UG Areas of Study and Degrees Deployment

Owned by Jane Young (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Apr 18, 2016
4 min read

What needs to be in place by deployment:

  • Testing cases have been undertaken and any highest or high Bugs fixed
  • Content approved by Faculty & School in situ
  • People images in place
  • Content checked and corrections made or a decision by Jane that they don't need to be made for release
  • Proofread
  • Process for demoting old content and promoting new content
  • International redirects are in place
  • Comms to relevant Faculty and School
  • Deployment plan

Before a Final Faculty/School check

  • Content loaded in Squiz
  • Rich media included - stories, slideshows, video
  • Content correct - Jane to make a call on any outstanding items on the corrections page
  • Tool tips in place
  • Design doesn't have to be perfect across all devices and browsers - we will recommend Firefox, IE11 or Chrome all on either a desktop or laptop.
  • Any bugs that aren't fixed Jane will let Faculty & School people know.

Overview

The new undergraduate recruitment content will replace the existing subject and degree content on the study tab of Faculty and School sites as well as in homesite. This content is in a new custom mobile first repository which is neither housed on homesite nor within the Faculty and School sites. Both the Faculty and Schools and homesite will have navigation to the new areas of study and degrees repository. 

The new pages have been built in Angular and use an API to draw information from Squiz and banner. There will be new URLS for this content and old URLs will be redirected. The content has been tested by Planit and the project team across various devices and browsers.

The content on the international hub won't be replaced until all the new undergraduate recruitment content is in place. For international students we need to included additional information around admission requirements, different contact details and warnings when a qualification may not be available or relevant to an international student. For these reasons it is easiest to delay the go live.

Jane Young (Unlicensed) We need to be sure that the new pages aimed at domestic students are not too misleading for any 'lost' international students.  

Tania Hockings (Unlicensed), Andrew Bredenkamp and I propose that home site be the 'source' for International unless the material we require is not there and is only available on the faculty or school site. Whatever instance of these old pages is left on, it can only be archived once International has the new content and the switcher.

Nathan Irwin had requested a column showing which redirects must be done at the go-live and which could be done at a latter date. Following discussion with Andrew and Tania it was decided that all really should be done at the same time and that the 'spreading of the work' is already handled by the 'multiple bundled releases'. Restating, all Squiz and url managment work listed below should be done when the topic and degree bundle goes live.

 

Prior to the first release of topic and degree pages we should:

  1. Polish the AoS groupings:
    1. Make updates to home site navigation/overview page, as listed in WIP-876
    2. On the home site navigation/overview page: Ensure subject-level links swap to AoS-level links whenever a new AoS page goes live.
    3. On each/any/all new AoS page: Ensure that in the related AoS we have the 'explore AoS' button live (and subject links disabled) when the related AoS is also live as a new page. This means that when a new AoS page goes live all other live AoS pages that list this new AoS as 'related' have the appropriate behaviour in their related areas of study elements.
  2. Ensure that users can't (out of curiosity) see 'draft' content by changing the url in production.
  3. Communicate with the key stakeholders for these pages, and wider University (e.g. ITS).
  4. Ensure that our GSA and external search engines are able to (or have) been informed/updated.
  5. Embed the feedback survey widget in each (area of study and degree) page.

The common pattern with most Areas of Study and degrees is that the content appears in four places:

  • Faculty site, school site and home site) that are all 'linked' (contain the same underlying content and changing any one will update the other two), plus International (that contains selected divs only). As International will not get access to the new pages until later it is essential that we don't break their pages in the release/switch-over for domestic students. This means that we must leave one of these three instances in Squiz (but not available to the public).

 

Just after the first release of topic and degree pages we should:

  1. Run through the pages on the main browsers, OSs and devices to see that things appear and work okay. Note that this is not 'testing'.
  2. Try out the urls to all old pages that we expected to be impacted. Include International pages in this check.
  3. Monitor any error reporting (e.g. 404 report) and analytics (e.g. Mouseflow) to find early feedback (on obvious errors).
  4. Have people standing-by to fix things promptly, or even be prepared to back-out the changes (if this is even possible).