Project update, it's been a while!

Well, it's been a very long time since I put a posting up which is probably a sign that things have been rather busy this end! So, a quick post to catch up on where we are with the project & thankfully everything is looking good:

• The concept designs have been signed off and we are now at the point of cutting these up.
• The responsive designs have landed with me for approval, so far everything looks great so it's now a case of running them past the various boards.
• We're due to start our Matrix training next week (Morning Dave) with a number of introduction and advanced courses to complete. Following our training i'll be mapping out an intensive training session for the 100+ editors currently working on the website.

A lot of the team and still working through the content refresh and with only 6 weeks to go we will have covered all 10,000 pages of content. An incredible task that has meant we have cut down the size of the website by around 15-20% and by using our SiteImprove tool, fixed over 600 broken links and corrected over 1,800 spelling mistakes.

As you can tell from the above we are ploughing through tasks at an amazing rate and are still on track for our launch date later this year. Exciting times ahead for us as the launch of the new website will really only be the start of the project!

Concept Design Feedback, seems all good...

It's been a week and a half since I took delivery of the new concept designs for the website and there's been a flurry of activity around collecting feedback! Last week was a round of showcases for board members as well as a week of collecting comments from students at our De Havilland campus.

The good news is that we are running at 92% positive feedback on the new designs overall and when we filter out the staff feedback we are at 94% positive for our students. Not a bad number and we still have a week of feedback to collect as well...

Having a mixture of Yes/No questions with narrative follow ups has allowed us to pick up on recurrent themes within the comments and is highlighting what we should be addressing in order to get as close to 100% positive as possible. No shockers so far which is good and hopefully I can roll out a very small preview closer to us going live!

Interestingly, within the questions we started to tease out some feedback on mobile usage, currently we only have 49% of our students/staff accessing the University website on their mobile phone, mainly due to the awkwardness of navigation. However, when asked if they would use the site if it were responsive the number went up to 63%... highlights that mobile usage is more front of mind than some people may think!

Concept designs have arrived!

One of the most asked questions when running through a digital project is "What will it look like?" which is usually followed by a statement such as "I know a few things about design, i'd be happy to help you..."

The presentation of new designs can be an exciting time in the project but requires close management on what happens with the feedback given. All comments are valid but there needs to be an assessment of the impact suggestions can have and how they might impact on the overall business requirements. I have just taken delivery of the new concepts designs for the website from Squiz's Head of Design Matt and they look amazing! Although I have my preference over which design I prefer I now need to keep a neutral hat on whilst showcasing the designs to all stakeholders.

So for the next two weeks I will be collecting feedback, collating suggestions and starting to draw out the comments that keep cropping up. This should give me a good understanding of any potential issues and then how to rectify them. Ultimately there will need to be a decision on what not to action...

So, a significant step in the project that all stakeholders can participate in, is that a good or a bad thing!

Change is as good as a holiday!

You may have noticed that the blog has a new design applied to it... well, I am moving on from the University of Bedfordshire in a couple of weeks time and heading over to a Web Project Management role at the University of Hertfordshire!

I'm taking the blog with me of course and it will still be based around all things digital, i'll just be posting from a different office. Exciting times ahead!

PS Totally random image of an ashtray at Reading Uni I took during IWMW 2011... very cybermanish!

Hello new homepage!

The new homepage is live!

We've made a number of changes to our new homepage:

• More social! Twitter, YouTube & Share/Like buttons are now on the homepage
• Scrolling news articles
• Four new buttons (Google DFP powered)
• Easier navigation to courses

It's been a major tweak rather than a redesign but allows us to present a number of key areas in a much clearer way.

Getting social


We have always been keen to promote our social media channels and so are using 'Share This' to embed a number of social buttons in the footer.

More news!


We've added in a new scroll n the news stories, this replaces the tabbed layout and allows for additional news stories to be displayed.

New button banners

The four new buttons across the middle of the page are running from the DFP Ad Manager system from Google which allows us to keep track of the number of impressions and clicks the banners get. More exciting is that it allows us to run a number of visuals to test which one generates the most clicks with weighting options built in! It also allows us to run banners with scheduling and impression counts on them so no more calendar notes to take banners down!

The part we are most excited about is the geo-targeting options which allows us to localise aspects of the site for our international audience. EU and International banners are substituted in should the visitor be from outside the UK.... genius!

