We are live!

So, after 9 months of build and a lot of meetings, phonecalls, tweeks, shouting, laughing and general madness the new University of Hertfordshire site is live!

Thankfully it looks pretty damn good...

Plenty of lessons learnt on the way, especially that data migration is still a pain even with the best possible plans in place. Also, using data from different systems carries a level of risk far higher than first anticipated. Luckily, I have an excellent team who have managed to run through and fix a lot of issues in a very short period of time. Phew!

So, for now, go forth and enjoy the new site!

Visit the new University of Hertfordshire website here.

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!

Happy New Year!

A very quick post to say Happy New Year! 2012 has been a fantastic year with a website launch, a new job and a new project under my belt.

However, 2013 looks as though it will prove to be even better, 6 months to go with the new website project and then a few more potential projects to follow.

Exciting times ahead!

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...

JISC XCRI-CAP Project

Before Christmas we put together a bid for JISC funding around the implementation of XCRI-CAP formatted course data. Many, many intensive submission writing sessions later and we're pleased to say that we have been awarded the funding! This is a brilliant project with some very interesting potential outcomes. The first being the automated process of passing well formatted course data to our website in a feed format shared by multiple univerisites.

The idea behind this is ultimately to create the possibility of a 'compare the uni' type website that will allow students to directly compare the same course across multiple institutions. This has huge advantages for potential applicants and could mean a more engaged and informed application.

So, all we need to do now is start mapping out how we're going to get to that point. A fair proportion of the work will be focusing on internal processes that will need to be in place in order for the system to work. so, whilst the display of courses on the website may not immediately change we're be busily building in the admin side!

Watch this space, there's going to be some rather interesting outcomes over the next 12 months!