Update - December 2016

Hello everyone,

We’d like to thank you all for your help with the website this year.

The majority of content is now reworked and transferred to the new templates and we’ve rolled out a number of new developments.

We plan to move all final, relevant content to the new website in 2017. While we do that, we’re looking at a way of introducing a responsive design for the remaining old content.

Our latest development is a new section to display our University news, features and blogs - http://www.strath.ac.uk/whystrathclyde/news/

Coming in the new year will be a new area for the Centre for Lifelong Learning.

You can keep up-to-date with other developments and plans by looking at our Beta site homepage.

Feedback required

One new area where we’d like your feedback is our newly developed campus maps.

You can view them at:

We've introduced some new features which we think will help you in your communications with students and visitors:

The first tab, 'Campus map' is based on getting around our University buildings while the second tab, 'Getting to campus’, is focused on helping users get to the University from elsewhere.

Our plan is to move the maps to the live site in January/February. All feedback is welcome - email us at webcontent@strath.ac.uk.

Have a Happy Christmas and we look forward to working with you again in 2017!

Thanks, 

The 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:

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 research template which we have developed to help you transfer your content over to the new website.

We've also created 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. 

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 Network and much more.

Please get in touch if you have any questions or feedback.

Web Team

Update June 2016

Thanks to everyone who attended the web forum last week. For those of you who couldn’t join us, here’s what you missed!

New developments

We’re working on a number of areas including:

      • revamped student accommodation section including search functionality, full descriptions and image galleries of each student residence
      • a new section for alumni
      • new research centres including the International Public Policy Institute and AFRC, with a generic research centre for colleagues to use as a template for creating their department research centres.

We’re also on track to move much of the SEES and RIO information to the new website before the start of the new academic year. This will allow us to complete the full student application journey on the website.

Support

We ran a quick session which looked at how T4 users can create great web pages – we get lots of questions about the best way to lay out text, add images etc so we’ve added this information to our beta site - Top tips for creating great webpages

Staff profiles

We outlined our plan for staff profiles over the next few months:

      • with the plan to request consent from PGR students as part of the online registration form for their inclusion in the staff list
      • the plan for ‘staff’ who are not part of the normal staff process eg visiting professors
      • where we are with the ability to create and manage staff groups for the website

As always, please get in touch if you have any questions. If you are interested in creating a section on the web for a research centre in your area, please contact us on webcontent@strath.ac.uk.

We have created a short guide to creating your research centre section and you’ll be given an area on our beta site to add your content before it goes live on the website.

Have a look at the Web forum presentation June 2016 

Web Team

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Update February 2016

Thanks to everyone who attended last week’s web forum. If you missed it, we took the opportunity to update attendees on some of our achievements from last year and also confirmed our areas of focus for 2016.

This includes:

      • a focus on student information, eg general student experience, accommodation, improved course content, personalisation
      • more research centres, eg AFRC, IPPI
      • alumni content
      • staff/PGR student profiles

At the forum we ran three group sessions to explore some of these areas a bit more closely. Here’s a quick summary.

Student application journey

We’re focusing on the student application experience and the website content required to make that journey as easy as possible. To help in this, the team has run workshops with colleagues involved in student recruitment and marketing from areas such as RIO, SEES, Business Improvement and the faculties.

At the workshops we worked to map out the different stages of a UG and a PGT student application journey. Then we recorded the information the student would need at each stage and how they would access that information. We also looked at any improvements we could make to the journey.

We’ve put all this information in a giant map which will be used to prioritise the areas of the journey to be worked on. This will also ensure that the user is kept at the heart of everything we do.

Personalisation

We’re working on a number of projects to tailor our content for our many users. We showcased a couple of our latest developments at the web forum. One is a way that we personalise content for users from different geographical locations. For example, if you’re logging in from India, we can target users with information relevant to India-based students, eg our India country page, relevant scholarships, tailored contact details etc. We’re also developing a feature that allows our users to ‘favourite’ their courses of choice. This lets them compare and contrast the courses that are of interest to them and helps them make a better-informed selection. This new feature is to include a tool that allows users to convert their ‘favourited’ courses into a printable PDF.

Careers tab on our course pages

We’re also undertaking work to improve the careers tab on course pages. In speaking to prospective students about course pages, we’ve always found that entry requirements and careers information have been the most important areas for them. Working with the Careers Service, we have made a Careers Service landing page, which will be linked to from all course pages. This highlights some of the main areas the Careers Service work with, making it a selling point for prospective students. Working with a couple of example departments and careers advisers, we also created improved career tab information for Law (LLB) and Education.

This is something we would like to tackle for all courses, for which we’ll need the help of academic departments. We’ve put together a pro forma to assist with this.

To boost the careers tabs, we’ve also created two graduate profiles, Paul Breen, (Law (LLB) and Postgraduate Diploma in Professional Legal Practice) and Adam Black (Primary Education (PGDE).

Again, this is something we would like to add to all course pages and for which we will also need the help of departments.

We’ll be in touch to discuss how we can work with you to identify great graduates and fill out the pro formas.

CMA information

Finally, we’ve been working with an intern to input more information about course costs to ensure that the University complies with CMA guidelines. That information is now live on the undergraduate course pages.

As always, if you have any questions please get in touch on webcontent@strath.ac.uk. If you’re interested in any of the above areas, please let us know as you’re welcome to pop into our office to have a look at the latest developments. 

The Web Team

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The web team needs you!

January 2016

We’re looking to recruit University of Strathclyde students to become our UX champions and help us develop & improve Strathclyde’s website and digital services for the future.

As a web team we carry out UX testing (also known as user or usability testing) when we want to evaluate a web page, part of the website or a web service. User testing consists of testing the web page or service with our typical users.

We get the users to complete tasks while we watch, listen and take notes or we might ask a series of questions. Our goal is to collect data to allow us to see how successful users were in using the web page/service and to hear their thoughts on it. This helps us to better understand the needs and goals of our users as well as identifying usability issues.

This where you come in!

We’re looking to recruit a panel of students who are willing to take part in our user testing. You’ll only need to spare a few hours throughout the year and the sessions will be held at times suitable to you.

We want to recruit students of all ages, all year groups and from different faculties and types of courses to ensure we get as wide a representation of Strathclyde’s students as possible.

By joining our user testing panel you’ll be helping to improve the digital experience for all future Strathclyders.

We can’t promise you anything in return but there might be some tea/coffee and chocolate biscuits on offer!

Get in touch

If you’re interested in becoming one of our UX champions please email webcontent@strath.ac.uk with your name, what year you are in and what you are studying. We plan to have our first get-together at the end of February where all new recruits can meet up and find out more.

If you have any questions or want some more information about becoming a UX champion please email webcontent@strath.ac.uk.

Thanks!

The Web Team

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