: Search Engine Optimisation

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In our recent Planning and Writing Web Content training there were a few questions about how to improve your website’s position in search results. So we thought it timely to share our top 5 tips for search engine optimisation (SEO).

There’s no mystery to it – writing content that will be highly ranked by search engines is the same as writing effective web content for your users.

1. Use the language of your readers

It’s important to think about the terms your readers might use to search for your site, and then to use these words in your content.

You should also identify keywords and phrases that you want to rank highly for. Keep these narrow; it’s unrealistic to compete with general terms like ‘student experience’.

2. Keep your content up to date

When a page was last updated matters to search engines as well as your users. It’s essential to check for, edit and delete out-dated content.

3. Highlight important content

Highlight key words to make sure that the search engine can work out which content is most important. You can do this by:

  • including keywords in the page title and subheadings
  • making keywords bold
  • using keywords in hyperlink text

Don’t rely on graphics or text in images to convey your message. Search engines can’t get to this copy and your content won’t get indexed.

4. Use descriptive web addresses (URLs)

URLs appear in search results. It’s therefore important that your URLs are descriptive of the content on your page. Users can then tell if the page will be relevant to them.

5. Links

Search engines respond to well-linked sites. You should link to relevant content on Newcastle University’s website and externally. Also look for opportunities for colleagues at the University and external partners to link back to your site. This verifies your content’s relevance and importance to search engines.

Related posts

Training our Editors to Think Digital First

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Our Go Mobile programme is the driver for some brand new training to get the University thinking digital first.

Raising the bar

We’re training our web editors to operate the new content management system – T4.

We’ve also invited key site owners to come and learn about managing a site. This includes setting goals for content and best practice in writing for the web.

The first sessions ran on 7 and 8 May for trainees from the:

  • Undergraduate and Postgraduate marketing teams
  • Research Office
  • Institute for Sustainability
  • School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development

Day 1: Writing and Planning Web Content

We want to get our web editors really thinking about their content.

The University doesn’t want a team of content-putter-uppers. It needs digitally savvy writers who understand what their site is for and how to evaluate it.

Day 1 introduces setting a site purpose and how you prioritise content to support it. It was good to be able to try out some exercises we’d picked up at Confab Europe (a content strategy conference).  Even better, our editors seemed to really understand them and could see how they might use them.

“[The] site purpose planning doc was super helpful!”

The session also covers tips for writing web content and introduce a range of tools to help you do this.

“The writing tips I know, but still find hard to put into practice…it was a useful refresher.”

Day 2: T4 Training

Our T4 training day provides an introduction to the Content Management System. It showcases the idea of responsive design and how we’re configuring T4 to support editors to write for a range of devices.

“Having news and staff lists in one place is fantastic.”

Empowering editors

Site editors can more easily influence the design of their content in T4. The first editors are starting a 2-4 week period of supported editing. In this time they’ll get to apply new layouts, add quality assets, and improve their content for reading online.

It’s a chance to cut words, tighten copy and focus on users.

Initial feedback

As we go, we’re gathering feedback on the training topics, the delivery and the new CMS. We’re in Beta mode at the moment – but hope we’ve got a good starting point. We’ll be improving the training content as we go.

Accessing training

Training is only available to site editors as part of the Go Mobile Programme: we’ll be in touch when it’s your turn!

Team update: 30 April – 13 May

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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!