Merry Christmas & Happy New Year - December 2015

With 2015 coming to a close, we’d like to say thanks for all your help with the progress we’ve made with the new website.

With your help, we completed the redevelopment of all our department and faculty pages - all 32 of them! A special thanks to everyone who worked with us to deliver these new pages, it was quite a task.

We know that the new content, designs and features are working well. Headline visitor statistics show that:

  • homepage views are up more than 42% for external visitors for the year 24/10/2014 to 23/10/15 compared to the previous year
  • there has been an increase of 13% in terms of people applying for PGT courses in the same year on year comparison
  • we’re also seeing large growth in web traffic from mobiles/tablets for the year 2014 to 2015, compared to the previous year. This suggests our responsive design is working well. Views from some regions have increased significantly. Mobile visitors from India are up by 106% and Germany up by 131%.

Our latest video – an overview of the Law School- has secured a massive 45,000 views - and it was just released last week. Over the last year we created 47 videos and there are more on the way.

Our new scholarship search is up and running. This is a vast improvement on previous scholarship searches. It's still early days for this tool and we plan to carry out further developments over the next few months. Please let us know if you can think of ways that we can improve it.

Our new Technology & Innovation Centre and conferencing and events pages are working well. They’re helping Strathclyde establish itself as one of Glasgow’s major conference venues. And there is a much improved way to present our licensing opportunities.

We’ve also developed a new media centre and plan to introduce a new facility for general University news.

Our international students’ section has 56 dedicated country pages. We created them in conjunction with international students, particularly the Strathclyde International Student Society. More recently, we’ve created a new study with us landing page.

Our Glasgow pages are helping to promote the city to as a great place to live, study and work and new students have a new area to welcome them to Strathclyde.

We’ve also created dozens of student, graduate and academic profiles and features to help us sell Strathclyde to the world. 

Everything we’ve created is tested with users. We’ve spent lots of time speaking to prospective and current students and other groups of users. We’ll be doing a lot more user testing in 2016.

Finally, don’t forget that there is lots of help if you’re a T4 user and have access to the new website. We’ve created a suite of support documentation for you on our Beta website and we’re always on hand to help.

In 2016 we’ll focus on more areas to drive student recruitment and increase the reach of our research.

Thanks again for all your help throughout 2015. Please get in touch at webcontent@strath.ac.uk if you have any questions or comments.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

ends 

Update from the web team - November 2015

Thank you!

All our academic department and faculties are now on the new website.

Thank you so much for all your help and hard work.

Scholarships

We've also released our new scholarship facility on the website. I know many of you are working to populate this – if you’re having any problems please get in touch and one of us can help you.

Please note, we intend to remove the old scholarship information on 30 November 2015.

You can view the new scholarship database/search here http://www.strath.ac.uk/studywithus/scholarships/

Please note that at this early stage we are not promoting it or linking to it – this will give you enough time to add new scholarships as they are approved.

The old scholarship databases and content which will be removed are here:

http://www.strath.ac.uk/search/scholarships/index.jsp

http://www.strath.ac.uk/undergraduatescholarships/

If we’ve already moved your faculty and department pages over to the new website, we’ll work with you over the next few weeks to link your new scholarships to your new sections.

We’ll also set up a review meeting with every academic department and faculty team to ensure that you are happy with your new section on the website and comfortable with managing it in the future.

What's next on the website?

Finally, we’ll arrange another web forum shortly to update you on our plans for the rest of 2015 and into 2016 – and take any feedback that you may have.

Next year, we expect our focus to be on student information (recruitment/retention/experience), research/research centres and why Strathclyde information.

We’ll also undertake lots of work to improve user experience, quality, performance etc. We'll keep this site up to date as we move on to new things.

If you have any feedback, please get in touch webcontent@strath.ac.uk 

ends

Lucy Robb

Update from the web team - 4 August 2015

Some of the team - Harry, Emma and the two Lucys - have just returned from a few days in Edge Hill University, down in Lancashire. We were there to attend a conference for web specialists and we learned a lot in a short period of time.

We also quickly discovered that the Ormskirk area is enjoying the same terrible summer weather as we are here in Glasgow!

The conference – IWMW – runs every year. It's a perfect opportunity for digital teams to get together, share experiences and learn more about future trends and demands.

More than 100 people attended and it was great to spend time with so many people who are working in similar environments.

This year’s conference theme was ‘Beyond Digital: Transforming the Institution’. We were joined by colleagues from the universities of Aberdeen, Bath, Liverpool John Moores, Bradford and many others. There were also a number of speakers and attendees from marketing agencies and management consultancy firms which work in the higher education sector.

We looked at how digital influences everything we do - and should do - as a university. It’s much more than simply having a good website.

