Introducing the Admin A to Z project
The digital communications team have been aware for some time that, in order to finish our external website programme, we would need to tackle the Administration A to Z section of the website. We’ve now kicked off this project, which aims to put information about the University’s Schools, Departments, units and teams in the locations that users will be most likely to find them.
Information about the structure of the University is currently found in the ‘Administration A-Z’ section of the website. However, these pages contains large amounts of information which is duplicated from other areas of the website, or is primarily for internal users. The project aims to separate out the content which is valuable for external users and ensure this is moved into a new location, whilst moving all relevant internal content into the sections for staff and current students.
Admin A-Z audit
One of the first pieces of work we completed was an audit of all of the webpages within the Admin A-Z section in Terminal4 version 7 (T4v7). We found 59 sections in T4v7, with more than 200 pages of content. The biggest sections were Human Resources, Environment and sustainable development and Finance. At the end of the audit, we had a mindmap which showed all of the pages in the section, and coded it to show which sections had already been deleted or marked inactive in T4. We then immediately removed any content from the section which had already been deleted to tidy T4v7 up.
Information for external users
Our plan is to create a new website section in T4v8 which gives information about the structure of the University for external users. This will allow the University to provide information about which teams are responsible for different tasks, and to sign-post to more detailed information. We plan to add this new section of the website to the existing About section, which resides in T4v8. The About section currently covers the governance structure of the institution, but not the structure of the University’s Departments, units and teams, and it does not include information about our Academic Schools.
We plan to ask all Academic Schools, Departments, service units and teams to provide a short summary of their responsibilities, and these will be uploaded to the new ‘University structure’ section. The content team is currently drafting an example summary for Corporate Communications, which will be shared with colleagues across the University, along with a preview of how the new pages may appear.
Information for internal users
A lot of the information in the Admin A-Z section is primarily aimed at internal audiences – current students and staff – and a number of pages are already password protected. We plan to move this information out of the Admin A-Z section and into the more relevant Current Students and Staff sections. This will make it easier for staff and students to find this information, and will allow us to more efficiently look after the content.
The digital communications team plans to move all of the content, which means that staff with access to these sections do not need to do anything. Digital communications will also ensure that redirects are put in place, so that users will not notice that sections of the website have moved.
There are a small number of pages that digital communications recommend are password protected because of the content they include. We will contact all content owners and let them know about our recommendations.
Next steps
The digital communications team are now starting to write out to all content owners who have content in the Admin A-Z section, with our recommendations for where their content should be moved to. We are happy to discuss these recommendations if content owners disagree with the suggestion for the new location.
We have also started to create a prototype of how the new webpages are likely to function, and will send this prototype to all stakeholders next week. We will then start working with contacts to create the content describing the various Schools, Departments, units and teams at the University.