As we reach the end of a long and complex migration of website content from our Drupal 7 platform, EdWeb 1, to Drupal 10, EdWeb 2, we are reviewing our lessons learned and will adjust our approaches to reflect on them. One key insight was the volume of outdated website content in the platform. This […]

The 2nd conference for the Scottish Higher Education Web and Digital community took place a few days ago, hosted by the University of Dundee. This event is extremely popular and relevant with teams across our University, to the point that there was a “special” pile of lanyards with the label “Edinburgh” on top, beside the […]

Earlier this week, Emma Horrell, User Experience Manager, and I travelled to Cambridge to attend the annual Digital Leaders meeting, hosted at the University of Cambridge. Janus Boye has been organising and facilitating similar meetings for several years, and there were some very interesting discussions related to leading and managing digital services and products. My […]

Understanding user needs and behaviours is a key component to the success of modern digital services. Having the appropriate data and insight at the right time, can trigger an individual or a team to take action to improve the digital experience, and thereferore support a successful organisation realise its strategic targets. With that in mind, […]

Our team has been very active, rising to the call of the University’s “Make a Difference” initiative and volunteering to support causes that are related to Edinburgh and its communities. Following from last year’s beach clean at Burntisland, Fife, we have organised a day to clean the Union Canal, and put out a call to […]

The University’s cookie consent approach has been under review and has now changed, shifting to a stricter approach against web analytics’ cookies, specifically those set by the Google Analytics platform. This change has been reflected by the introduction of a new cookie consent overlay and an updated guidance for our web publishing community. What is […]

Our team has been experimenting with a hybrid approach in working for the last few months. This has involved combining working from home, as we all have been doing for about a year and a half, and a gradual return to work on campus, mostly in Argyle House. We took this opportunity to openly discuss […]

One of the key strategic projects our team has been working is the creation of a University Design System. What is it, why is it important and what have we been working on?

Since the introduction of the European Union (EU) cookie legislation in 2013, and after the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) implementation in 2018, the University has taken extensive measures within the central University Website (EdWeb) to reduce the risk of capturing and storing user privacy-invasive data. Additionally, platform-agnostic guidance and support has been available for […]

We have now transitioned to a full home working environment across all of our teams, responding to the UK government’s and University of Edinburgh’s guidance. Even though team members have been working from home on occasions, doing it in this scale is unprecedented. I would like to share what was involved, how we prepared and […]