Since starting at the University, I have been heavily involved with the EdWeb migration project. With this work now finishing, I reflect on my experience of working on the project and what I think worked well.

Background 

I joined the Website and Communications team as a Web Content Design Assistant (WCDA) in April 2024 alongside three others to help migrate web content from EdWeb to the updated system, EdWeb 2. There were five WCDAs in total working on this project. 

While we undertook a lot of different responsibilities throughout the migration, our main roles in the project consisted of: 

• Auditing content – using spreadsheets and software to compare original page content on EdWeb against the migrated page content on EdWeb 2. During this process, we manually ‘passed’ pages that had no issues and ‘failed’ pages that needed to be fixed. 
• Creating ‘audit reports’ to share with the wider migration team so they were aware of the different fixes we were undertaking on different websites. 
• Fixing any content that had not migrated correctly to EdWeb2 so it resembled (or closely resembled) the original content. This process also required manually building out homepages across websites from scratch. 
• Writing up handover notes to lead publishers so they were aware of any changes as a result of the migration. 

If you would like to read up more about our roles, check out Emma Horrell’s blog: 

Through migration and beyond: the role and rise of the team of Web Content Design Assistants 

With the migration project coming to a close, I’d like to reflect on my experience of working on the project and coming into the team. 

Joining the team during a migration freeze gave us time to focus on training 

When I joined the team, the migration was in a three-week pause period. This gave all the new WCDAs an opportunity to learn more about the project, learn what systems we would be using and what was expected of us. 

When migrations went live again, we were always busy. By the time we had finished auditing and fixing a website, another one was waiting to go. Deadlines had to be met but our team was more than capable of meeting them quickly. 

My confidence in meeting these deadlines can be attributed partly to us starting during the three-week pause period. It gave us time to attend training sessions, understand the software we would be using and become proficient in it. We also had the opportunity to do ‘pre-audits’ – essentially practice audits – that allowed us to go through the audit process without having a hard deadline to meet. 

Having this three-week period to be trained and upskilled in different elements of the migration allowed us to build confidence and smoothly integrate into the team. 

Learning two content management systems (CMS) at the same time was hard but beneficial in the long run 

Within the first two weeks of joining the team, the other new WCDAs and I had to complete essential training on EdWeb and EdWeb 2 so that we could get editing permissions on both systems. 

The first training session I sat in on was Tess Higgins’ training for EdWeb 2 with just members of our team. We got to ask Tess any questions we had and experiment with test sites that were set up.

I then sat in on a training session from John Wilson, the Editorial Assistant in our team, to get up to speed on EdWeb and how to use it.  

This was slightly overwhelming at first. The two systems look and operate quite differently from each other. I remember feeling worried about remembering where all the functions where on each CMS. 

But while it was difficult at first, it proved to be beneficial to be trained in the CMSs in this order. 

As EdWeb 2 was my primary CMS, learning it first allowed me to focus more on it and learn more about its functionality. Furthermore, learning both CMSs at the same time allowed me to understand the key differences between the two and share this with publishers whose websites were migrating.

The importance of a daily morning check-in 

Since I started at the University, the migration team had a stand-up meeting at 9.30am every day. These meetings became so second nature to me that I almost forgot to highlight how important they were in this blog post! 

Everyone involved in the project attended these meetings, including project managers, IT specialists and content designers. It gave everyone an opportunity to provide an update on the status of their work going on in different areas of the migration. 

The fact that these meetings were such a constant throughout the migration meant it was very easy to keep track of where everyone was with their work. It was easy to ask questions in this meeting and highlight issues to other members of the team so that they could be resolved quickly. 

From a WCDA perspective, it kept us informed about aspects of the migration we weren’t normally involved with, such as the developer side. Hearing developers talking about changes and improvements they were making to EdWeb 2 improved our knowledge of the platform, and in turn we were able to use this knowledge to become more proficient with the platform. 

These check-ins were such an important part of keeping communication channels open internally, and I personally found them extremely beneficial to keep track of such a multifaceted project. 

We constantly improved our processes  

When live migrations started, I was quite nervous at first. I would be handling content that belonged to other people and wanted to make sure I wasn’t making any mistakes when checking content. As the project continued, we kept taking steps to improve our processes, and these steps also improved my confidence. 

Spreadsheets and the audit tool 

Auditing required us to check that pages on EdWeb 2 matched their original source pages on EdWeb. Previous audits had been done using spreadsheets, requiring WCDAs to check both pages manually, mark whether the page passed or failed the audit and leave notes. It was a long process that required multiple monitors to complete efficiently. 

