City University London has launched a new version of its homepage. This new design corrects many problems identified by our Web Marketing Executives Kathryn Wright and Caitlin Huson in conjunction with expert reviews and analysis conducted by members of Web Team.
A quick overview
- The homepage entered into production in January 2007 without sufficient testing and has remained unchanged across three recruitment cycles.
- It’s the most important page on the website with ~220,000 unique external visitors per month. This equates to 3.5 Undergraduate Open Days every day!
- It does not fit the strategy of the University and so we decided to take the initiative to affect positive changes.
What has changed?
Image Carousel
A larger carousel image gives the University more marketing area but, more importantly, the space in which to provide evidence for otherwise generic “marketese” type statements. This evidence should improve our transparency and credibility as an institution whilst also delivering relevant content to our audience.
Primary Navigation
This provides much greater context and understanding of our site map by exposing our core content in themed chunks. It also increases the number of hyperlinks by 30 without adversely increasing complexity, and so the load on our users, or by increasing the amount dedicated screen estate on the homepage.
From a marketing perspective, we now have greater control of our USPs, funnels and tasks — especially in revenue generating areas.
News and Events
This content is now usable! The new layout removes the unnecessary truncation of headlines whilst also fully revealing our upcoming events (previously hidden behind a “Events” tab). We now have more news stories on the homepage along with the ability to publicise news in the main carousel.
Open Days
This business unit now has a dedicated area which affords them far greater control over the marketing of their events. It also means that they no longer dominate the carousel for the majority of the academic year. This means that the carousel can describe the rhythm of life at the University along with our expertise.
Finding Courses
This is promoted in importance and usability. With good SEO (links and keywords) we are able to push all of our courses as well as secondary course streams such as Continuing Professional Development and Evening & Weekend courses.
Lessons learned
We’ve relished the chance to work collaboratively and pro-actively using our internal resource and expertise; not least as we often find that we only have time to react to the competing demands of Schools and Central Service Departments. We’re really looking forward to extending these and getting our hands dirty with Brandwidth — the agency coordinating the website redevelopment project.
Project Members
Caitlin Huson and Kathryn Wright, Web Marketing Executives
- Project inception and business case
- Content work and copywriting
- Analysis of user needs with Google Analytics, a web statistics application
- Coordination with decision makers and stakeholders across the University
Larry Naman, Web Services Developer
- High fidelity prototyping in Photoshop
- Design and build — xHTML, CSS, JavaScript and CMS integration
Rik Williams, Web Services Developer
- Competitor Analysis and business case
- Information Architecture recommendations
- Conceptual design / wireframes
Steve Jordan, Web Services Developer
- Server side video scripting
- Client side video overlay scripting
Anja Bailey, Head of Marketing
- Project approval and critique.
December 10th, 2009
Web Team will be launching a new homepage this afternoon, prior to the commencement of the website redevelopment project. This represents the last significant piece of development for the current version of our website.
To whet your appetite we thought we’d take you on a whistle-stop tour of our (historic!) homepages courtesy of the WayBack Machine at the Internet Archive.
Interestingly we prefer the page from 1997. What do you think?
Note: pages may take longer than you expect to render and may not look exactly like they did when in production.
December 10th, 2009
Internet Explorer logo
Globocorp, and all round good guy, Microsoft, is currently donating $2.15 to the US charity
Feeding America for all users who upgrade their web browser from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 8, via the
browser for the better website, before September 30th 2009.
Why Upgrade?
- Faster, more secure and productive web browsing
- Happy Web Developers who will not need to support this eight year old browser (that’s 44% of the of the time since the birth of the World-Wide-Web in 1991.)
- Help prevent Americans from going hungry
Which version of Internet Explorer do I have?
You can find which version you have by following the path ‘Help’ and then ‘About Internet Explorer’ from the menu bar within the browser.
