Gareth is the web architect within the University of St Andrews digital communications team. A graduate of St Andrews (BD Hons, 1993), Gareth joined the web team in 2006 and worked mainly on information architecture and front-end development (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). He currently spends most of his time doing DSDM agile project management and business analysis.
The topic of which Web browsers are the most popular came up at our weekly Web team meeting this morning. So I went away and did a little digging in our Google Analytics account. (Bear in mind that I have no degree…
I remember as a child during Advent counting down the days to Christmas: the excitement each morning of seeing the next door opened, wondering what would be revealed behind it, and sneakily trying to ‘accidentally’…
When asked how one can improve a web page in one simple step it is the considered opinion of certain members of the Web team that this may be done by adding a photograph of a fire engine to the page. See, this page is…
This afternoon (12:00 – 14:00) the Web team ran our third monthly drop-in clinic. By popular demand here are some reflections on how it went. How it all began Every now and then I’ll be chatting with someone, usually…
Every couple of months the same topic of conversation comes up in the Web team office: should we still be supporting Internet Explorer 6? The answer so far has always been a resigned yes, but that may not be the case…
The University is currently in the process of moving to a replacement service for staff email and calendars, which are currently provided via two separate, locally-hosted applications, including Meeting Maker. The new…
Last month Duncan blogged about making the student handbook mobile friendly which was in preparation for mSaint – the new student portal for the iPhone, built on the campusM platform from oMbiel. mSaint went live this…
The University’s Photo of the Week (and accompanying press release) this week shows one of the Papal Bulls issued by Pope Benedict XIII in 1413 that formally constituted the University of St Andrews. Is it just me, or…
Encountering Agile Back in April 2008 I attended the Scotland on Rails 2008 conference in Edinburgh; I literally have the t-shirt to prove it. It was an absolutely fascinating (read: über-geeky) conference let down…
I’m currently working on a redesign of the University’s research homepage which involves a requirement to pull in three RSS feeds: Recent research outputs (from the PURE research portal, which hasn’t gone public yet)…