Content refresh is about to start

Last year, when I was in my previous post, I decided to blog on the progress of the Content Management System project. It was a great way of sharing progress, ideas and issues with the wider community and received some great feedback.

Now that I have a new role and a new project I think it's time to do the same thing!

So, starting today the new CMS project is kicking off at the University of Hertfordshire and we're tackling content first... always a tricky subject! There is a planned 9 month content refresh schedule in place where we will be looking to correct all broken links, spelling mistakes and dodgy content. The main aim being that we will deliver a faster, leaner site which is easier to navigate and maintain. Not hoping for too much really!

In the mix will be a number of useful resources including Siteimprove and Google Analytics. We'll also be unveiling our new Content Management System and Enterprise Search provider shortly.

First areas to get our attention will be the School of Law and the School of Humanities with the School of Education following on shortly. Interesting and busy times ahead!

UCAS Clearing 2010

Clearing 2010 is well underway at the University and we're seeing some great figures so far. I have put in place more tracking than ever before and the biggest issue we will have once Clearing shuts is how best to present it all! We have Clearing campaign tracking on all our online ads that filter into Google Analytics, including our trial run with Spotify advertising, telephone tracking, site tracking, unique phone numbers on print adverts and short URL tracking for radio. All in all it's going to be far easier for us to work out which mediums offer us the best ROI!

Hopefully everyone else is having as successful a time as we are and once Clearing has closed i'll look at publishing some of the reports on the blog, could make interesting reading!

Google Analytics Intelligence

If, like me, you've been struggling to understand how best to utilise the new Intelligence reports within Google Analytics then you might find the following article useful. Written by Dave Chaffey on the Smart Insights website it gives a rough overview of what is/isn't useful and then a step by step guide to creating a custom alert.

Having read through the article it's inspired me to set up a few to trial run this under-used feature!

Smart Insights

Asynchronous Tracking with Google Analytics

So, I was creating a new blog today for our Equality & Diversity team and was adding in the tracking code for them from Google Analytics when I spotted this in the settings - 'New! Try the asynchronous tracking code'. Obviously I clicked on the link and experienced a mixture of excitement and disappointment!

With a description such as asynchronous tracking code I was expecting something pretty exciting but the link simply led to a help page within Google. However, after popping on my technical hat and doing some reading this actually sounds like a small improvement. Nothing amazing but enough to possibly help improve the load time of our sites which is always a bonus.

The way Google Analytics runs at the moment is that it's almost the last thing to load on the page. However, with the new version of the code you move it up the page to just after the tag so it loads earlier and you have more chance of it loading before a visitor leaves your page. Certainly something to bear in mind if you've started to notice that the analytics code is taking it's time to load, which on occasions we have!

To quote from Google:

The new tracking snippet offers the following benefits:

• Faster tracking code load times for your web pages due to improved browser execution
• Enhanced data collection and accuracy
• Elimination of tracking errors from dependencies when the JavaScript hasn't fully loaded

As we run our analytics code in a global footer the update only has to happen in one place to run site wide and we should see improvements almost straight away. This should mean more accurate stats but might mean your bounce rate goes up!

If you wanted to read the article with directions on how to implement on your own site then head over to the Google Help pages.