Upcoming developments on the research website project

Jennifer Hamrick
Thursday 5 April 2018

The research website project team have been steadily moving forward with creating content and working on development for the new research website.

We have met with a number of stakeholders now to gather requirements and user stories and to establish the content writing and sign-off process.

We have also created a centralised WordPress research blog using the University’s multisite which is pulling in content from over seven different blogs related to research.

Here are our plans for the upcoming sprint:

Build webpages in T4v8

Now that we have over half of the content written (and some already signed-off by stakeholders) for the research website, we will start uploading it as webpages in our content management system, TerminalFour v.8. We have already built some webpages in a “test” site which is accessible by all staff at the University.

The benefit of creating the webpages at this stage is that our stakeholders will be able to see exactly how the content is laid out with all of the design features. They will also be able to share the pages with other colleagues in their departments to gather any additional feedback in time for launch.

Polish the research blog

With permission from the original owners, we have migrated all content from a number of scattered research-related blogs into a single WordPress site. This new blog will provide a one-stop-shop for all research-related blog posts and will be linked to in multiple places from the research website.

At the moment, this centralised blog is a bit of a “Frankenblog” because none of the blog posts have been sorted yet. The next step is to go through all the blog posts (544!) and edit them to meet house style, categorise and tag them, and edit their media items to meet photo and video standards. After this, we will add our WordPress theme to the blog (basically giving it a facelift) so that it is in line with corporate identity.

Build a prototype showcase section

One of the main bodies of work for the research website is the “showcase” section which will be an area of the website demonstrating examples of the high quality research taking place across the University. Part of this section will include case studies – these will be webpages featuring research, public engagement, knowledge transfer and other stories which have had high impact.

The content team have created an initial case study template and have started drafting the content for these stories. In the upcoming sprint, we plan to design how these case study webpages will look and identify any additional DPL patterns which may need to be built.

We will also meet to determine how the case studies, as well as other feature such as news and events, will be linked to from the front page of the showcase section.

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