We shared a lot of our own experiences, swapped ideas and discovered different ways of doing things. We’re now working to add what we’ve learned into our plans for the next 12 months.

The great news is that Strathclyde is well ahead of many UK universities in terms of our website and digital plans. We’ve still got lots to do, but we’re definitely on the right track and that’s been acknowledged by a number of our peers.

At the moment, we're focused on moving our academic departments and faculties over to the new website. We’re due to complete this by October 2015.

We’ve also been working on some features and other interesting things: 

As we plan the next phase of our work, it would be great to hear from you - do you want to get involved?

We’re always open to new ideas - please get in touch with your thoughts. We’re now located in the University Centre, next door to the gym and you’re welcome to call in or drop us a line at webcontent@strath.ac.uk 

Lucy Robb 

Web update 21 July 2015

Summary

New sections

We've launched a number of new areas:

Course pages

A reminder that we will be removing old course pages. This will improve Google and our site search and provide better information for our users. If you link to course pages on your current pages, links should now be changed to point to new course pages.

  • a guide to how to change your links is available here
  • initially we will stop importing and updating the old course pages and PG apply buttons We will then remove the old automatically created pages
  • the deadline for this work is 31 July 2015. You can view all new courses here.

We're also working on:

  • scholarship search
  • staff profile improvements including profiles for PGR students
  • student welcome pages

ends 

Web update 28 May 2015

Summary

New sections

We’ve launched  a number of new areas on the website:

We’re also close to launching other new sections which you can see on our here.

Over the next few months we’ll continue to work on academic department and faculty pages – our deadline for all these sections to be live is Oct 2015. We’re also working on key student information including a new scholarship search.

Other work includes:

Staff profiles

We aim to enhance staff profiles within the following areas: 

  • Improved listing of projects, activities and publications
  • Listing of staff – adding functionality to enable staff to be listed in desired groups
  • Looking into the possibility of postgraduate student profiles

Course pages

A reminder that we will be removing old course pages. This will improve Google and our site search and provide better information for our users. If you link to course pages on your current pages, links should now be changed to point to new course pages. 

  • A guide to how to change your links is available here.
  • Initially we will stop importing and updating the old course pages and PG apply buttons
  • We will then remove the old automatically created pages

In response to some feedback, we have extended the deadline for you to change the links until the 31 July 2015. You can view all new courses here.                                            

Training

A reminder to please attend the new T4 training courses as we’ll be unable to hand over new department sites to colleagues who have not been trained.

Any questions on anything to do with the website, please get in touch with us on webcontent@strath.ac.uk

ends

Web update 2 April 2015

Summary

We’re working on a number of new sections that are now live for you to view. Please remember that they are all works in progress – comments welcome.

Faculty pages

• Faculty of Engineering

Department pages

• Department of Computer & Information Sciences

• Department of Architecture

News

• University news

• Media centre for journalists

Staff profiles

The old staff profiles have been removed from the website. We understand that there are some issues with the way we are grouping staff and we intend to do some work to improve the way we present this information. We’ll update you as this happens.

Courses

The old undergraduate and postgraduate course pages will be removed from the site in coming weeks. We will issue guidance on this process soon.

Training

Thanks to those of you who have attended the training sessions – remember that the training is supported by our documentation site which includes a number of guides on how to use and build the new templates in T4.

Other project progress

We’re currently working on new sections for:

  • Scholarship search
  • School of Psychological Sciences & Health
  • Department of Physics
  • Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering
  • Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences
  • Department of Mathematics & Statistics
  • School of Humanities
  • The Technology & Innovation Centre
  • Conferencing & events
  • Our colleagues in Strathclyde Business School are also working on a number of business school faculty and department pages.

What’s next?

A reminder that we’ll be working with the following teams in May and June:

  • School of Government & Public Policy
  • Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering
  • Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy & Biomedical Sciences
  • Law School
  • Department of Chemical & Process Engineering
  • School of Social Work & Social Policy

ends

Web forum 28th January 2015

Summary of web forum

  • An update on the website
    • Updated course search
    • Pilot department
    • Suite of guidelines
    • 12-month plan approved
  • Organisational units
    • Timetable for all academic department and faculty  pages has been created.
    • Each unit will work with the webteam on a 5 to 6week project to generate the new pages.
    • During the web forum an outline of the timescales and the tasks involved was discussed. See slides for more details.
  • Staff profiles
    • Launching new Pegasus application to allow all staff to maintain their staff photo and non-academic staff to submit a personal statement. Photos that have been taken as part of the web project will be uploaded automatically
    • Old staff profiles will be removed at the end of February. The webteam will provide guidance on how to change links to the new staff profile pages and how to provide lists using the staff search.

