Team update: 18 July – 29 July 2016

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.

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Team update: 4 July – 15 July 2016

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!

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Team Update: 20 June – 1 July 2016

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.

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Team Update: 6 – 17 June 2016

There’s been a fair bit of holiday in the team over the past couple of weeks. Those of us left behind have been busy getting batch two sites ready to go live.

Go Mobile programme

Fen has been migrating the Pre-Arrival and Faculty of Medical Sciences websites into T4. They are both at the proofing and editing stage. She is working with the Faculty of Medical Sciences to make some amendments and updates to their content, ready for go live next week.

Fen and Jane met with the Pre-Arrival team – they are delighted with their development site and can’t wait to get stuck in on T4! Fen is proofing the site and sourcing images, ready for go live next week.

Andrew has been editing content on the School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences website preparing it for go live next week.

Linda has been doing some prep work for the Services for Business website – which is due to go through the Go Mobile transformation in batch four.

Linda checked in with the Alumni team. They’ve been reviewing their new site only a couple of months after go live! Super keen. They’ve got plans to add new content types and develop some of their messaging.

Lisa has been building, editing content and sourcing images for the new Faculty of Medical Sciences Online site.

Emily has been working on the content and structure for the Accommodation website.

Emma C has proofread the new Newcastle University Medicine Malaysia website which goes live next week.

We’ve been planning the batch three sites, lining things up for audits etc.

Design and technical developments

We’ve imported the following sites into T4:

  • Accommodation
  • FMS
  • NUBS
  • Pre-Arrival
  • NICR

Custom analytics and Google Ad tracking has been added to the T4 version of the Business School site.

Peter has modified the standard Events list so they can now be added to tabbed pages.

Campaigns and other developments

The Universal Analytics tracking code update for WordPress sites on microsites.ncl.ac.uk has been passed to the Digital Platforms team to implement.

Linda’s been working with teams in Marketing and Newcastle University London to get content ready for Clearing.

Emma C has been making plans for the next Web Editor Community Event. If your site has been through the Go Mobile process already keep an eye out for the invite coming early next week.

Following queries from editors, Lisa wrote a couple of blogs posts around hyperlinks: To Link or Not to Link – When and Where to Use Hyperlinks and A Quick Guide to…Hyperlinks.

Training and support

Linda, Jane and Lisa delivered Planning and Writing Web Content training.

We’ve received 21 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 12 of them.

Plans for the next few weeks

Batch two sites going live in the next couple of weeks:

  • Marine
  • Numed
  • NUBS
  • Accommodation
  • Pre-arrival
  • Civil Engineering
  • FMS Faculty
  • FMS online courses
  • Clearing (1st July)
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Team update: 23 May – 3 June 2016

It’s been a busy couple of weeks – read on to find out what we’ve been up to.

Go Mobile programme

We’ve been getting the next batch of sites ready to migrate into T4:

  • Fen and Emily are ploughing through Accommodation
  • Andrew and Steve have been hard at work on pre-migration tagging of Civil Engineering and Geosciences
  • Andrew has also done the site audit for the School of Psychology, which is one the sites we will be migrating to T4 in Batch 3 of Go Mobile. He’s also working on the initial site map for the Institute of Cellular Management ahead of pre-migration tagging
  • Emma C is tackling the Business School
  • Fen and Jane are working on a new sitemap for Pre-Arrival

Lisa is working with colleagues in the Faculty of Medical Sciences (FMS) on a new site for their online courses, while Fen is preparing the current FMS website for migration into T4.

Design and Technical developments

Catherine has been setting up some of the batch two sites in the pre-migration template and has imported the Civil Engineering and Geosciences into T4. She has also been working on colour schemes for the batch two sites.

Campaigns and other developments

Emma C is working with colleagues in Marketing and Student Recruitment to plan homepage messaging for the Clearing campaign. She’s also been helping the Press Office with development of the About the University site.

Training and support

Linda and Emma C ran a fully subscribed day of training on planning and writing web content.

Lisa ran a fully subscribed Website Media Management training session.

This week Anne’s delivered the first T4 CMS Basics workshop in our new training room, and also tested out a new half-day session for Careers staff, which focuses on managing News, Events and Staff in T4.

We’ve received 36 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 6 of them.

Plans for the next few weeks

We will be continuing work on batch 2 sites to get them ready for their Go Live date of 24 June.

Andrew and Lisa are currently preparing to deliver the next Planning and Writing Web Content training sessions.

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