I can’t install programs on my machine
After checking that you don’t have any business applications that require Internet Explorer 6 approach the Response Centre and request an upgrade.
September 1st, 2009
Between facebooking and tweeting and widgets and trolls, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and out of touch when it comes to all things social media.
With these terms thrown around on TV, at the pub and now in the office, it is only natural to feel the panic set in and an urge to spend the afternoon creating accounts, “friending” people and picking out the all important profile picture.
Using social media for marketing purposes is the norm now with big businesses like Coca-Cola and Nike getting in on the action. Not only do they have a presence on social networking sites but they also include user-generated content on their own sites which ultimately adds more credibility to their brand.
When it comes to how businesses are engaging on popular social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, the key to their success is that the business isn’t doing the talking, the people in the business are. (Or in the case of Coca-Cola, a couple of diehard fans are.)
Organisations should be using social networks for two reasons – strengthening the brand and building relationships. By creating a presence on these networks, you give your customers the space to talk to one another and also give you valuable feedback.
The idea is not to control the conversation but to be a part of it. Social media is all about fostering relationships and sharing information. After you’ve put out your message – your brand – it is imperative to respect the dialogue by doing most of the listening.
Last summer the University’s market research manager surveyed national and international prospective students on their social media usage. We discovered that students actually would like their University to have a presence on social networking sites if they were getting something in return.
What did they want? The prospective students said they would be interested in finding course-related updates, careers information and workshops, and opportunities to network with other students – to name a few. Sounds easy enough.
Facebook was the most widely recognized and most frequently used among the students so we started there. With several unofficial groups set up mostly by students, we believed there was a need for an official page for the University.
But we know it isn’t enough to just have a page up there with a few photos and links to University events. Our “fans” want something more.
Like most things, it comes down to lack of resources and a bit of fear thrown in. When you suggest having a discussion board and invite students to ask questions and share experiences, you’re taking a risk that someone at some point will say something negative about the University. You need to be sure you have the resources to man the discussions, to watch and report back, and to jump in if need be.
It all sounds easy. After all, joining a social network is free and it can be an amazing tool. But that’s all it is – a tool – not the be all and end all of driving recruitment and improving the student experience.
More than anything else, we need a strategy for the University that would allow us to strengthen our presence and really create a space where students – our customers – can speak freely and we can learn from them.
In the meantime, we’re focusing on how we can use social networks right now:
- Sharing University news
- Publicising events
- Promoting student activities and achievements
- Recruiting students for photo shoots for promotional material
- Notifying students and staff if ever there were an emergency
How do you use social media to engage with students? Where do you think we could improve? Let us know how you think we could build the University brand by using social networks.
We’ll be here, listening.
August 5th, 2009
This afternoon web team returned from sunny Colchester, we have been attending the Institutional Web Management Workshop. We all heard useful stuff and came away with lots to think about (particularly as we embark on the website redevelopment). I’ll take a couple of paragraphs to share the things I am thinking about.
Machine readable content
This was something more than one session touched on. The idea is that you don’t just think about the humans that will be interacting with your content, but you also provide ways for computers to interact programmatically with it.
This can be as simple as providing RSS feeds for website searches, or any list of things on your site (e.g. courses?). Or as complicated as providing a full blown API (api.city.ac.uk anyone?) with a RESTful interface.
This was covered in some detail by Mike Ellis of Eduserve and Tony Hirst from Open University, and again by the BBC guys. The idea is that this will allow other people to re-purpose your content in ways you wouldn’t even consider, and even encourage people to do interesting things. One interesting example was Tony’s own mashup map of MPs travel expenditure, where he took data from the guardian, munged it and put it on a Google map.
Amazon Web Services
Mike Richwalsky gave us a compelling demonstration of AWS, including the serving of static content from S3 and the ultimate in virtual servers EC2.
