In most walks of life, a small number of things are significantly more important than the rest. To be effective as the manager of a web presence or service, you need to know what matters most to your target audiences. Fortunately this is fairly easy to do.

I recently attended a seminar hosted by the Institute for Academic Development on how to use social media to market Online Distance Learning courses at the University. While social media was the focus of the seminar, many participants spoke about how services and guidelines provided by UWP can help strengthen and measure the success of […]

Always keen to get my hands on (a) free coffee and (b) useful advice on improving website quality, I recently attended a briefing on “Tips to improve the accessibility of your website”, hosted by User Vision.

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.

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.

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.