Digital Communications team update – March 2022

John Chapman
Monday 21 March 2022

Latest updates from the digital communications team for March 2022.

Website survey initial results

Thank you to everyone who completed our website survey. So far we have had 79 responses and interviewed 23 staff members and 4 students. We hope to carry out further interviews, particularly with students.

Initial feedback has found:

  • the new design pages are popular and people would like to see this rolled out to all pages. 
  • there are challenges navigating the site and using the search function to find information.
  • people would like personalised content that is relevant to them and their role. 

The survey remains open for people who wish to leave feedback.

User feedback quick wins

In the survey responses, many people said that they use the website to access the library webpages however they find it hard to find them. To fix this, we have added a link to the library in the top navigation of the staff and students webpages.

If we find any other quick wins from the survey data then we will look to implement changes as soon as possible. 

Website audit

We have recently conducted an audit of all web pages hosted on www.st-andrews.ac.uk. There are about 18,000 pages, but this does not include the thousands of variations that are dynamically generated from the same templates, for example, programme specification pages. 

For pages managed by T4, there are about 8,200 that use the digital pattern library (new design) while 1,900 have the old design. 

There are about 5,500 PDF files on the website, the majority of which are managed by T4. 

A/B testing the course page design

At the end of 2021, we began A/B testing of a new page design for the English MA and Biology BSc course pages. We have been using Google Optimise and Hotjar to determine the difference in usage. The results from this test are now available to view on the Digital Communications blog. 

WordPress migration

We are making good progress with the migration of Biology WordPress sites to WP Engine. These sites are currently hosted on synergy.st-andrews.ac.uk. Once this migration has been completed we will focus our attention on migrating WordPress sites currently hosted by Medicine.


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