Digital Communications team update – March 2021
Latest updates from the digital communications team and useful articles and resources relating to digital best practice for March 2021.
Careers website redesign
We have completed the initial research phase of our project to redesign the Careers Centre website. During this phase, we undertook the following:
- Competitor analysis – we evaluated websites hosted by universities in the UK and commercial organisations.
- Online survey and analysis – we had 1071 responses from students, alumni, prospective students and staff.
- Workshops with key stakeholder groups (Careers Centre, undergraduate students, postgraduate students, alumni and employers) to further understand how they use the careers service.
- Social media review
- Website analytics
Based on the data collected during the research phase, we have come up with a list of initial user requirements. We will meet with the Careers Centre to review these requirements before moving on to prototype an information architecture and digital strategy.
We are hoping to complete the redesign by May 2021.
University events
We are continuing to work on updating the events site to run the latest version of the events application. This will provide some minor enhancements to the functionality and make the application easier to maintain in the future. We are currently testing the changes and hope to make this live later this month.
Digital prospectus
We are working with IT Services to develop a way to automatically use centrally held information such as entry requirements and tuition fees on the undergraduate and postgraduate course pages. At the moment this information has to be manually maintained across 217 web pages. We are hoping that the work will be completed for the start of the next academic year.
Recent blog posts
- Covid-19 information landing page update
- New sustainability website
- Using QR codes in 2021
- How to you write for different audiences?
Articles and resources
- A Practical Guide to the Power of Playbooks (Paul Boag – free webinar) – how creating a digital playbook can transform the effectiveness of your team and shift the culture of your organisation.
- WebPShop – a plug-in for opening and saving WebP images directly from Adobe Photoshop.
- Featured Snippets (BackLinko – article) – featured snippets are short snippets of text that appear at the top of Google’s search results to quickly answer a searcher’s query.
- Digifest 2021 (Jisc) – online event taking place from 8 to 11 March 2021.
- How to Interpret User Time Spent and Page Views (Nielsen Norman Group – article)
- Gradient Generator Tool and uiGradients – free colour gradient tools
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