Briefs for School of Design students

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
To the extent possible, the design should reuse existing blocks that are used elsewhere on home site
Currently all the content is on one page but this could be a broken up so that there is a top page showing who the members are and their job titles and then each SLT member could their own profile page which includes contact information, their EA's details, a bio, the areas they oversee - https://www.victoria.ac.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/1738050/Senior-leadership-team.pdf

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 for prospective students

We would like to offer prospective students visiting our website a "checklist" to help with the research into study here at Victoria and the actual application process. It would assist the user prepare for and make a successful application to study (and maybe even prepare for arrival), while providing us with information on the stage of the journey that a student is at (and therefore his/her information/services needs at that point of time):

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.
Powered by data that is stored in Marketo, possibly also with client-side cookie values.