Upcoming: new inbound student hub

Jennifer Hamrick

Tuesday 26 September 2017

In the next few weeks, we plan to launch one of the new Collaborations and Study Abroad (CSA) website ‘hubs’ – the inbound student hub.

Read more about the project to create new website hubs for CSA.

The inbound hub will provide all the information that an international or European student looking to study abroad at St Andrews would need. The inbound hub contains these five main sections:

1. Choose St Andrews – provides information about available exchange and study abroad programmes offered by St Andrews and about what makes studying abroad at St Andrews a unique experience.
2. Applying to St Andrews – includes information about entry requirements and the application process (including for accommodation) specific for inbound students.
3. Your studies – provides tailored information about the modules inbound students can take, the advising process, and English language support.
4. Before you arrive – includes all the information an inbound student needs to know before coming to St Andrews, such as how to get to St Andrews, healthcare information, fees and financial information, and a link to visas information. It also includes a handy checklist to breakdown and simplify what students need to do.
5. Once you arrive – includes all of things inbound students will need to do once they arrive at St Andrews, such as getting to their hall of residence and attending Matriculation.

Our process

In order to create (or recreate) the inbound student content, we organised our work in to the following steps:

1. Create a Kanban spreadsheet.
   This spreadsheet includes each page that needs to be created, where the information for that page currently resides (if at all), asset information (PDFs or images that need to be migrated), and its status along the rest of the steps.
2. Create the content for each page in Google docs.
   We use Google docs so that we can easily share and edit each page within our own team and with CSA.
3. QA internally
   After one team member creates a page, a different team member undertakes a quality assurance and checks the page to make sure it meets house style and our digital standards.
4. Send to CSA for QA and sign-off.
   After each page is QAed internally, we immediately send it to CSA to check over, answer any of our queries, and sign-off.
5. Upload content to T4v8 and receive final sign-off.
   After a page has been signed off by CSA, we upload it to T4v8 as a draft webpage. We then send a link to the draft webpage to CSA for any final comments, queries, or amendments.
6. Launch.
   Once all the inbound draft webpages have been signed off by CSA, we can go live. The launch process involves removing the old-style pages and setting up redirects to the new pages.

Learn more about how the CSA project fits within our external website programme.