As we draw ever nearer to starting our content migration from EdWeb into our new Web Publishing Platform it’s time to answer all the most prominent questions we’ve been getting over the past few weeks.

Web address name change

Every site in EdWeb is going to become its own unique site on the new platform rather than being a part of one huge site. In addition to this moving to our new Cloud hosting provider means we need to change our domain names or web addresses.

The new format will be as follows:

• something.ed.ac.uk
• rather than ed.ac.uk/something.

This brings us inline with some School sites and many of the sites that exist outside of EdWeb. We will be contacting Lead Publishers individually to explain this in a bit more detail and to talk to you about the redirects we’ll set up for you.

Redirects

We are still looking at how we are going to work out the redirects but we are going to see if we can automate the process and do a page by page redirect. For small sites we can do this manually.

It’s likely we’ll need to keep these redirects going for quite some time. We have full control over these redirects which means they will be stable and we can update and change them as we need to as well.

We’ll be in touch about this but it’s worth noting at this point if you start to restructure your site it will effect these redirects so it’s worth doing any major restructure before migration if at all possible.

Training

• We are just starting to roll out our training program and we’ll be in touch with Lead Publishers to let you book on to a choice of dates.
  • It will be recorded as well if attendance is difficult.
  • We’ll be running drop in clinics after the training and we’ll let you know how to book on to these.
  • You can always send questions to website.support@ed.ac.uk as well.
  • There will be a named person to coordinate with you during the migration.

Migration period

• We’d recommend a complete change freeze during your 2 week migration slot. You can edit content but if it’s after the migration you would need to track and then replicate any changes on the new system later when this went live.
• In consultation with the Lead Publisher we’ll remove as many as editorial rights as we can from the site to help ensure the change freeze.
• After we’ve completed the migration and some of our checks we’ll hand the site over to you.
  • You’ll need to check a sample of pages.
  • Rebuild your homepages
  • Rebuild your web forms
  • Check any web applications or 3rd party services such as FindAPhD are still working

Content migration

• We’ll make sure that hidden content remains hidden and doesn’t appear in the navigation.
• You can delete unwanted content in the new system and you can also leave any unwanted content behind. Just make sure all unwanted content is in a folder called ‘Content to be removed’ (or variations such as ‘CONTENT TO BE REMOVED’.
• There will be no down time of the site or it will be a very short time (seconds).
• Any short term issues during migration Lead Publishers will have a named person on our team to deal with. After that it’s best to contact website.support@ed.ac.uk so that it’s logged properly in our call system.

Google Analytics

• Google Analytics will be added to the new site.
• Just to add we do expect Google Analytics to start from scratch with it being a new domain. However, the data from the old site and the new domain could be combined using segments in analytics. For example, analytics will let users specify that they wish to look at data from both ed.ac.uk/something and something.ed.ac.uk (and subpages) combined.

Staff profiles

• We will migrate Staff Profiles. But we do want to improve their location and how this works. You’ll still be able to edit in the same way. This is one area we do want to improve but this is a long term plan.