What we’ve been up to

As ever, it’s been a busy year for the Web Team and we wanted to tell you about what we’ve been up to. We’ll be sharing these updates more regularly to keep you informed on what we’re working on, as well as posting about exciting web related news, skills and technology. Please do have a rootle around the sites mentioned below. We’d love to hear your feedback – good and developmental! Send your comments to web-team@bradford.ac.uk 

Highlights from the last six months

• Student Services – The purpose of this website is to provide one place where students can find out about the range of services available to them. Users can search for what they are looking for through either an A-Z, category page or FAQ section.
• Students’ Union – Working with an agency from Bolton, we were engaged in bringing the Students’ Unions new website to life with a focus on capturing the range of events and activities that are taking place in the SU.
• Be Outstanding – Over the Summer you may have seen many billboards and advertising posters dotted around Bradford and further afield. To tie in with this activity there was a lot of digital campaigns developed including revamps of the Undergraduate and Clearing websites. As a result of this activity, the number of visits to the clearing pages alone went 18,558 unique visitors in 2012 compared to 38,318 over the same period this year.
• Schools and Colleges – We worked closely with our Education Liaison team to develop a website for teachers, careers advisers, parents and potential students, about the work we do to inspire young people to go to university. The website has a particular focus on events, as well as helpful resources for teachers and potential students.
• New Students – We updated and improved both the content and ‘look and feel’ of our website especially for new students. The content is grouped into pre-arrival and arrival information, covering both study related and student life focused content.
• City website and map – We wanted to show that there’s much more to be explored in Bradford than the city centre, so we developed a website based on an area guide approach. Part of this project included developing an illustrated map of the city. The map has a dual purpose being used both online and in print.

Smaller projects

• Study – Our study section had become a little overgrown, so we did some work on updating the Information Architecture and improving content.
• October Open Day – Updating our Open Day web content is part of our bread and butter work. This round of updates involved adding content about the new additions to our Open Day programme, as well as updating our interactive day planner. This year we also developed a mobile app version of the Open Day site which enables users to view programme information and sign up to receive alerts.
• Enrolment  –  The enrolment site had an overhaul ready for our September new and returning students. We updated the ‘look and feel’ to match the Undergraduate and New Students websites, as well as rewriting some of the content to be more web friendly.
• Fees and finance video – We updated our Guide to Student Finance video, which was developed initially when the new fee system came into play during 2012.
• Student blogs –  A number of our students were blogging about their experiences on work placements earlier this year. We helped get the blog up and running, provided training support and moderated posts.
• Award ceremonies video and social media – We helped to produce a series of graduate case studies, from pre-production to distribution. We also set up and used Storify for the first time, which we used to capture highlights of the celebrations.

Supporting the Web Community

A large part of our remit is to provide ongoing support to our Web Community across the University, which consists of around 500 plus CMS users. On a day-to-day basis we receive a number of  ‘web team jobs’ from CMS users and colleagues across the University. These ‘small’ (but not necessarily quick) jobs can include content updates, corrections and deletions, setting up new users, stat requests, technical queries, template requests and appeals for advice. Between April and September 2013 the Web Team have completed 300 plus web team jobs.

Governance

We have also started to undertake work in our website governance using the suite Siteimprove. This will allow us to assure our commitments to providing accessible, usable, error free websites for the University.

Blogging

You may also notice that there is more posts being updated by members of the team, so please check back and if you have any queries, ideas or suggestions you can contact us at web-team@bradford.ac.uk