Reflections on ContentEd 2024
In October, I went to Liverpool to attend ContentEd, a conference for content professionals in the higher education sector. This post is about a couple of talks that stood out for me.
Lessons in managing stakeholders through large content design projects
Jonny Vaughan (Head of Content Design) and Claire Furnish (Content Designer), University of Southampton
Jonny and Claire presented some work they’d been doing on Southampton’s faculty pages. At the time of writing, these pages follow a fairly standardised design.
For two examples, see:
This presentation was the story of what it’s taken to get to that point.
A large scale consultation exercise
Essentially, getting a standardised faculty page took a massive amount of collaboration and consultation with colleagues around the University. Jonny and Claire’s team worked with around 100 senior academic stakeholders, and ran 44 consultation sessions working on website prototypes. Each of these two-hour sessions generated comments, email threads and questions. It sounded like a mammoth operation, but all done in the spirit of building-with rather than building-for.
Rethinking governance
Alongside that, there was a piece of work around how the governance of these pages would work. This is important because websites are constantly changing. There’s no point revamping faculty pages only to see them deteriorate further down the line.
Ten faculty web managers would be in charge of the pages. Over six weeks, these web managers completed a boot camp with the central UX team to build their skills in accessibility and content design.
My thoughts on the presentation
I appreciated the honesty Jonny and Claire brought to the presentation. It was clear that the work hadn’t always been easy, but when you’re hearing about this sort of project, it’s useful to hear about the bad times as well as the good.
Also, I thought the boot camp sounded great – really ambitious but a good way of maintaining quality standards on the faculty pages.
From pixels to people: building a content community
Sarah Vickers (Senior Content Designer) and Scott Hood (Head of Digital Content), University of Liverpool
Sarah and Scott were presenting on their work to improve content quality across Liverpool’s web estate.
The challenge
They started by listing the problems they were facing at the start of the project. This featured things I’ve heard from digital teams at a few universities now:
- Content that doesn’t answer users’ top questions
- Inconsistencies across the web estate creating confusion and a disjointed experience for users
- Accessibility issues occurring at the content level
- Large amounts of content that no longer needs to be online
Addressing the challenge
After this outline of the problems, Sarah and Scott moved on to discuss what they’d done to tackle them.
First, they reviewed who had access to the website. More than half of the editors registered on the content management system had been inactive for a long time and were consequently removed from it.
Second, they audited what was on their sites and trimmed the fat. I love hearing these stories. In this case, Sarah and Scott reported having deleted 4,500 pages, which is a fantastic achievement.
Third, they worked to establish a community of practice for content specialists at their university.
The community of practice involved:
- Regular training
- Engagement with the content publishing community via Teams
- Developing a content design framework, including standards on style, tone of voice and writing for the web
My thoughts on the presentation
I was particularly interested in this talk, because it was similar to the work we’ve been doing this year within our team. You can read books on the theory behind this sort of thing, but it’s useful to hear a genuine case study from teams working in a similar context to us.
Read more about ContentEd
Like last year, ContentEd had a wide variety of talks relevant to our work on university websites. There was a great atmosphere and I learned a lot.
Plus, Liverpool was a great location for it. It’s such a cool city, and I discovered Superlambanana, my new favourite piece of public art.
ContentEd – about the conference
Attending Content Ed 2024 – blog post by the Prospective Student Web team
My post about attending ContentEd last year
Ah, go on then:
