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.

36 down, 38 to go...

Training started last week and we have just begun week two of a reasonably comprehensive run through of Edit+. So far 36 people have been trained and we have 38 left to go... thankfully though, all the feedback has been positive! Bringing in an editor that people can easily understand and use to add content to their page will mean that the team and I can spend time developing new functionality rather than acting as technical support.

The whole process has highlighted the frustrations that people have with the current system, including some issues we didn't expect:

• I can't add anchor points
• I have to use a separate content clean up tool when pasting from Word
• I can't build forms
• I can't edit tables

Luckily Edit+ and Matrix addresses all of these issues and many others that haven't been raised yet! But, it does surprise and sadden me that our editors currently have such a poor editing experience, although it explains the lack of engagement that we are currently battling.

Never mind, it'll all be fixed in a month or so, roll on June!

Week two of Edit+ #training... 36 people down 38 to go! #UHDev
— Kris Collins (@iamkriscollins) May 28, 2013

It's time for some editor training!

With only 2 months until the new website launches we are starting to reach the point where we need to engage with and train our existing editors in Edit+. A potentially huge task when you initially look at it...

The starting point for this is to look at who currently has an account and their activity within the site. It turns out that getting a list is pretty easy but that finding out how engaged they are is far trickier. The current CMS's we use don't give you stats on editors so we have very little idea about who owns what page, login details, activity, etc. So I am essentially starting from scratch and trying to build a list that highlights who is still active, the area they edit and their level of activity.

The starting point is to email all 152 of them and see who replies! Then, those who reply are listed and asked to provide details on their area and level of activity. This then give me a list of 74 people, a 50% cull on old accounts.

Now that I have a more up-to-date list I can book people in for training slots. I've decided to use Doodle as the booking system as it was recommended to me by a colleague. I have to say, it's a great tool, really easy to use, flexible and not packed with functionality i'm not interested in! Having set-up the dates and times of the training sessions it's then just a case of emailing the list of editors and letting them select the slot that works for them.

As you can see from the screenshot the layout is very clear which has led to no questions coming back to me about how to book onto a course. So far, of the 74 active users 68 of them have signed up via Doodle, not a bad drop out rate.

So, if you're looking to run training courses, events or drop in sessions then Doodle could be a useful tool for you to use.

All I need to do now is create a training site, training materials, session content... nothing too major.

Training, training, training...

We're now at the point in the project where we are all getting our training on the system. Although this isn't new to me it is to the rest of the team and it's been interesting to see how easily everyone has picked up the new system.

This is partly to do with having a very good trainer (Hello Dave!) and also the fact that the system makes sense. Compared to our current systems, OpenText and Shado, Squiz Matrix is ridiculously easy to pick up and use and you can start creating pages very quickly. We had all created and published out a modest 6 page site within 10 minutes...

Dave also has an exam at the end of the training sessions designed to ensure that the attendee has understood all points covered during the day. Thankfully, the team all passed with 95% or more so we're in a rather strong position to now move on and start training our internal editors in how to use the system.

Lucky really as I currently have a list of 160 editors waiting to be trained!

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!

Workshops, Workshops, Workshops...

We are now into the latter half of the Workshop sessions with Squiz to look at what we want to include in the new University website. Some workshops have been great (wireframes, design, etc) and some have been rather slow, but necessary, Metadata & taxonomy for example (Sorry Nelson!)

However, what does appear to be coming out in these meetings is that the are very similar ides around what the website should do. For example, functionality wise people expect the website to degrade well when viewed on a mobile device. If that question was asked a few years ago people wouldn't have put a Responsive Design at the top of their lists! This not only highlights the fact that people are aware of smart phones but also that they way in which people are using them is changing as well. We currently have 15% of all our visitors coming to us on a mobile device, that's double the figure for this time last year... This highlights the moving target we are dealing with, potentially as soon as we deliver the website we will need to start development work to keep up with the evolving market! A great argument for a structured development plan...

However, one of the most exciting parts of the analysis stage (for me) is looking at what issues people currently have and how they can be fixed, effectively trying to make peoples lives easier! The list is reasonably long, as you would expect with a project this size, but so far nothing has been highlighted that can't be dealt with.

As we roll into our last few weeks of workshops it make me even more confident that the next 7 months will be extremely exciting...

Digital Innovation in the Public Sector

Westminster Abbey

Last week I was invited to present at the latest Squiz Seminar session at Westminster Abbey. The session was titled "Digital Innovation in the Public Sector" and focused on ways of making projects easier for Public Sector bodies.

As we have recently run through a tendering process using the G-Cloud Framework I decided that would be an ideal topic to present on. Having given an overview of where the project stood at the point of my arrival I then ran through how the G-Cloud Framework facilitated a fast selection and purchase of a new CMS. Following on from the presentation there was a chance for the audience to question me about the process! A good deal of talk later and the final question came up "Are there any negatives to using the G-Cloud Framework?"

My answer?

"I can't say a single negative thing about it - it saved the project."

The day was well attended and highly informative and it's always a pleasure to speak about success stories. A highlight for me also was that my fellow presenter Matthew Hutton, gave a fantastic overview of the NOMS project to implement a new intranet... potentially an area for us to review post-launch of the external website!

You can see a copy of my presentation below.

Technical Workshops... done!

We're only a few weeks into the official Web Development Project and we have already completed the scheduled technical workshops. Over the last two weeks we have had two full day workshops spread over two weeks. The aim of these was to look at drawing out an understanding of the current infrastructure at UH (University of Hertfordshire) and what we would like to create as our hosting environment on the Squiz Cloud.

