Here we are again with your fortnightly catch-up on the work of the web team.

Progress on the Go Mobile programme

The new Press Office website was launched, bringing phase one of the programme to a close.

We’re planning the next phase of Go Mobile developments: audits are starting, meetings are being arranged. We’re aiming to start properly in January 2016.

Steve has been working on rebuilding the websites for Digital Institute and Physics in the new content management system (CMS).

Lisa is busy carrying out an audit of Newcastle University’s Business School website.

Emma C finished the rebuild of the Newcastle University London website in the CMS. It went live in time for the official launch of the London campus on 21 October.

We are working with the undergraduate marketing team to get all final elements and design features into their new website. The undergraduate team are currently working on content and images.

Design and technical developments

We released our latest iteration of the external homepage and implemented a new ‘mega menu’ across the Go Mobile sites. This as an extension of the global navigation links at the top of each page. This includes direct links to the most popular sections of our website. It replaces the ‘mega footer’ from the old design.

Training and support

We’ve received 33 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 16 of them.

Lisa has been making updates to the planning and writing web content training. We’re ready for the next round of training sessions in November and December.

Campaigns and web developments

Emma C’s been messing about in spreadsheets. Testing the Google Analytics add-on for Google Sheets and working out how we can combine analytics data into our content audits.

Steve has been working on the SAgE DTA website.

Lisa wrote a blog post about improving page titles and headlines.

Plans for the next few weeks

As we prepare for the next phase of Go Mobile there’s a number of opportunities to keep our skills up-to-date.

We’re sending a small contingent to Nielsen Norman’s Usability Training Week in London next month. Lisa and Jane will attend the content strategy workshop, while Emma C will be at the analytics and user experience workshop.

Peter and Catherine are attending an advanced JavaScript course on-site.

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Phew! so we’ve pretty much finished phase 1 of Go Mobile, and we’re already busily planning and refining work for phase 2 ….read on.

Go Mobile programme

The whole team got together for an away (half) day. We reviewed all the stages of the programme so far and worked out what went well and what we needed to improve.

It was great to get all our team together to share experiences, our success and of course a bit of cake! We’ll use the notes from the day to help plan the next phase of the programme.

Feedback on the new sites

We put a feedback form on the University’s homepage (and all sites in the new template) when we launched the new responsive design.

We’ve had 23 responses (with the majority coming from University staff). Staff feedback focuses on tasks associated with working at the University eg the location of the people search and accessing internal services like Human Resources and the Safety Office.

The staff homepage contains all of these links – it’s our recommended starting point for staff seeking internal information.

You can access the staff homepage from the global top menu: Staff & Students

We’ve also had some comments on the design of the search box in the top right so we’ll be improving that over the coming weeks.

Design and Technical developments

Finishing touches are being made to the new Press Office website, due for launch on October 19.

Certainly not ones to sit back – the tech team is already working on the latest iteration of the University homepage. We’re adding dynamic menus to the top level menu. This will help people to find other parts of the University’s website, and also reduce the number of clicks it takes to get there.

Training and support

Anne’s developed some bespoke T4 training for the Press Office. This is so they can get to grips with their new website, and also the new ways of publishing and writing press releases on the web.

Some fairly detailed hand-over notes are being prepared for the editor of the Research website. With a new Research Impact campaign already in the initial stages, it will soon be all-change for the current impact case studies on the website. So those big visual boxes will change to reflect the new case studies coming along.

We are still working on developing our next phase of training for Go Mobile. We’ve got some sessions in November and December ready for the editors of phase 2 sites, and catching back-up editors from phase 1.

Emma C delivered the first of our new Website Media Management training sessions on 12 October. The sessions were well received, one participant said: ‘I thought the session was extremely helpful. Very interactive and easy to follow’. We’ll be running more sessions for Go Mobile editors in the coming months.

We’ve received 30 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 12 of them.

Campaigns and web developments

Steve has launched a new site for the Institute for Agri-Food Research and Innovation (IAFRI).

Catherine has launched a new site for the Newcastle Academic Health Partners.

Lisa wrote this month’s newsletter for the blog and is writing a post about improving page titles/headlines.

Plans for the next few weeks

Continuing work on our evil plan… oops sorry Phase 2 of Go Mobile!
Phase 2 is scheduled to start January 2016 and finish December 2016, the next batch of sites are still being prioritised and agreed by Faculty Steering Groups and central senior management – so watch this space.

Feedback

Let us know what you think about our new mobile responsive websites – leave a reply.

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Our Go Mobile Phase 1 sites are now live!

Go Mobile programme

We’ve now made 17 Go Mobile sites live, including the University Homepage:

• About the University
• Institute for Ageing
• Institute for Cell and Molecular Biosciences
• Institute of Neuroscience
• Institute for Social Renewal
• Institute for Sustainability
• Information for Schools and Colleges
• Newcastle Law School
• Open Day
• Postgraduate
• Research 
• School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development
• School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape
• School of Biology
• Staff and Students
• Study

Stay tuned for more updates about the next phase of the programme, coming soon.

The Undergraduate site is back in T4, Linda has been checking the import and building new grid-based landing pages to the UG Team’s specification.

Design and Technical developments

Finalising Press Office News template build to include feeds to Plasma screens, social meta data and theme based news. As part of the Go Mobile clean-up old scripts and systems that are not required by the Press Office team have been noted for removal and other systems to be kept for archive purposes only.

