The Postgraduate Entry 2026 website that launched on 7 October introduced new approaches to how we present degree programmes. Contributions from colleagues in schools, colleges and support units have been critical to our transformation of online provision.

Back in the summer, I surveyed the student recruitment and marketing community about the website and digital service improvements that would have greatest value for their work. The results of this survey have helped our steering group set priorities for the coming year.

In 2021 I created a diagram of the people, processes and systems surrounding the Degree Finders to help inform our technical planning and communication to stakeholders. I’ve just updated the diagram for 2025 to reflect our new service. Comparing old with new really highlights how much our technology landscape has evolved and simplified.

Our work this year to deliver a new website for prospective students has reduced the number of pages we publish by over 50%. This is better for the student experience, better for the environment and better for our content management overhead.

As I mark nearly one year with the Prospective Student Web team, I’m excited to reflect on my experience as a Web Content Support Assistant, imparting some of my highlights and key learnings from the last 10 months.

I’ve been looking at future work in recent months while the team have focused on rolling out our new service. We still have a lot of improvements to bring to the prospective student online experience, and we want student recruitment marketing and admissions colleagues to help us prioritise what we do next.

As part of the rollout of our new degree finders, we’ve been delivering tailored training to our undergraduate and postgraduate editors. We’ve learnt a lot about training and our editorial users along the way, and have compiled some of our own tips for running training sessions.

Our team went on campus during the recent Undergraduate Open Day to do some pop-up research and check some design concepts with prospective students and their parents.

Last year, we carried out usability testing around the proposed search and filter interface for the future degree finder. We also tested the effectiveness of updated navigation features to help users orientate themselves on programme pages. We were pleased to see students encounter no major usability issues when interacting with these.

Since the end of 2024, we’ve held team sessions to experiment with using GenAI to edit content. We’ve found it to be unreliable and more time-consuming than manually editing content, so we’re not going to use it to help with degree finder editing in the near future.