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Why to avoid marketese on the web
Marketese is a writing style which favours promotional, self-congratulatory and boastful language over technical and objective wording. At the University of St Andrews, we aim to avoid using marketese on the web at all costs.
7 February 2019Content
Featured events criteria
The new events website allows us to highlight five events. On the events homepage, there is a large hero banner to showcase one event, and in the ‘Featured events’ section there are smaller boxes to showcase four events. This post sets out the criteria for these featured events and explains how staff and students can…
7 November 2018Content
What St Andrews web editors do when we’re not writing
This post was inspired by the Scottish Government blog post, What content designers do when they’re not writing. At St Andrews, web content editors create and maintain content on the University’s externally facing website. Our role is to make it as easy as possible for users to find the information they are looking for. While…
19 October 2018Content
Writing long-forms as a team
As you may already know, the digital communications team have recently redeveloped the University’s research webpages. Alongside a new homepage, the research showcase page highlights the range of research taking place at St Andrews. As part of this project, the content team were tasked to create two new research focused long-forms, focusing on coastal erosion…
8 June 2018Content
Showcasing research through content
The main feature of the new research website will be the research showcase section. This section will highlight the world-leading research taking place across St Andrews to internal and external researchers, prospective students, and the general public.
3 May 2018Content
Why duplicating content creates risk
One of the main drivers behind the external website programme is to centralise data for external users which has previously been held across various School websites, blogs, department subpages, etc.
27 February 2018Content
How we promote our long-form stories
Are you familiar with the Stories section on the University website? The digital communications team have been creating long-forms since 2015 with the purpose of showcasing the University’s research, history and student experience. Stories from 2017 have included Breaking bonds and What’s bad about being good? Featuring in a long-form is an excellent opportunity to…
22 November 2017Content Social Media
Content modelling – is it the future?
One of the main lessons from IWMW 2017 was the need to focus on content not websites. It is no longer sufficient to expect users to find information just via the University website as content is being accessed by an ever increasing variety of digital devices and methods. The following is a summary of how…
22 September 2017Content
2018 digital prospectus launch
The 2018 digital prospectus went live on Friday 1 September 2018. All undergraduate and postgraduate taught programme pages are ready for prospective students interested in studying during the 2018-2019 academic year to view. A few exceptions to this include programmes which will begin later this year or January 2018 (and are therefore still part of…
12 September 2017Content
Streamlining the migration of courses
We have just completed the migration of over 300 undergraduate and postgraduate courses from TerminalFour (T4) version 7 to version 8. A blog post describes how we automated parts of this migration, but we were still left with a lot of manual tidying up. This article describes how we ensured the final pages were ready for…
20 June 2017Content External website redevelopments