Changing hosts will always present a number of potential issues but the main one at UH is being able to replicate what is proving to be a very efficient set-up. This is mainly due to the fact that the current UH hosting solution is in-house, bespoke built and running off the JANET network. In order to offer a comparable level of service we will need to be looking at rolling out all of the bells & whistles possible!

On our side we have the team who created and maintain the current content delivery and during the course of the two workshops a number of ideas came to light. A follow up meeting to iron out the details and i'm sure we'll be running an amazing set-up to host our newly designed, responsive website!

We have kick off!

It's official, the Web Development Project (#UHDev) has kicked off! Having had the first meeting with the Squiz team last Friday we now have all dates for our analysis stage workshops.

Starting next Wednesday with 2 technical specific workshops to look at our current infrastructure and cloud hosting options.

Following on from those will be 9 content and feature related workshops that will help to tease out what we want our new site to be able to do as well as how we would like it to look. Reasonably intensive timeframes but then we do have a short project timeframe to work to!

Following on from the kick-off meeting we also held the Stakeholder Development Group meeting where Squiz came in to present current and completed projects and to answer any questions raised. It was a great session and it appears that everyone on the Group felt as though we will be very well supported!

Great presentation from the @squizuk team for the Stakeholder Group, appears everyone feels in very safe hands! #UHDev
— Kris Collins (@iamkriscollins) September 26, 2012

Content refresh is underway!

Probably the biggest and most difficult part of any website refresh is the cleaning of content. So, to try and address this prior to our migration to Squiz Matrix we have now started a nine month project to clean up the content we currently have in whichever system it is sitting in. In total we have over 10,000 pages to work our way through so although 9 months sounds like a long time it really isn't!

The best possible outcome would be for us to close around 15-20% of the current pages, fix all the broken links and spelling mistakes and make the migration of content as easy as possible. Realistically though this is probably not going to happen...

People become very attached to their content, the value the time they have put into creating it and don't really want that to be taken away. A fair position to take if you only look at the time spent putting the content together but not if you look at the wider picture. If no-one has viewed the content then can it be said that it adds value to the website or visitor experience? I'd argue that it does't and that the content should be removed. It's easy to highlight what should be closed with a simple analytics report, the clever part is in convincing people it's the right decision!

So, we are now 3 weeks into a nine month project and so far it's going reasonably well, pages are being closed, we're using Siteimprove to find and fix broken links and spelling mistakes and hopefully the quality of the site is improving on a daily basis. But, we're only just getting started so who knows what the next few months will hold for us!

PS. The image is of the Edit+ editing tool within Squiz Matrix, a far better editing environment than the ones we currently use... roll on next year!

G-Cloud Procurement process, an idiots guide

Prior to joining the University of Hertfordshire I had herd a few rumours that the HM Government were looking at a more streamlined procurement process. At the time it was mildly interesting but not that relevant to my day-to-day working.

However, having suddenly needed to make a purchase of a new CMS the G-Cloud immediately sprung to mind and I was rather relieved to find that it was now working! Having run through the internal procurement processes at the University we have now just completed the purchase of a new supplier via the G-Cloud Framework Agreement. I am happy to announce that the University of Hertfordshire will be implementing a new website within the Squiz Matrix CMS.

The procurement process has been very straight forward and the use of the G-Cloud Framework Agreement has been a real life saver. Prior to the project beginning I agreed to write a blog post on the experience and the process of making a purchase. This is now live on the HM Government G-Cloud website, the link to the posting is below if you would like a read...

They have also now provided a list of eligible organisations who can take advantage of this fantastic service so if you do have a large procurement coming up it's definitely worth considering!

• Kris Collins from University of Hertfordshire explains how easy getting a new CMS can be

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!

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!

We're live and our heads are spinning!

Image ref: http://uob.im/o5EcEQ

It's been almost exactly a month since we launched the new website and I am finally at a point where I can add a new blog post about it... that shows how manic it's been over the last 4 weeks!

So, the good things:

• We're live and the site looks lovely!
• The performance is great
• The feedback about the design has been positive
• We're only using a fraction of the CMS capability so lots to roll out shortly!
• Squiz Analytics is going to be rolled out tomorrow
• We're pulling dynamic course content
• We're pulling dynamic contact details

and the bad things:

• We have a lot of work to do on course content and making it findable
• We have a lot of work to do on improving our contact details

Pulling in external data and putting it into an easily viewable site structure has meant that errors are easily picked up on so we're busily correcting our data sources so bear with us!

However, the general feedback has been that the Easy Edit Suite for editors is a million times easier to use than the previous system. Which is good but does mean that we are now approving a huge number of changes through our new workflow system!

What we're all looking forward to now is the next few months of picking the site to pieces and looking at how to roll out new functionality and as we have Funnelback in the mix as well we'll be able to pull in some more external data!

More updates to follow and I won't leave it so long next time! ;)

Go back a little to leap further...

Well, this is embarrassing, after an 8 month project it looks like we're going to need another 11 days to sort out our new website! Having run into some rather serious hardware & DB issues I have decided to delay the launch of the website for a few days to allow us all to put those finishing touches in place.

So, to all you IWMW 11 attendees that I was speaking to keep your eyes peeled a little longer!

Don't worry, it'll be worth the wait... ;)

"One who fears failure limits his activities. Failure is only the opportunity to more intelligently begin again."
Henry Ford

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