Having recently joined the University in the role of Head of Web Strategy & Technologies, I’ve had an intense few weeks getting to grips with the University’s online presence. In this post I’ll cover a little of my thinking around strategy, and upcoming areas of work.

We’re currently doing some work to support the Student Experience Services Communications (SES Comms) project, and as part of this, we’ve been reviewing the Personal Tutors and Student Support Officers (PTs and SSOs) website.

Yesterday at our monthly Web Publishers Community meeting, a gave a presentation titled “How to get a grip of your website (and then keep hold)”. It’s good do-it-yourself advice, and I also outline where the University Website Programme can step in and help. This post is a transcript of (roughly) what I said…

We’ll be introducing a few refinements to the new website design on the smallest screen sizes in the near future. This week we’ve been parallel testing three versions with staff and students around the campus.

At the end of last year, I ran an open invite session for web publishers, developers and project managers in which I outlined how we’re conducting rapid, iterative usability testing as part of the development of the new University CMS, EdWeb. The presentation was followed by a demo of the process in which everyone participated.

I’ve been a long time subscriber to the remote usability testing tool UserTesting.com. They’ve recently introduced a free taster service – “Peek” – which I recommend you try out.

What do students expect and how can the University change to meet their individual needs and aspirations?

Driven by the work around the Research Excellence Framework, we’ve done some development work to embed PURE data easily on your website.