An update on the 2018 digital prospectus
Last month the digital communications team were busy launching the new site structure, a big milestone in our external website project. Now that’s out of the way, we have more time to focus on our business as usual work, and this means ensuring all of the 2018-entry postgraduate taught and undergraduate course webpages are ready for September 2018.
New methods
2017 was the first year that the web publishing schedule for postgraduate programmes aligned with Publications, which meant that all drafts of the webpages were sent out at the same time as the draft print prospectus for each subject. This was done in an effort to make the proofing process easier for Schools, as all feedback could be sent back to Publications in one go. Undergraduate pages were still sent out separately, but digicomms hope that, in the future, these can also be sent out with print prospectus information.
Uploading
Once digicomms receives all the Word documents back from Schools, the next step is to upload the content to T4v8.
When each course is uploaded, the content team checks the page against specially written acceptance criteria for the undergraduate and postgraduate pages.
The first phase is to upload the postgraduate pages. Once they have all been uploaded, there will be a final overall QA in which the content team will read over for typos, test all links, and check each page against the acceptance criteria and the print prospectus.
Once the postgraduate pages have been signed off, we will begin uploading the undergraduate pages. The process will be the same for UG as it is for PGT, although, due to UG pages having more subpages, and more content on each page, we expect this will take longer.
The schedule
The deadline for Schools to return the postgraduate taught pages was 24 May, and the deadline for undergraduate page returns was 7 July.
We aim to have both undergraduate and postgraduate course pages live on the University website by the 1 September 2017.
Once the new 2018 pages are live, both the 2017 postgraduate and undergraduate pages will move into the archive.