Historically, every time we have a discussion with staff from the SoD about real work that their students could do, we are unprepared and miss the opportunity. In order to increase the chances of working together, we decided to drat up some ideas to share with staff prior to seeking students.
Redesign of the SLT page
We have one page under About that profiles the senior leadership team, albeit poorly. We are keen for a new design that would do this better. Requirements are:
- Must align with our brand and high level design
- Should use existing blocks that already exist elsewhere on home site, as much as possible
- Must allow a link through to full researcher profiles, when they exist (as this is a work in progress) and if the person has a one.
Wordpress theme
Digital Engagement facilitate the use of Wordpress as an alternative content management system to Squiz, to meet needs that Squiz isn't as well suited to and when we are unable to provide the developer resource. Hosted with SiteGround, most sites are for conferences, but also blogs and a few others. So far, none have required to look like the University brand. In fact, they haven't been allowed to, in case they did it poorly. But we have possible contenders for Wordpress that would really benefit from a Victoria theme.
Example site currently live include:
- Experimental Psychology Conference 2019: Standard conference site, of which we have about 10 and growing. All such sites use one of two default themes.
- Best New Zealand Poems: Has its own custom theme, so probably not a candidate.
- MyView: A blog for current students. Uses a (cheap) commercial theme.
The theme work could be split into a design piece, followed by a development/build. Or both could be together.
Requirements are:
- Victoria-like theme: Visitors should see the association with the main University theme, although it can be different. This means the new theme must respect the tone and sentiment of our current theme.
- Should work with our conference site, including the plugins required for this site.
- Flexible: Avoid locking user up in restrictive patterns, as we don't know all the requirements of future sites.
- Maintainable: The theme must be easy to maintain, both as the Wordpress core and other plug ins change, but also for future improvements.
Application checklist
We would like to offer prospective students visiting our website a "checklist" to help with the research and application process. It would assist the user towards successful application to study here and even arrival, while feeding us with the stage (and therefore needs) of the student:
- Cover the main or tasks required to start university study
- Work in our Squiz sites and the Angular app
- Be invoked by entering a name and email address
- Allow individuals to mark off what is done (or not relevant) and what is remaining.
- Assist the University to know the information needs of prospective students, so outbound communications (from Marketo) are personalised and relevant.