The Web Team for the University of Bath
We are looking for a Web Content Editor to join our Faculty of Engineering & Design. This new post will be based within the Faculty but will work closely with the central Web Services team (that's us!).
Full details can be found on our website or you can call me for an informal chat on 01225 385381.
Many thanks to everyone who applied for the above positions. We had a large volume of applications, for both posts, and short-listing has been very difficult. However we have made some decisions and invited a number of candidates for interviews over the coming weeks.
If you haven't heard from us already then I am sorry, but your application has been unsuccessful. Unfortunately it isn't possible to contact every candidate directly, so I hope this blog will serve as an update to those who took the time to apply.
Best of luck in your future endeavours.
Our first CMS site was published at least 2 years ago. Since then, academic sites plus a few others have been moved to the CMS, so it's a good time to look at how the CMS is working for us. The University is investing in the web site so the CMS will be important in helping us to achieve our aims.
We got together for an hour to brainstorm under 5 main headings:
Nine of us came up with 116 items, so we've got quite a lot to digest. Happily they were quite well distributed. The key will be making sure that we identify and prioritise items that will have the biggest impact for everyone using the CMS. Making these changes will be important for both Web Services Content Editors and Faculty Editors.
It's clear that the WYSIWYG editor is a big issue for us and others creating content and almost everyone wants to edit in HTML. The interface isn't very intuitive; it can take quite some time for new editors to get used to the way it works. On the positive side, it's easy for us to make changes to the central template so that everyone will get updates immediately. We can also create macros that allow people to easily include complex content (videos and staff profiles).
One of the benefits of using a CMS has been to reduce the number of copies and versions of Dreamweaver across the University. As a result we've improved our support to site editors and can resolve problems much more quickly.
We would like to hear about your experience of using the University CMS. What changes do you think we should make?
Following a Web Content Review changes are being implemented to strengthen the effectiveness of the University website. As a result two new posts are being created within Web Services to support the management and creation of content.
We are looking for a Web Content Manager to manage the development of content to transform the University of Bath website to an audience-focused, market-facing corporate resource.
In this new role you will manage a team of Web Editors/Coordinators and provide advice and guidance on web content management across the University. With experience developing web-based marketing communications you will be an advocate for the creation of compelling content and able to develop effective training programmes to deliver this.
You should be a creative thinker, have an eye for detail and be experienced at developing tailored marketing/communications strategies for individual stakeholders.
Full details.
We are looking for a Web Content Editor to develop recruitment focused content for the University website. Working closely with Recruitment and Admissions and the International Office you will develop engaging, informative and clear information for prospective students both from the UK and internationally.
With experience writing for the web you will develop effective and tailored marketing/communications content for a range of different audiences.
You should be a talented writer, have an eye for detail and be able to distil complex information, from a range of sources, into factually correct compelling content.
So what an exciting first few weeks back we’ve had!
We started off nice and easy, picking up all the support requests that had been filed over the Christmas break and, after a suggestion from Kelvin last year, put together a demo of an augmented reality map of the University campus using Layar (which I will post more about later).
We also started preparing for our next set of work, delivering the most-requested features and fixes to our news publishing service, which is based on WordPress.
The shortlist of work we’d do was created in December during face-to-face meetings with members of the Press Office after which it was published on our wiki using the survey macro to give everyone a chance to vote and comment on which items were most important. At the same time, we got on with estimating all of the listed items so that once voting was complete we’d be able to balance the importance with how long they were going to take!
And then the snow came.
Fortunately the University had prepared for this already and an emergency telephone number had been set up with the current status of the campus and there were prepared news articles ready to be published. Of course, yet again the use of Twitter was instrumental in delivering the message that campus was closed as quickly as possible (and at least one person enjoyed their 7.30am tweet delivery!)
Sadly for us in Web Services, there are excellent remote working facilities provided by Computing Services, with a good VPN and remote desktop connection to work PCs and a wake-on-lan facility if your PC is off. There is also an instant messenger server which enables both one-to-one chats and chatrooms for groups of people which enables us to co-ordinate effectively even when we’re at home in our PJs.
The combination of remote desktop provision and web-based tools for documentation and issue-tracking meant we were able to complete the work for the news system on time. Now that the snow's melted we're just waiting for a moment to deploy our changes and show the Press Office what we've done!
As part of a major project to look at the online branding of the University, we held a workshop on the 22nd of May. It was led by Laura Francis, a consultant on user centered design (a brief bio can be found at the end of this post), and attended by 15 representatives from various departments including RDSO, Admissions, School of Management, Corporate Communications, and IDPS.
The goal of the workshop was to create a design brief that I as the web designer can use to create a new online identity, that stems from the combined input of eveyone present and conforms to criteria agreed at the workshop. In addition, a full report on the workshop was created and I will be publishing some extracts from that within this post (italicised text).
