We’ve made a few changes recently to our communications process to better reflect the range of activities and support we offer, and help minimise unnecessary mails to the web community.

Reasons to change

You told us that you were frustrated at having to pick up our information from a range of sources and being signed up for notifications that you weren’t interested in.

Drupal’s release will mean that branding services under the “polopoly” banner will become less relevant, and eventually confusing, as time goes on.

We also provide a number of services at the moment that are not just for central website users, and we wanted to make them more obviously available.

The changes we’ve made

In order to improve what wasn’t working well, and to reflect the changes to our services, we made three main changes.

Support contact address

We’re changing our advertised email address to reflect the fact that you can get a range of help from us:

• website.support@ed.ac.uk

We hope it’s reassuring that queries will be dealt with as previously, and that our old address will continue to work for a time.

We’ve also taken this opportunity to retire the “Polopoly Drop-In” branding we used for our one-to-one support sessions. It had become a running gag for us: they’re not “drop-in”, nor only about Polopoly: we offer advice on Google Analytics; content strategy; information architecture; and more.

We’ll now be offering “Website Support Clinics“, in the same location and the same time as before, offering advice on all the above along with the use of the central web CMS:

• Website Support Clinic information

Mailing lists

In order to focus our emails to those who are interested in them, and to keep the volume of traffic on our mandatory mailing lists to a minimum, we’ve split our mailing lists into separate instances:

• Polopoly Live Users – from now on, we’ll only be using this mailing list for very specific Polopoly issues, such as updates about downtime. Because these updates are so important, if you are a Polopoly live user, you can’t unsubscribe from these. A forthcoming Drupal mailing list is planned with a similar remit.

• Website Community – this new mailing list will be used to let you know about training, events and consultations. We’ll sign all Polopoly users up for it automatically, because we think these services are useful, but if you’re not interested you can choose to unsubscribe.

Full details of these notifications changes are on our Website Support Wiki:

• More on our mailing lists

Support wikis

We’ve also split up our wiki presence: one Polopoly-specific, and one general website support. A Drupal support wiki is also being populated as the project progresses.

• Polopoly Support Wiki

• Drupal Support Wiki

• Website Support Wiki

We hope that these changes encourage increased engagement, and simpler communications on all matters within the University web community.