Resources

Jan 2015 Web Forum Slides

Organisational unit template plan

Department sprint checklist

Organisational unit timetable

Web team update – September 2016

 

It has been a busy summer for the web team and everyone that we’ve worked with to develop the website.

 

New sections

 

Over the last few weeks we’ve made a number of new sections live. They include:

 

·         one of our major research centres, Advanced Forming Research Centre

·         a new section for our alumni

·         student registration pages

·         a revamped student accommodation section including search functionality, full descriptions and image galleries of each student residence

·         new pages for our English language teaching courses

Thanks to everyone who helped us with all of this work – we worked with many teams to complete the new sections and make the pages live.

Improvements

We’ve also made improvements to a number of areas:

·         the site now works more effectively on mobile devices

·         staff search – we have improved its performance and how it operates

·         scholarship search – we have improved how it filters to help users search more easily

Research centres/groups

If you are part of a research centre or group, there is a generic researchtemplate which we have developed to help you transfer your content over to the new website. There are details on our beta website including a short guide to creating your research section. As long as you have been on the most up-to-date web training, we can give you access to build your new web pages. Details on the beta websiteor get in touch.

Redirects

When we launched the new website back in 2014, we agreed to put a number of redirects in place to ensure that we didn’t lose any of our old website users. We now plan to remove these redirects to help with search and performance.

The redirects that we will remove are for UG, PGT and PGR courses, central research subject pages and academic departments across the four faculties. We will remove these redirects on 31 October 2016.

What’s next?

 

We are currently finalising our plan for 2016/17 but the next areas that we will work on will include maps, the Centre for Lifelong Learning, corporate governance pages, Strathclyde Entrepreneurial Networkand much more.

 

Web team update – September 2016

 

It has been a busy summer for the web team and everyone that we’ve worked with to develop the website.

 

New sections

 

Over the last few weeks we’ve made a number of new sections live. They include:

 

·         one of our major research centres, Advanced Forming Research Centre

·         a new section for our alumni

·         student registration pages

·         a revamped student accommodation section including search functionality, full descriptions and image galleries of each student residence

·         new pages for our English language teaching courses

Thanks to everyone who helped us with all of this work – we worked with many teams to complete the new sections and make the pages live.

Improvements

We’ve also made improvements to a number of areas:

·         the site now works more effectively on mobile devices

·         staff search – we have improved its performance and how it operates

·         scholarship search – we have improved how it filters to help users search more easily

Research centres/groups

If you are part of a research centre or group, there is a generic researchtemplate which we have developed to help you transfer your content over to the new website. There are details on our beta website including a short guide to creating your research section. As long as you have been on the most up-to-date web training, we can give you access to build your new web pages. Details on the beta websiteor get in touch.

Redirects

When we launched the new website back in 2014, we agreed to put a number of redirects in place to ensure that we didn’t lose any of our old website users. We now plan to remove these redirects to help with search and performance.

The redirects that we will remove are for UG, PGT and PGR courses, central research subject pages and academic departments across the four faculties. We will remove these redirects on 31 October 2016.

What’s next?

 

We are currently finalising our plan for 2016/17 but the next areas that we will work on will include maps, the Centre for Lifelong Learning, corporate governance pages, Strathclyde Entrepreneurial Networkand much more.

 

Web team update – September 2016

 

It has been a busy summer for the web team and everyone that we’ve worked with to develop the website.

 

New sections

 

Over the last few weeks we’ve made a number of new sections live. They include:

 

·         one of our major research centres, Advanced Forming Research Centre

·         a new section for our alumni

·         student registration pages

·         a revamped student accommodation section including search functionality, full descriptions and image galleries of each student residence

·         new pages for our English language teaching courses

Thanks to everyone who helped us with all of this work – we worked with many teams to complete the new sections and make the pages live.

Improvements

We’ve also made improvements to a number of areas:

·         the site now works more effectively on mobile devices

·         staff search – we have improved its performance and how it operates

·         scholarship search – we have improved how it filters to help users search more easily

Research centres/groups

If you are part of a research centre or group, there is a generic researchtemplate which we have developed to help you transfer your content over to the new website. There are details on our beta website including a short guide to creating your research section. As long as you have been on the most up-to-date web training, we can give you access to build your new web pages. Details on the beta websiteor get in touch.

Redirects

When we launched the new website back in 2014, we agreed to put a number of redirects in place to ensure that we didn’t lose any of our old website users. We now plan to remove these redirects to help with search and performance.

The redirects that we will remove are for UG, PGT and PGR courses, central research subject pages and academic departments across the four faculties. We will remove these redirects on 31 October 2016.

What’s next?

We are currently finalising our plan for 2016/17 but the next areas that we will work on will include maps, the Centre for Lifelong Learning, corporate governance pages, Strathclyde Entrepreneurial Networkand much more.