{"id":1785,"date":"2016-06-02T10:22:22","date_gmt":"2016-06-02T09:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/?p=1785"},"modified":"2016-06-01T14:22:38","modified_gmt":"2016-06-01T13:22:38","slug":"tips-for-surviving-go-mobile-a-guest-post-by-kate-austin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/2016\/06\/02\/tips-for-surviving-go-mobile-a-guest-post-by-kate-austin\/","title":{"rendered":"Tips for Surviving Go Mobile – a Guest Post by Kate Austin"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Kate<\/a>Kate Austin<\/strong> is an Information Officer at the Careers Service, her role involves providing one-to-one information and advice to students and recent graduates. As part of the Information Team she researches, develops and edits content for the Careers Service website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Careers Service site has recently been through the Go Mobile process. In this post Kate shares the Go Mobile experiences of the Careers team.<\/p>\n

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The move to a mobile platform was a huge project for us. The Careers Service website covers anything and everything about careers and employability, with users including students, graduates, prospective students, employers and staff.<\/p>\n

As you can imagine with all that information our site was huge – so big it has now been broken into four different websites! Now we are through the process and our\u00a0new website\u00a0is live, read on\u00a0for our tips on surviving your own Go Mobile project.<\/p>\n

Allow yourself plenty of time<\/h2>\n

Make sure you set aside plenty of time for your Go Mobile move. It\u2019s a big project and I can promise everything will take a lot longer than you think.\u00a0Allow extra time to tackle\u00a0any bumps in the road or issues that come along. When our website went live, it wasn\u2019t\u00a0perfect\u00a0– we\u00a0had\u00a0problems with broken\u00a0links and redirects, issues with images and inconsistencies on our new occupations site. Planning in a\u00a0little extra time for us to check our site before going live would have been a huge bonus.<\/p>\n

Consider images<\/h2>\n

We soon realised the images on our old Careers Service website were not going to work on the new Go Mobile website. Our images were a little outdated and didn’t work well in the new content types, like\u00a0mastheads<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If, like us, you need to have a photoshoot, make sure you brief the photographer on the types of images you\u2019re going to need. I\u2019d suggest having photos taken\u00a0which would work well as mastheads. These\u00a0need to be high quality, large photos with the focus of the image on the right-hand side.\u00a0If you have your photos taken as mastheads you\u00a0can always crop down the images to suit other content types later on.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re unable to have a photoshoot, then make use of the\u00a0University photo library<\/a>. Thinking creatively and doing a bit of digging can help you find images to suit most pages. For the Careers Service\u00a0Occupations website<\/a>, we even\u00a0managed to find images which represented particular\u00a0sectors. On our Education\u00a0pages, for example, we\u00a0used an\u00a0image from a PGCE teaching class. We were also able to use an image from a Geomatics course\u00a0field trip for our page which focusses\u00a0on careers in the built environment.<\/p>\n

Use the demo site<\/h2>\n

The new content types allow you to display the information on your pages in a range of different ways.<\/p>\n

When you\u2019re in the planning process, it\u2019s much easier to figure out what style will work best for your content once you\u2019ve seen the different types in action.\u00a0<\/strong>So\u00a0have a look at the\u00a0demo site<\/a>\u00a0and websites which have already gone through the Go Mobile process.<\/p>\n

Make use of the training sessions<\/h2>\n

The training sessions from the Corporate Web team are informative and useful. The T4 training session in particular is great as it\u2019s hands-on and practical.<\/p>\n

At the training sessions, you\u2019re also introduced to handy software such as:<\/p>\n