S3 is a service where you can upload content to the Amazon infrastructure and have it served superfast from their data centres. It operates on a PAYG pricing scheme, you only pay for the bandwidth and storage you use. Mike is using it to serve flash video up at his University website. And I was impressed with the quality and speed in comparison with our offerings, might be something to consider as we decide how to take the video stuff forward.
EC2 is a service where you can create on-demand computing power, bringing virtual servers up and down on a whim through your browser. Again only paying for how much bandwidth/uptime you use.
In all it was a worthwhile couple of days where we could take time out to consider the bigger picture ad rub shoulders with others in a similar situation to ourselves. I look forward to implementing some of the things we’ve seen in the coming months.
July 30th, 2009
Web accessibility guidelines are a mess, but that doesn’t mean we can’t develop a coherent accessibility policy.
The second session of Headscape’s EdWeb 2009 conference (I previously blogged about the first session on becoming a user-centric institution) tackled the ever-thorny topic of accessibility. Why’s it such a difficult issue? Well for a start, web accessibility legislation has a reputation for being confused and ill-defined. Moreover, there’s just so much of it – anoyone for DDA, PAS78, Section 508, RNIB See it Right, WCAG 1, WCAG 2, etc etc?
While traditionally there has been disagreement within the web development community about the best way to act on the inherently weak W3C guidelines, WCAG 2.0 appears to be a positive step forward. Why? Because it stresses principles of web accessibility and non-measurable guidelines, and in doing so it:
- Takes us beyond a checklist mentality, and in doing so gets us thinking about the spirit rather than the letter of the law.
- Downplays the importance of conformance levels (”our website is AAA-compliant – ner ner ner ner nerrrrrrr!“)
But ‘web accessibility’ isn’t just about the traditional understanding of ‘disability’; we should give it the widest possible interpretation – allowing our content to be accessed by the widest possible audience – and in doing so think about issues like bandwidth, old browsers, alternative devices, assistive technologies, mobiles, seach engine optimisation, etc. etc.
So what should our strategy be for dealing with this interpretation of web accessibility? Here’s the 6-Step Plan:
- Start with the basics (’alt’ tags for images,resizable text, Standards-based code, etc).
- Educate out content editors.
- Create policies for hard to implement functionality, e.g. video captioning, media alternatives.
- Respond quickly to accessibility support requests. Fix or explain; never ignore.
- Introduce Graded Browser Support.
- Provide simple user guidelines for changing browser settings and making our website easier to read.
June 19th, 2009
Microsoft have this week released a bundle of updates and security patches for Windows XP and Vista users that includes a recommended upgrade from Internet Explorer (IE) 7 to IE 8. Upgrading will probably mean that you will not be able to upload assets (e.g. images, Word files, Excel files) to the CMS. To fix this problem, you will need to follow the steps below:
- In IE, click ‘Tools’ then ‘Internet Options’.
- Select the ‘Security’ tab.
- Select the ‘Trusted Sites’ icon, then select the ‘Sites’ button.
- In the ‘Trusted Sites’ window, type ‘https://*.city.ac.uk’ (without the quote marks) into the ‘Add this website to the zone’ field, select the ‘Add’ button then the ‘Close’ button.
- Now select the ‘Custom level…’ button.
- Find the “Miscellaneous” section and look for the option that says “Include local directory path when uploading files to a server”
- Make sure that option is Enabled.
- Select ‘OK’, and ‘OK’ again to close all the Internet Options windows.
You should now be able to upload files to the CMS using IE8.
June 11th, 2009
We in webteam work on a lot of unseen stuff behind the scenes. I thought it might be nice to share a bit of this work with you (don’t feel obliged to feign interest though, you can leave now if you like)
Frameworks
The modern approach to web development seems to be all about frameworks; there are 96 listed on wikipedia’s comparison page.
Frameworks provide the bones of an application (on to which you build the flesh) – they do a lot of the repetitive hard work, leaving the bits that make your app unique down to you. This is good because nobody wants to waste time reinventing the wheel. They’re also very trendy at the moment, and we in the web world are a bit partial to shiny new things (and there is plenty of shine if you look at some of the frameworks home pages). It seems if your not using a web app framework you are behind the curve.
