At a recent Website Support Clinic, I was asked about EdWeb’s subsite footer option—its purpose, when to use it and good practice tips.

We do a lot of engagement via University mailing lists, and on the whole do pretty well in terms of response and reaction. I wanted to share with you a few things I’ve learned over the years in the course of communicating with the communities we support.

With the end of the long migration of content from Polopoly into EdWeb now in sight we are looking at how important website content can be preserved and potentially archived. The decommissioning of Polopoly will start 1 June 2016 and editors will have full access up until then.

I’m introducing a new usability testing service for the University, for an initial trial period up to the end of July 2016. It will be an easy and convenient way to embed user insight into your development projects, and provide learning opportunities for anyone interested in trying the techniques out for themselves.

The next in our regular schedule of updates and improvements to EdWeb will take place on Thursday 10 March. This deployment will introduce the ability to schedule publishing (and unpublishing), to ’embargo’ sensitive content, and to apply security patches.

In the Website Support Clinic this month, we were asked about working efficiently with the MyEd Event Booking system – and specifically, how to consume feeds of forthcoming events onto EdWeb pages so that visitors could browse and book onto courses effectively, and without manual intervention on the part of the website’s editors.

The Desktop Recorder software on Media Hopper is a great resource for creating training videos.

The current EdWeb enhancements phase will comprise of six development iterations which are scheduled to complete in July 2016. Recent deployments included additional branding space for business units to add logos and homepage enhancements.

This year’s UCISA conference is being held in Manchester from 16 to 18 March. I’m contributing a ‘university showcase’ in which I’ll talk through how we use collaborative usability testing as part of our development processes.

Digital transformation is a popular term cropping up in many organisational strategies, including our own. But what’s it all about? I attended an excellent seminar last week that prompted me to reflect on my views on the subject.