Tuesday 25 October 2011

Course layout page is now live!

The new course layout page is live on the website!

Following a number of feedback sessions, usability testing and a review of the importance of structuring our data we have rolled out the new course description layout and it's looking great!

You can see a live example here:

http://www.beds.ac.uk/howtoapply/courses/undergraduate/applied-psychology

That's another project ticked off the list, next we're looking at the homepage design!

Monday 10 October 2011

It's time for a re-design... already!

We've been live for two months now and the feedback has been coming in thick & fast with a real mixture of positive comments, suggested changes and negative feedback. The biggest issue for us at the moment appears to be the use, quality and display of SITS IPP course data.

We always knew that this would be our trickiest area to get right when the site launched and so we have collated the issues that have been raised and will be re-designing the layout and content of the course pages. We'll be going primarily for a re-skin so this is essentially 'project 1.1' with a short turn around time!

The reason this has come about is because of the way we pull data onto the site. I put togther a quick diagram (below) to explain this to our key stakeholders.


As you can imagine, pulling external content onto the site can come with some interesting challenges. Although we can force some limited formatting via Matrix we really need to work on cleaning up the data within IPP itself. So, only 523 course to re-write!

To help our visitors find the course content they are really interested in we are also going to look at a change to the layout of the course content. This will involve embedding more imagery, video content and quotes and bringing the core course content to the surface whilst burying some parts that need to be there but are of less interest.

Interesting couple of weeks ahead but keep your eyes peeled for a new look to the course section... after only 8 weeks live! 


PS. The visual update to the blogs template is on the list!