As the year draws to a close I thought it would be fitting to write a blog post detailing our progress in the last 12 months. If 2008 was the year we got our house in order then 2009 was the year we built the foundations for our new house.
Our projects 2009
So what have we done? Well we’ve made a lot of headway with our new external-facing website. Two of the largest sections (Study and Research) have been developed and additional functionality created. We’ve replaced our news system, created a number of ‘feature’ sites to celebrate and showcase events and launched a new video area to name a few! As always it’s difficult to remember everything so our (helpful!) wall chart shows our projects and associated timelines.
This was also the year when the new design came to life. Thanks to our designer, Liam McMurray, we not only have guidelines for colour, typography and photography but we have a range of fabulous sites which really show where we’re heading with our visual identity.
Next year we’ve lots of new and exciting things planned but you’ll need to keep reading to find out more.
Until then, from all of us in Web Services, have a wonderful Christmas and a very Happy New Year!
We received an enquiry about the BUCS website, which I initially built a few years ago. I planned the information architecture based on a card-sorting exercise where users identified where they would look for specific topics.
I put each page title from the old site on a card and invited the card-sorters to organise them into categories. I allowed them to decide the categories (so it was an open card-sort).
We are using the OpenCms content management system. This allows good workflow; permissions are fine-grained, and allow some users to contribute content and others to review and publish it.
The initial re-draft of the BUCS site was done by two students; one was studying for an MSc in Science, Culture and Communication, the other for an MSc in Human-Computer Interaction. Then we handed it over to a team of five editors, who had publishing permissions, and the rest of the department were able to contribute content but not publish. Subsequently the department recruited an overall content editor who manages the site, and she has also done a lot of work on the information architecture in consultation with users and department members.
I used the strict hierarchy model from this tutorial on information architecture models as being the most compatible with the design of the template which someone else had already come up with.
From subsequent user testing and feedback, it became apparent that people ignored the horizontal menu and just looked at the left-hand menu. This is why we have opted for just having a left-hand menu in our new design. But it is still a strict hierarchy IA model.