Course links

Alongside the course finder we now include links to the listings for FD, UG and PG courses.


So that's the initial refresh of the homepage done, next on the list is an improvement to the course finder and ideas around how to improve the homepage banner!

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!

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!

Design concepts... done!

After a furiously busy week last week we finally have an agreed design concept and functional specification.

The original design concept that came across was really good but as you can probably guess, everyone has an opinion on what the website should look like and so we needed to make some tweaks! In order to take the designs forward Squiz passed us the PSD files (try that with another agency!) and I sent them out to our internal designers for tweaking.

The only real area that needed looking at was the banner slot and how the banners will be displayed.The following day I had 5 alternative designs sent back to me and using a combination of two (thanks Mick & David) I presented the final design concept to our Steering Group members and it was happily signed off.

A great example of some flexible working and collaboration!

The functional specification document was a different beast as that one was down to me and a lot of reading time! Luckily the workshops we held at the beginning of the project helped to focus on what we wanted delivered and apart from having to read and re-read a 110 page document it required little changing. The advantages to doing some planning in the early stages certainly paid off and the final functional specification was signed off on Friday as well.

Tweaked, signed and done... phew! Now it's time to move on to the additional designs, project plan, build... migration.... testing.....

The design concept is here...

So, wireframes are done and we've moved onto the far more controversial design concepts! I picked them up on Friday from Squiz and overall we're really pleased, we made a couple of initial tweaks here and there to pull some 'real world' content onto the page to make the presentations to the working and steering groups a little easier.

The tricky part now is going to be giving everyone the opportunity to feedback on the look and feel, collate those responses into something usable and then refine the designs! We're looking at holding focus groups with our current students and also to open up an online feedback session for all staff to contribute. I'm expecting a lot of replies to be based around content rather than design but that's only normal!

I would obviously love to put a copy of the designs up on the blog but then that would ruin the surprise!

Wireframes agreed, design here we come!

So after a manic week of meetings I now have final sign off on the wireframe layouts for the new website homepages and content pages. It's fair to say that there will be a significant change in the way our information is presented and the way we work with content within the CMS.

As anyone who has presented a wireframe layout will know it's not the most interesting part of the project unless you're interested in content layout! But, we've put in some very solid foundations to build and expand upon once we take full control of the CMS later this year.

The really interesting part will be on Friday when we get our first look at the concept designs. After an initial viewing it will be down to meetings with the Steering & Working groups to pass out the information for feedback  and everyone has an opinion on visual designs!

Analysis phase... done!

So, we are now five weeks into our project and we are at the end of our Analysis Phase and all of our workshops are done... Phew!

Having had 9 workshops scheduled we managed to wizz our way through and complete them all in only 8 sessions, super efficient! The outcome of all of these workshops is that we now have some detailed wireframes for the website layout and they're looking really good. Even without a design on them the wireframes show that we will have a very visual change to the websites key landing pages and a huge shift towards a site that is focused on our key audience, the prospective student!

So now we have some quiet time where I need to get sign off from the steering group and Squiz need to start work on the design concepts for the website. Then, we start moving into the implementation phase, the data migration and integration stages should prove very interesting. We have a lot of complicated systems at the University and some of the key ones will need to be able to push data to the websites. Luckily initial findings are looking very promising however, I always stay a little concerned until it's all in place and working!

1 month into a 6 month project and not only are we on budget, on time and on scope but we're also all still talking to each other, a very positive sign!

We've been Squiz'd...

Part one of our exciting news can now be shared... we're moving to a new Content Management System!

After a round of tendering and a selection process we have decided that all University websites will be migrated to the MySource Matrix CMS and supported by Squiz. We have had a fantastic run with our current system and have produced a multi-award winning website and we're now looking to continue that success by harnessing the power of Matrix.

The system comes with some very powerful tools built in that would allow us to provide all prospective students, current students and staff with a highly personalised browsing experience within a newly designed site.

I'll be keeping the blog up-to-date with what we are up to so make sure you check back for or status reports!

Flashback to 1997...

I was given some paperwork by a colleague in ISD last week which included the original designer spec for the website from 1997. How things have changed! A few highlights include:

• Strict HTML 3.2 (!) 
• All pages should be capable of being printed
• MAD-T... ?!
• Designed for a 640 by 480 screen

The full document is embedded below, no laughing please, this was cutting edge at the time!