Flickr embed code is looking lovely!

Having had the site running for a few months we can now start rolling out some more interesting development work. So, to help with the display of images we can now support embedded Flickr galleries:

View the Hutton Hub development page here.

This is a perfect example of the team asking for development feedback from staff and actioning in a system (Matrix CMS) that is flexible enough for us to implement things very quickly. Well done to Ellis Taylor for the 24 hour turnaround time!

@iamkriscollins that's #agile dev for you it's about having the correct enabling technology and a team to support it
— surensilva (@surensilva) September 5, 2013

Life as a newbie...

So, week two at the University of Hertfordshire and i'm already starting to see some very similar patterns that must run through all Universities. Similar issues around content maintenance, faculty demands and the oncoming deluge of paperwork! One huge plus point though is that fact that this project looks like it's going to be brilliant, lots of things I can bring to it from my previous role, a huge number of quick wins and some stability that I can put in place that should last us for a number of years.

Thankfully my new team appear to be exceptional and I have a great mix of technical support to throw into the mix as well. Interesting times ahead but for now it's down to shaking hands and putting my face about as much as possible! Luckily life as a newbie involves a lot of coffee...

Want to search next years courses? We can do that!

One of the advantages of pulling content from a central source is that you can quite easily pull additional versions of the data and it will be in the same format, nice and easy to work with!

So, as of yesterday we are now offering prospective students the ability to search 2 years worth of course data on the website. Entry for courses starting in 2012 and courses starting in 2013.

The reason for this is that when the normal recruitment cycle closes post-clearing for 2011 intake (September) and the new cycle opens for 2012 start we sometimes still have places to offer that start in Feb 2012 but are included in our 2011 intake numbers. A tad confusing but means that there is a need to advertise 2 overlapping years of course content...

The only real change that can be seen is the inclusion of a new button on our course finder:

http://www.beds.ac.uk/search/course-finder

that says 'Switch to 2012' to the right of the search field. This will switch any search made from courses starting in 2011 to courses starting in 2012 and a marker on each course to show which intake it is for.

As the Meerkat annoyingly says "Simples".

Update: Quick shout out to @danielinniss for the hard work on the above... shout out not prompted for at all of course!

Presenting at Westminster Abbey was an experience!

So last week Squiz asked if I would be kind enough to present a preview of the new website and an overview of how we go to where we are today. A brilliant opportunity for me to highlight the very exciting functionality we have on the new homepage and a chance to show off the new design.

The venue itself was great and Imogen Levy (@teppie) from Westminster Abbey (@wabbey) was even nice enough to give the audience a tour of the Abbey afterwards.

The presentations from Imogen (Westminster Abbey) and Dan (City University) highlighted that we are all facing similar issues at the moment. How do we address the increase in mobile traffic, how do we highlight course information and how do we compete in an ever increasingly competitive market. Thankfully we all seem to have solved the majority of the issues and the ones we haven't we can 'borrow' from each other!

You can find a copy of my presentation below and it even has a sneak peek of the new design on the last slide!

View more presentations from Squiz

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!

Happy New Year everyone!

Lots of exciting things have happened over the Christmas period following a round of rather well received proposals for development work. Stay tuned for updates as they are officially signed off as i'll be posting all of the details on here!

We're all looking forward to a very exciting 2011...

The new Campus Centre is open for business!

So, the Campus Centre at Luton campus is now open for business! Pete and Hannah (of Spotify fame) grabbed a camera and took a quick walk around to see how it all looks. The rough cut is viewable below!