Team update: 18 July – 29 July 2016

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Go Mobile programme

Linda met with the School of History, Classics and Archaeology to line up their site for Batch 4. She’s also been working on the Business School website to make sure it’s ready to go.

This last week has been all about the proofreading and final amends to sites to get them ready for launch on 29 July (today).

Emily’s been working on the NICR and CEAM sites to get them ready to go live, and has also helped out with the proofing of the Business School site.

Emma C made the final amends to the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics website before passing it on to Andrew for proofing.

Andrew’s worked on editing sites for the Cardiovascular Research Centre and Institute of Cellular Medicine, before proofing English and helping proof the Business School site. He’s also completed the audit for CURDS in Batch 4.

Anne’s been proofing the Maths & Stats website ready for go live on 29 July.

Fen has been working on the School of Mathematics and Statistics website, and proofing the School of Chemistry website ready for go live today. She’s also been prepping for Batches 4 and 5, with audits of the Conference Team, Catering and Business Services websites.

Lisa has edited the School of Chemistry website, which has been proofed by Fen with help from Jane, who has pitched in with proofing for a number of sites. Jane also met with Accommodation to discuss further developments to their site, which launched in Batch 2.

There’s always ongoing planning for the next batches. Emma B and Linda have mapped out work in Batches 4 and 5.

Design and Technical developments

Catherine completed the colours and styles for websites in Batch 3 and has started some of Batch 4

Catherine has been building a T4 widget to provide Directions to our schools, faculties and services, with input from Jane and Andrew.

Peter has been conducting the technical preparation of websites in Batch 3, ready for Go Live on the 29 July (today).

Campaigns and other developments

Linda and Catherine met with the Advancement Team about design requirements for the new system they are implementing to manage the alumni community and events.

Peter dealt with a request from NU London to add campaign tracking from Rubicon.

Training and support

Fen and Linda delivered a full day training in Planning and Writing Web Content.

Andrew has delivered a half-day of media management training.

We’ve received 39 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 22 of them.

Plans for the next few weeks

Starting Batch 4: audits, kick-off meetings and planning.

Team update: 4 July – 15 July 2016

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Go Mobile programme

Batches 3 and 4

The team is well into Batch 3 of the Go Mobile programme. We’re planning for the go live of sites on 29 July!

Fen has been busy working on the School of Mathematics and Statistics website. It is now in T4 and is being edited.

Andrew has been building a new site in T4 to showcase the work of our CardioVascular Research Centre.

He’s also been redeveloping the Institute of Cellular Medicine’s website. The focus is on restructuring their research pages.

Emily is working with the Northern Institute for Cancer Research to get their content ready.  She is also working on the School of Chemical Engineering and Advanced Materials website. They are currently in the pre-migration template – ready to move into T4 next week.

Emma has been working with the Business School to get their site on track to go live in this batch.

Lisa has the Chemistry site audited and in its pre-migration phase.

We’re already planning for batch 4 too.  It never stops!

Site reviews

We’re planning to return to sites that have been through the Go Mobile programme. We’re aiming to review around six months after launch. We’ll be looking at:

  • site performance
  • broken links and spelling errors
  • last updates
  • whether it meets content standards

Fen has started a review of the Research website. Andrew has also reviewed the Institute for Sustainability’s website. We’ll be reporting back in due course on further site reviews.

Design and Technical developments

The tech team are working on requirements for Batch 3 and 4 sites.

There’s been a lot of work on the Clearing campaign particularly around analytics.  This has been keeping them out of mischief!

Training and support

We ran a successful web community event on Monday, which got together around 10 web editors – new and old!

We covered:

  • where we’re at with Go Mobile
  • a show and tell (new features in T4)
  • a World Café – an open forum for feedback on T4

We’ll be writing a further blog post on this soon.

Anne delivered T4 CMS Basics training. Jane and Fen delivered our Planning and Writing Web Content workshop.

We’ve received 43 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 18 of them.

Plans for the next few weeks

Our focus for the next few weeks is finishing off Batch 3 and preparing for Batch 4!

How We’re Improving Our Google Analytics Configuration

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Over the past few weeks we have been reviewing the set-up of our Google Analytics tracking.

We had to update the tracking code embedded on all pages of the website. While we were doing this it seemed sensible to look at the whole set-up to make sure we are getting the most reliable data. We’ve been working with the digital agency, iProspect, on this project.

Account structure

The biggest change you’ll notice when you log in to analytics is the structure of our account. Everything has been consolidated into two properties:

  • internal.ncl.ac.uk
  • www.ncl.ac.uk – cross site tracking

The majority of our editors will be interested in data from external sites, so I’ll focus on what can be found in the www.ncl.ac.uk property. Within this property you will see a number of views. These allow you to access data for specific sub-domains, eg research.ncl.ac.uk, or applications, eg Hobsons.

There are also two views that allow you to look at data across all of the services, and see movement between them. They are:

  • 1. MAIN // incl. Microsites, Research, Conferences & Webstore – this gives access to filtered and de-duplicated data and should be used to report on activity from July 2016 onwards
  • 9. RAW – this gives access to unfiltered data and should be used only to report on activity before July 2016

Access to analytics

As part of this review we’re also looking at who has access to our account. This will include revoking access for anyone signed up with a personal email address. If you still need access to analytics we’ll ask you to re-register with a Google Account connected to your Newcastle email address.

