February26
By: Alison Kerwin
Last November I delivered a presentation to our Executive Committee which highlighted a number of concerns regarding our website.
I began by highlighting the importance our website played as a communications and marketing tool, a fact which everyone agreed with, and then went on to drop a bombshell… our 404 page is the 6th most accessed page on the entire site!
I followed this by demonstrating some of the other key issues with the site; duplication, out of date content and lack of ownership.
Our Senior Management team had little awareness of the problems (and of course why would they?) but I was encouraged to hear my presentation had shocked them and that they were concerned.
A Web Content Review was requested with immediate effect and I have since been involved in looking at how we can turn this around. Today the outcomes of this review have been published and we can now begin to really work on “improving the effectiveness of the University’s website”.
Posted in: communication
We have been offering HTML snippets (and training in how to use them) in the Content Management System for some time. A snippet is a reusable piece of code that can be inserted in a webpage, so that you don’t have to re-enter it all again.
The snippets gallery in OpenCms
OpenCms gives you a preview of what the piece of code will look like when displayed in a browser.
The ones we developed previously were for use with the old site template. Now that we have developed the new-look template, however, it needed different design elements, and hence a new set of snippets.
So I went through the new study website and found all the presentation elements, and added them to a new gallery.
A lot of them had been designed for a specific context, so it was sometimes difficult to come up with generic text to put in them; in these cases, I used the text from the context for which they were designed.
Posted in: communication
February4
By: Andrew Male
We are running an experiment over the next couple of months where we assign some time for everyone to work on their own ideas and develop new skills. A number of our established services started life when someone said “wouldn’t it be cool if …”. The wiki, IM service, inPictures, hungrybot and blogs to name a few.
Often it’s difficult to help people understand the value of new technologies, particularly when you can’t point to lots of examples in your own sector. Taking time to try new things, and most importantly being allowed to fail, means we can talk with authority about why we should pursue or quickly discard the idea.
One big gain that I expect to see is experience of mobile web development. The team have expressed an interest in looking at this, but with a huge site overhaul going on it will be a while before it’s a ‘project’. It’s obvious that we can’t afford to ignore this area though.
There are a few rules about how this time is used:
- Every project or idea results in at least one blog post
- two people should see the value in your idea
- you can work alone or in groups
- every 4 weeks we do a team demo and retrospective
- you can call team demos at any time
Over the next couple of months you can expect to see posts about the work that is going on and thoughts about how successful the experiment has been.
Posted in: communication