External homepage build is complete with news scripts and site manager connection added to the revised mobile layout.

Training and support

Emma C is busy writing our new training module – Website Media Management. This session will cover finding and editing images, best practice for documents and uploading to the T4 Media Library.

Anne’s working on some bespoke T4 CMS training for the Press Office.

We’re busy planning the next phase of training for Go Mobile. More sessions are scheduled through October-December ready for the next batch of editors.

We’ve received 29 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 17 of them.

Campaigns and web developments

Lisa has been working with the editor of the Open Day site to carry out post-event updates

We’re trialling some new software to help us monitor our position in search rankings (on desktop and mobile) for targeted keywords.

Emma B has launched a new site for the Newcastle University Humanities Research Institute  and been working with her editors in APL and Law to iron out any post go-live glitches in the sites.

Plans for the next few weeks

We’re now turning our attention to Phase 2, in which we plan to take the rest of the external facing website through the Go Mobile process (University login required). Phase 2 is planned to take place between January and December 2016.

The order in which we tackle sites is being prioritised by Faculty Steering Groups and central senior management. Once the order and timescale for each site is agreed, we will publish our plans on our website.

Feedback

Let us know what you think about our new mobile responsive websites – leave a reply.

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Welcome back! September is shaping up to be quite busy.

We’ve got our shiny new ‘back to school’ pencil cases with us and we’re not afraid to use them.

Go Mobile programme

The Go Mobile programme is finally in its launch phase for the first batch of sites.

Proofreading

There’s a lot of proofreading going on: we’re making sure our sites are following our new content guidelines. View our Go Mobile demo site or the University content standards (University login required) to find out more.

The whole team have been involved with proofing:

• School of Biology
• Newcastle Law School
• School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape
• Institute for Social Renewal
• Institute for Cell and Molecular Sciences
• Institute for Sustainability
• Institute of Neuroscience
• Study

Emma C and the editors for Athena SWAN have been putting the finishing touches to the new About the University pages.

Sites go live

Fanfare!

• School of Biology website went live on 11 September
• Newcastle Law School went live on 14 September
• School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape went live on 14 September
• Institute for Social Renewal went live on 14 September

We’re really proud of the sites – go and have a look at them and let us know what you think in the comments below.

The next group of sites to go live includes the Institute for Cell and Molecular Sciences, Institute for Sustainability and Institute of Neuroscience.

Guest posts on what Go Mobile is like for editors

We’ve published two guest posts from Go Mobile editors so you can get their perspective of working on the programme. Read what Fiona Simmons (Social Renewal) and Ivan Lazarov (Press Office) had to say.

Next phase for Go Mobile

Gareth attended Executive Board on the 15 September to provide an update on progress and raise awareness and support for the next phase.

 Design and Technical developments

The tech team have finished building components needed for the Go Mobile template. We are busy re-importing some content like staff, news and events into T4 to make sure it’s all up to date before the sites go live.

The Press Office needs some bespoke content types setting up to manage the news and expert profiles. We’ve got the design and we’re nearly there with the CMS build.

Training and support

We’ve received 26 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 15 of them.

We’re developing some training and guidance around the new image dimensions in the Go Mobile template.

Details are already available on our Go Mobile demo site but as images have to be much higher quality for a smaller screen (counter intuitive I know), we felt that running a short session would help editors get up to speed. We’ll be in touch once dates are firmed up.

Campaigns and web developments

Steve has developed new pages for the recruitment of Student Ambassadors, Student Mentors and Street Scientists.

Catherine has been working on a website for a newly formed partnership between Newcastle University and our local NHS Trusts. The new site will be launched at the end of September. Find out about Newcastle Academic Health Partners.

Emma B has been working on webpages in the School of Arts and Cultures site for the newly formed Media, Culture, Heritage subject area, which has been created due to the merging of ICCHS and MACS.

Plans for the next few weeks

Make lots of sites live! By the next installment we’ll be approaching the finish line for the first phase of the project.

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The team’s not back to full capacity just yet due to holidays but there’s still been lots going on over the past couple of weeks…

Go Mobile programme

It was an exciting day yesterday as the first two sites in the programme went live: Information for Schools and Colleges and Open Day.

The Undergraduate site has been successfully tagged and migrated back into T4. Now the real fun begins: checking, fixing, and adding new content and images.

Proofreading of sites begins in earnest: The Law School, Institute for Social Renewal, Biology and Architecture, Planning and Landscape are all being checked to make sure they meet our content standards.

Design & Technical developments

We’ve been making last minute refinements to components and have been finalising the footer design for all sites in phase one.

Training and support

Last week Anne ran two workshops: a T4 CMS workshop for editors of Agriculture, Food & Rural Development and Athena SWAN websites, and the monthly Contribute workshop. She also ran a Site Manager session for editors of the Accommodation website.

We’ve received 35 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 15 of them.

Campaigns and web developments

Lisa wrote a blog post about when to use expandable content, and has made some updates to the international pages of the Pre-Arrival site.

Linda wrote this month’s newsletter for the blog.

Plans for the next few weeks

September’s going to be a busy month for us as we get ready to launch the remaining sites in phase one of Go Mobile.

We’re also busy planning for phase two of the programme.

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