Service development

Over the summer we’ll be taking some time to develop the analytics service we offer. This will give us time to collate 2-3 months of data in the new configuration.

We’ll be looking at access, reporting and analysis, as well as how we feed any recommendations back into content and template development.

Related posts

Team Update: 20 June – 1 July 2016

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Go Mobile programme

We finished working on sites in batch two, with five sites going live on 24 June:

Lisa proofread the Faculty of Medical Sciences website. She also met with the editor for the new Medical Sciences Online Learning site. The editor is delighted with the site and is already planning ways to evaluate and develop the content.

Fen proofread the Medical Sciences Online Learning website. This week, she has been helping the editors in the Faculty of Medical Sciences to make some updates to their content.

Emily and Steve have been working on the School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences website, ready for go live today.

Jane and Emily have been putting the finishing touches to the Accommodation website. All members of the content team have chipped in to proof the site ready for go live today.

Fen and Linda have been working with the UG marketing team to develop new websites for Clearing and Clearing at Newcastle University London. Both sites will go live today.

Emma C has been working on the Business School website in T4, getting it ready to hand back to the NUBS marketing team for final accuracy checks.

Andrew has been working with the Institute of Cellular Medicine and the CardioVascular Research Centre on the initial stages of their website developments.

We’re continually reviewing our processes so we can be flexible and effective throughout the entire Go Mobile project. We held a ‘Sprint retrospective’ meeting on Wednesday to assess how things went in batch two, and identify where improvements can be made for future batches.

Design and technical developments

Catherine and Peter have been working on the design for some banners for our UG degree pages. The banners will link to the new Clearing website and will show which courses are available when Clearing opens in August. Catherine has also been preparing the colour schemes for the batch three sites.

Campaigns and other developments

Catherine is building a new research section for the Newcastle Academic Health Partners website.

Peter has been updating the goals in Google Analytics and adding additional button tracking for the Clearing campaign.

Emma C has worked with members of the Press Office and International Relations team to get statements from the University about the outcome of the EU Referendum onto the website.

Linda wrote a blog post about using Clarity Grader to improve the readability of a website.

Training and support

Four of the team attended a two-day Google Analytics training session to make sure we have everything set up correctly and are getting the most from our data.

Anne delivered T4 CMS Basics training.

Andrew delivered Media Management training.

Fen and Jane are preparing to deliver Planning and Writing Web Content training next week.

The whole team has been involved in planning our upcoming Web Editors Community event, taking place on Monday 11 July.

We’ve received 34 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 18 of them.

Plans for the next few weeks

We’re beginning work on sites in batch three. Audits are in progress and site structures are being agreed. Next up is pre-migration work to get the sites ready to import into T4.

Improving Readability through Go Mobile

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We measure the success of the Go Mobile programme by looking at the readability score for our content.

Why readability is important

It’s important to us as our websites help us communicate with a broad range of users. Everyone from school leavers to top researchers visit our sites. They all have different content needs. They all want to find answers to questions. We need to provide answers clearly and directly. This is where readability comes in.

You can find out more in our blog posts about readability and simplifying language.

Benchmarking our readability

We use a browser-based tool called Clarity Grader to give us a clear language score for a website. They look like this (red indicates a bad score, amber is fair and green is good):

This shows a Clarity Grader report with a bad score for long sentences, a fair result foraverage sentence length and readability, and a good score on passive language.

To work out the scoring of a site, Clarity Grader assesses the following:

Long sentences

A long sentence has more than 20 words. Using short sentences helps you to keep them simple in structure. It means it’s easier to get your message across. It also makes them simpler to read on a mobile screen.

Clarity Grader recommends having no more than 5% of your content in long sentences.

Average sentence length

Clarity Grader recommends an average sentence length of 10 words or lower across the site. Obtaining this average will mean that your content is clearer and easier to understand.

Passive language

You should be aiming for direct language. The Clarity Grader report considers a score of 4% or lower to be a good indicator of active messages.

Readability

A score of 60 or higher indicates your message is clear. It means users of your site will understand your meaning with ease.

Access to Clarity Grader

Our subscription means that we can’t make Clarity Grader available to all editors. If you think it’d be useful to you, get in touch and we’ll see what reports we can run for you.

You can get readability scores on a page by page basis by using the Hemingway app.

University readability – before and after Go Mobile

We’re running Clarity Grader reports before and after a site goes through Go Mobile. This has given us a useful benchmark to look at the readability of University web content.

Our School of Mechanical and Systems Engineering has improved the readability of their content. They’ve reduced the length of sentences and made their content more active.

Before

mech-eng-before

After

mech-eng-after

 

Setting a readability score for the University

We’ve shown that Go Mobile is improving the content quality across the site. I think the Clarity Grader scores are a little strict for us right now.

I propose a set of targets to get us nearer to where we should be. Unfortunately we’ll not get the lovely all green for good from Clarity Grader. But it’s a start.

I suggest:

  • Long sentences: 15%
  • Sentence length: 10 or lower
  • Passive language: 4% or lower
  • Readability: 45 or higher

Let me know in the comments if you agree with the targets.