Here in webteam we are not immune to a good idea, so we’ve been using one such framework to do a few things. The one that has been floating our boats is called Zend Framework. It is an PHP open-source framework, which works along the popular MVC paradigm. It’s not quite as trendy as Ruby on Rails (I can’t imagine A List Apart publishing articles about it), but useful none the less. It also suits our PHP skills, so we don’t have to learn a new language.
I don’t think it would be suitable to drive a large site with lots of content (like www.city.ac.uk, for example), but for a one off stand-alone project it’s very useful.
If you do any kind of server side coding in PHP, I can heartily recommend ZF to you. It will make your job so much easier and your code so much more structured.
Has anyone else had any positive experiences with application frameworks?
June 5th, 2009
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve managed to get away from sunny Northampton Square to attend two excellent events for HEI ‘web professionals’. A couple of weeks ago I took part in the inaugural session of a networking meet-up for London university web people, organised by the excellent University of the Arts team. UCL’s Jeremy Speller has already blogged about this so I won’t go into too much detail, but it was fascinating to find that we’re all facing the same problems, and were eager to talk about the same issues, namely:
- management of content (quality, quantity, CMS selection)
- use of outsourced vs. internal resources
- organisational issues, bureaucracy, politics
- appropriate usage of emerging technologies (notably Twitter), and best practice use of social media tools for student engagement
Unsurprisingly, the same issues cropped up frequently during the excellent two-day EdWeb 2009 workshop hosted by the gents at Headscape, about which I plan to blog over the coming days.The first session, entitled ‘Becoming a user-centric institution’, was particularly pertinent for City University because of the plethora of major digital projects that we are committed to, namely website redevelopment, Portal and CRM.
User testing should be a no-brainer, but Paul Boag argued (justifiably) that the HEI sector has a terrible track record for developing websites and applications with user needs as the number one priority, and we see evidence of this everywhere. Oftentimes, ‘user acceptance testing’ is no more than a process to verify that an application or process ‘works’;
“we think that most users can complete the form, and the back-end business processes are all working, so everything’s fine….“
What’s missing here is a focus on user objectives rather than business objectives, and an appreciation that user testing provides a valuable opportunity to enhance the user experience; to quote usability guru Jared Spool, “its real forte is in telling you where the interface causes frustration”.
Aside from the specifics of how to conduct a user testing session, the main thrust of this session was that none of the ‘traditional’ excuses for avoiding user testing (no time, no money, no understanding of the benefits, no expertise, etc) are relevant or insurmountable, and that a we should be adopting a ‘little and often’ approach to user testing throughout the development cycle i.e.:
- during requirements gathering (test the existing site or application)
- when developing Information Architecture, taxonomy
- design stage
- build stage
- post-launch
This makes a great deal of sense, and I think we all came away with a renewed desire to educate our institutions on the benefits of user-centered design.
June 1st, 2009
The University has commissioned an agency to develop a roadmap for the delivery of a new website. The purpose of the roadmap is to ensure the development of the website is firmly grounded in the strategic goals of the University and student recruitment targets, will meet the needs and expectations of our stakeholders, and is properly funded and resourced. The roadmap will act as a compelling business case, therefore, to secure the funds required to deliver the new site.
The inputs into the roadmap will include stakeholder workshops with students, academics, marketers, recruitment and admissions teams, analysis of our current site and of those our competitors, the School Plans and University strategy and relevant outputs from the Portfolio Review. The Project team and agency are engaging closely with colleagues across the University including the Portal Project team to ensure as joined up an approach as possible across activities. Information about the Project will be posted on the Project’s section of the University website www.city.ac.uk/webproject (link is internal audience only).
May 18th, 2009
Previous Posts
