Centralising content owned by multiple teams in the postgraduate study site
Our new postgraduate study site brings together content that was spread across our web estate into one location. This involved working with multiple teams to deduplicate and consolidate content, reducing our page count by 60%.
Project background
Creating a new postgraduate study site was one of the last jobs in our team’s project to enhance our central study content, which included both designing a new degree finder and redeveloping our central study websites.
Having launched the new undergraduate study site and degree programmes in March, our attention immediately turned to getting a new postgraduate study site ready for launch alongside the postgraduate degree programmes.
Read our blog post on the development of the new undergraduate provision
Recommendations following content audits
Before March, we had already kicked off the redevelopment of our postgraduate study site with an audit in summer 2024.
Following the audit, we passed on recommendations to other teams who owned postgraduate content we were not responsible for managing, namely:
- Open Days, events and visits (run by the Postgraduate Recruitment team)
- Online learning (run by the Online Learning Marketing team)
Our recommendations were to:
- remove out-of-date pages to consolidate the size of the Open Days site and incorporate it as part of the postgraduate study site
- incorporate the unique online learning content into the postgraduate study site to reduce content management overhead and avoid duplicate content
Not long after the audit, the Postgraduate Recruitment team removed out-of-date pages from their site, and the Online Learning Marketing team agreed to move their unique content into our central site.
We also did another audit which impacted the postgraduate site development. Content designers Flo and Heike headed a project to audit content for unsuccessful applicants across the University’s three college websites. What they found were a lot of similar reasons for why students do not receive an offer across the colleges. This prompted them to come up with a new structure for how we can consolidate these similar pieces of content and instead host them on the central study sites.
Read Flo’s post on the unsuccessful applicants content project
After getting agreement from colleges to centralise this content in the spring, we were ready to start designing and redeveloping the new content for the postgraduate study site.
Drafting sites into subsections
Drafting content owned by other teams looked a bit different depending on what our recommendations were.
For online learning and unsuccessful applicants content, where the recommendation was to primarily deduplicate the content, our audit notes gave a clear direction of how to go about doing so.
For example, Flo was responsible for drafting online learning content, using notes other content designers had made during the initial audit, which included a provisional information architecture for which unique content on the site we’d keep and how it could fit into our working postgraduate study site structure.
Example of content audit notes we were basing our drafts on for the online learning section.
In contrast, for Open Days content, the bulk of the work was done during the initial cull of out-of-date pages from the site. There were fewer structural changes to deal with in this content. Instead, content designer Nicole and I focused on redrafting the pages we were keeping based on notes we made in the audit, mainly to improve the pages’ readability.
Following drafting, we conducted internal crits to review and improve the pages before showing them to the teams we were working with.
Read about our crit process in Nicole’s post
Reviewing with content owners
We shared our drafts with their content owners a few weeks before having meeting with them. This gave them a chance to review the content themselves in their own time before the meeting. At the meetings, we went over questions that came up while drafting, and collaboratively worked to update the drafts based on their comments and feedback.
One of the challenges we found during reviewing was that for content that required frequent updating, some of our drafts quickly became out of date when changes were made to live content after we started our drafting process. So following the review meetings, we worked to better coordinate and sync up content updates that were being made to the current sites with our drafts.
A shift in content management
After reviewing the drafts, we built them in our new postgraduate study site, keeping them updated with any changes that were needed before we went live, as noted.
Since the site has been published, we’ve shifted how this content is managed. Instead of the content owners we worked with being solely responsible for their own sites, we now manage this content, which has become subsections of the postgraduate study site.
So instead of being site owners, our colleagues act as subject matter experts who are accountable for the accuracy of the content, while we take primary responsibility for managing and updating it.
I say ‘primary’ because content management does vary by need. For content that requires frequent updates, such as postgraduate events, we’ve given colleagues site access to make sure they can make quick updates as and when needed. For anything new or more substantial they need to create, we will work together to create and build this content.
Consolidating in numbers
When we conducted our initial audits, we looked at 325 pages, which covered the:
- previous postgraduate study site
- postgraduate online learning site
- postgraduate Open Days, events and visits site
- unsuccessful applicants content spread across the three college sites
The new postgraduate study site is 130 pages. So we’ve cut down our page count of this postgraduate content spread across the University web estate by 60%.
This reduction will help cut the cost of managing our postgraduate content going forward.
Read Neil’s post on how we’ve reduced the cost of web management
See the new site
View the postgraduate study site
If you want to see the three areas mentioned in this blog post, check out:
