I finished building a new module for our online content design course
The new module is about our editorial style guide. What it is, why we have one, and when to use it. Then there’s an activity where you identify problems in a piece of text and fix them with reference to the style guide. Next week we’re doing some quick usability tests to try it out with some real humans. I’m interested to see how this goes. In my previous work we created a lot of material for online courses but it was rare to test it with people before launch.
We hosted an online session for Mini Wins: Bitesize Content Improvement
This is still a fairly new idea. Publishers from across the University join a 20-minute Teams call and discuss a topic in the world of content. This time it was staff listing pages, sometimes called “Our People” or “Meet the team”.
Then we agree a small task we can do before the next meet-up. It has to be something manageable that will make an improvement to people’s sites. This time it was to check our staff listing pages and make sure it was an up-to-date list.
Our next session is on Tuesday 25 June 2024 and we’re talking about headings. If you work at the University and want to find out more, see:
Mini Wins: Bitesize Content Improvement
I ran a session of Content Design for Web Publishers
This is our in-person training that builds on the topics covered in the online course. We’re still tweaking the topics and activities in this session.
Previously we did an activity on user needs and business needs. People had to complete a table like this one:
Table showing user needs prioritised alongside business needs (taken from this article: Lou Rosenfeld: Stop Redesigning And Start Tuning Your Site Instead)
I did this activity in a couple of sessions, and both times it fell a bit flat. This time we ditched it and did a style guide activity. Attendees had to apply the style guide to some real pages from University websites. It worked better than the user needs / business needs stuff. I felt like it was more relevant to what people attending the session are actually doing in their day to day work.
The user needs / business needs stuff is important. It’s useful to have an idea of who your priority users are and what’s most important to them on your site. But discussion of that gets into high level site strategy stuff: questions about why you have a site in the first place and how you decide what goes on the homepage. That’s not relevant to a lot of staff within the University who just have to update a small section of a large site.
I did some experiments with listing news and events in EdWeb 2
I found some time to play around with EdWeb 2 and see how news and events look in it. We want to provide some guidance on how to manage archives and tagging. The first step for this is to work out what’s possible in the new system.
I got Türkiye in the Euros sweepstake
You never know. I still remember when Greece won.
