Document status: Under construction
Current state of faculty and school sites
Staff said:
- Design: Tired, complex, unattractive and difficult to use.
- Content: Too much on most pages and too many layers of page. Maintenance is time consuming so time-sensitive information is often out of date. Quality suffers. (e.g. spelling mistakes, links that don't go anywhere).
- Content Management: Lack of time and resources (especially writer) for web content. Too many editors. Too little time for many to become/stay proficient in Squiz.
- Staff profiles: Difficult to maintain, so often out of date. Very dated/tired look. Poor representation of the University.
- Channels: Too many channels with the same information as (anywhere on) the web (and as each other). Students still miss information despite repeat listings. Would like social media listed more prominently.
- Analytics: Needs to be more widely accessible and used, especially data on goal conversions.
- Search: Site search doesn't give useful results.
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- Why are they different?: Future and current undergraduate students didn't understand that faculty and school sites existed as separate sites "This should all be one thing – school, faculty and Victoria. We are one university and there is no reason why it can’t all be together."
- Very low engagement: With f&s sites only used for a few things (to find a person, get course info, access a shortcut to a tool (via the header menu)).
- Staff profiles via site search: To avoid knowing in what school to look for somebody, but also missing f&s news, events and other homepage content.
- Prefer email and Blackboard: As channels for information from Victoria, with all students also following relevant pages on Facebook.
- Postgraduate students: Greater awareness of separate faculty and school sites, but still had a very narrow information need (staff profiles, administrative services, forms, etc).
- Secondary school students: Students didn't understand the roles of faculties and of schools at all.
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Future state of the Victoria University website
- The Victoria University website represents a single organisation and should look and behave accordingly. User needs that are met by the website can be met by any appropriate part(s).
- The Victoria University website will is being reorganised around user need or task, with no expectation that users have prior knowledge of our organisational structure.
- There will be less duplication of content: Increasingly, information will have a single source yet be surfaced in multiple places according to need.
- New technologies are being introduced that will augment Squiz, allowing us more choices and better solution options.
- Improvements to the site search will be undertaken as BAU, with priorities influenced by WIP2 need
- Improvements to staff profiles are in scope for WIP2, and the work will be performed by ITS, the Web Team and the project team. Scoping work is underway to provide an information page that sits 'behind' every site page, and can be accessed by staff (i.e. some of the analytics). This
- Access to important analytics for key pages will be given to all users on our network via an info page (a sort of shadow or meta or derived page), allowing people to monitor how well the page is meeting its objectives/goals.. (e.g. see https://www.gov.uk/apply-uk-visa as an example of the web page and https://www.gov.uk/info/apply-uk-visa as an example of an info page).
- Provide an information page that sits 'behind' every site page, and can be accessed by any staff member and shows the key analytics for the main page.). This would provide detail on the page's purpose, target audiences, content owner, core analytics (eg, number of views of the page, average time spent on page) and similar things.
- The effectiveness of both News and Events is being considered and solutions discussed to bring about improvements.
- Keyword tagging will enable an item of content to be centrally authored then presented in relevant locations on the site ('reusable content').
- Strengthen Victoria's association with related third-party sites will be made clearer, when this is appropriate(staff and/or student) external sites, so that as an institution we gain the benefits of association with work our platform could not support or we would not allow (WIP-251).
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Future state of the faculty and school websites
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