Thankfully, we had an internally-created piece of software called ‘Mtools’. Mtools allowed us to effectively audit content as it showed what the content looked like on EdWeb and EdWeb2 on the same page. It also had a simple way of marking pages as ‘passed’ or ‘failed’. 

We could use this for every page on a website, and at the end, export the data onto a spreadsheet so we could easily identify the common fails within EdWeb 2 and fix them.  

Having audited content through Mtools and through spreadsheets, Mtools was a much more efficient way of completing audits. It allowed for less tab-switching, was very easy to use and drastically improved the time in which we could complete an audit. This tool allowed all the WCDAs to work more efficiently and dedicate more time to other aspects of the migration process. 

Compiling all possible fails into a sharable document 

To make it easier to synthesise data at the end of an audit, Anita Joseph, a fellow WCDA, created a document that allowed us to log all the different errors we saw when auditing and a note beside it of the exact wording we should use for recording the issue.  

This document was only a few pages long, but as time went by, we added more and more to it. It became an invaluable reference point useful to share with others who were helping with the migration, or who were joining the team.  

This document was 23 pages long by the end of the project! But it was incredibly useful to be able to refer to all these issues and was even more beneficial for compiling data at the end of an audit. 

Our sharable document that listed all the possible issues with a migrated page.

Help from developers  

Depending on the website we were migrating, there could be thousands of pages. That’s a lot of content to check.  

Links were one of the things that were constantly difficult to catch after long periods of auditing. It was a heavy strain on the eyes checking to see if migrated links matched the originals and were directing to the correct place, especially if a page had hundreds of links.  

We raised this problem at an internal meeting and the developers within our team proposed a solution for one of our most common link issues – a way of highlighting links that were incorrectly displaying in EdWeb 2. This change improved our accuracy auditing pages. 

This is just one example of how developers were able to assist with the auditing process. Thanks to their help, we were able to be more efficient with aspects of our work. 

Getting involved with meeting lead publishers was hugely beneficial 

Attending meetings with the Migration Coordinator  

Once live migrations started, we began to have weekly meetings with Paula Sivanandan, the Migration Coordinator. It was decided very early on that one of the five WCDAs would sit in with her on meetings with lead publishers to help prepare them for their site’s migration.  

The decision for our team to sit in on these meetings was hugely beneficial as it allowed us to directly hear any queries and concerns from the lead publisher. 

These meetings gave lead publishers an opportunity to ask questions about the migration process, but also gave us the opportunity to learn more about their website. It was useful to hear first-hand about the website and a good opportunity to take notes on the kind of content we would see when it came to auditing and manually fixing the site. 

Having notes on each website and being able to pass this information on to the other Web Content Design Assistants helped prepare us more thoroughly for the migrations of different sites. Based on the different types of content we expected to see, we were able to use notes collected from these meetings and implement extra checks into our workflow to make sure the website migrated as cleanly as possible. 

Content design workshops 

Led by Senior Content Designer Nick Daniels, our team has been running a number of sessions and workshops to help University staff with good content design practices. 

Read more about our content design training programmes in Emma Horrell’s blogs: 

Making content design a habit – using behavioural science to re-think our UX training approaches 

Applying effective digital content principles in practice – our new training approaches 

Helping colleagues learn and apply content design in practice at the University 

Our Content Design for Web Publishers and Content Improvement Monthly sessions were hosted in-person, and while the workshops focused on good content design practices, it was an opportunity to meet lead publishers and other web publishers across the University. 

Attending these workshops allowed us to see areas of websites that different web publishers were looking to improve and also allowed us to develop a better understanding of the websites that we would be working on in the future as part of the migration. 

All in all, meeting the people behind the websites was an extremely important part of the process. Lead publishers had different queries about different types of content on their site. Having the ability to meet with them, talk through our processes and gain a greater understanding of their website was a hugely valuable experience. 

Going forward 

The migration has been an enormous task with lots of people involved and to have reached the stage we are at is a big accomplishment. I have learned so much from lots of different people. Working on this for the past nine months has been difficult, but very rewarding.  

I have also learned a lot from my fellow WCDAs, Anita Joseph, Katie Spearman, Ellen Desmond and Mel Batcharj. Being surrounded by such a strong and talented team pushes you to do your best, and I think we all complemented each other nicely and allowed each other to excel. 

With migration coming to a close, I’m looking forward to the new year and being involved in content design projects and applying my learning from this project.