Our provision for prospective students is changing across 2025, starting with undergraduates next week. The way we approach content management is changing too, ensuring a more sustainable and proactively curated service.

Back in 2021 we conducted an audit of central website provision for prospective students. We already knew through usability testing that our website was challenging and frustrating prospective students in too many places. But our analysis began to uncover why. We found 2972 pages, on 26 central websites, managed by 65 editors, from 12 different teams, across 6 different departments.

How we conducted our 2021 audit and what we found – blog post by Paula Taylor

This post is in no way a criticism of what went before. Our colleagues – many of whom we still work with – were doing their best with limited time, capacity and direction. We all want to deliver the best student experience possible.

But the reality is there was no overall vision.  No expectation of what good looks like. No measure of how we were doing.

In short, we were operating in a devolved web publishing environment.

I’ve worked in web publishing for a long time; since the last century (how old do I sound?) when you needed specialist technical skills to make things available on the world wide web (there I go again).

The devolution revolution

In the intervening 25+ years we’ve seen the introduction of content management systems and social media which has opened up web publishing to pretty much everyone.

Lowering the technical barriers is great. I don’t miss coding HTML and CSS. It’s meant that web editors (now evolving into content designers) have been able to focus on the words and other content that influences website visitors and facilitates self service.

But the problem is that these advances in web publishing technology have encouraged businesses to devalue web publishing. Anyone can do it. More and more people have web publishing as a small part of their responsibilities. They often don’t even have it explicitly in their job description.

The end result is bloated, overloaded, unfocused, difficult-to-use websites. More and more content gets produced to varying standards and nobody is responsible for removing content. And AI is only making this problem worse.

In previous roles, when I trained web publishers and facilitated web strategies across university business units I would ask:

If you told your boss you had published 50 web pages today, how do you think they would they respond? And how would they react if you told them you’d removed 50 pages?

The reality is you would almost certainly be adding more value to the business and to the user experience if you were removing content, but it almost certainly wouldn’t be perceived that way.

Website management is a specialism

Actually it’s not one specialism, it’s a family of specialisms. We’re very lucky in our team to have all the skills to deliver better website experiences but this isn’t the norm.

All across the University, people with a wide range of job titles and a load of other skills, responsibilities and priorities are managing websites. This is no criticism of them. They do their best and some do a great job with website content management.

But when you’re not a specialist, and you have a load of other responsibilities how much time can you give to:

• Developing and managing a web strategy
• Coordinating the contributions of a range of subject matter experts and stakeholders
• Steering and coaching other web publishers
• Writing and copy editing to University standards
• Appraising the effectiveness of your provision through analysis of analytics and usability testing
• Ensuring your content is accessible to everyone, and optimised for non-human visitors
• Auditing and curating content to remain relevant and up-to-date
• Staying abreast of wider Univerity publishing and aligning your provision accordingly

Frankly, not enough.

We are a digital business. Pretty much everyone is in a digital business today. So much so, we may as well drop the word “digital”.  It’s ubiquitous. And yet we (like many organisations) believe that anyone (indeed a great number of anyones all at the same time) can deliver digital services to our key audiences.

Centralising provision for prospective students

All this is a long way of saying that the service the Prospective Student Web Team provides is changing.

We’re introducing new technologies this year, but we’re also introducing new ways of working.

The plethora of websites and web publishers is shrinking considerably.

We are consolidating the web presence so that students don’t need to go from site to site across the University web estate to achieve their goals. The number of pages is reducing and becoming much more task-orientated.

We are removing direct access to web publishing for a great number of colleagues and replacing with a support service so that we have greater coordination and keep content production more firmly focused on business need and user outcomes.

Our degree programme provision is more comprehensive, so that much less prospective student-facing content needs to exist on school sites; removing duplication and circular student website journeys.

Devolved web publishing doesn’t work

Content management expert Gerry McGovern has been forthright in this matter for many years. He famously said:

“Decentralized publishing equals amateur web management.”
Gerry McGovern

No doubt he was phrasing his opinion in a controversial way to (successfully) grab attention. But there is more than a kernel of truth here. The harsh reality is that when you audit our web presence, you can easily find content that is not representative of the calibre and standing of the University of Edinburgh. And duplication, so much duplication.

Our team can’t control University web strategy or where the organisation chooses to direct its resources. But we will demonstrate the return on investment in our team through:

• Improved prospective student experiences contributing to greater self service and fewer unnecessary enquiries
• Reduced carbon footprint as we host less content on our website
• Improved efficiency as fewer staff undertake infrequent web publishing tasks. Subject matter experts can spend more time in their specialist area and dedicated content designers do a better job, faster.
• Enhanced accessibility, as our adherence to W3C standards improves.
• Better insight, as our web analytics becomes easier to interrogate and draw trends from.

Looking ahead

2025 is an exciting year for our team and a step change. But while it’s a big step, it’s still only a step with many more before us.

We will be closing down subsites and consolidating web content throughout the year and as we do this, we will be advising colleagues in schools and research groups about what they no longer need to publish locally.

This will need to be a proactive process on our part because, we appreciate that devolved web publishing by time-poor non-specialists rarely prioritises content curation and rationalisation.

More blog posts about the development of our new provision for prospective students

A new website and a new approach to content management  / Future student online experiences by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0