A new approach to faculty and school sites

What is the current situation?

Workshop feedback

In the workshops, you gave us the following feedback about faculty and school sites.

Design

• The design is 'tired'. 
• The design needs to be simpler. 
• The aesthetics and user experience aren't good or attractive. 
• Needs to be more current, engaging and simple.

Content

• There's too much content. Pages can get buried and forgotten about. Maintaining the sites is time consuming. It's difficult to keep time-sensitive information current. Content maintenance is a big issue: we've found spelling mistakes that weren't picked up, links that don't go anywhere.
• Pages are too wordy. They need to be much simpler. They need to be more visual and use current technology - such as more video and podcasts.
• Lack of time and resources for web content. Need more content writing resource.
• Content management works best when it's led by one person.
• If you're not going to use Squiz often, it's hard to use.
• Regular content planning meetings work well for web and social media, especially when there's input and engagement from academic staff. 

IA

• It's hard to find things. You go looking for something and you can't find it. Need to be able to find information faster.
  
  

• Maintaining staff profiles is a pain.
• The staff directory is a problem - people don't know how to fix it and don't know that they are supposed to keep it up to date. 

Social media

• It would be good to have linkages to official social media channels.
• Our social media channels aren't well managed.

Channels

• We've got too many channels of information. Students are missing information even though they are being told it in a million different ways. They don't know which place they should go to.

Analytics

• Faculties and schools want to see analytics, including data about conversions.

Search

• The site search doesn't give useful results.

User feedback

Sessions with secondary students and current students in July 2015 provided the following insights.

School leavers:

Saw faculties and schools as places where you'd find information about which study options they'd have on offer.

Found the design of the sites difficult - commented on small font, squashed feel.

Current students:

(to come)

Google Analytics

A Google Analytics report for 1 March to 31 May 2015 showed us that audiences are using faculty and school sites primarily to access the following information.

Faculty site:

• Who to contact
• Staff profiles
• Subjects and programmes - undergrad and postgrad (this traffic is likely to come in via the site search)
• Admin info for current students (eg, facilities, building access hours, academic transcripts, faculty handbook, forms)
• Accessing centres and institutes.

School site:

• Who to contact
• Staff profiles
• Subjects, programmes and courses - undergrad and postgrad
• Scholarships and awards and exchanges
• News
• Events
• Student profiles - eg, research students
• Accessing centres and institutes.

Victoria University website: where it's going

The Victoria University website represents a single organisation. A key aspect of this is that stand-alone sites are being phased out.  

The Victoria University website is topic, task and audience based. We're moving towards having all the website information organised on this basis, rather than by our organisational structure. 

There will be no content duplicates: all information will have a single source. However, the site will provide the ability to display some content in different locations when needed (eg, news, events, staff profiles).

• Information about subjects, programmes and courses will be located in ‘Future students’. The structure, presentation and content will be improved. 
• Information about diplomas, certificates and professional development courses will also be located in 'Future students'. Improving the content is out of scope for the current project.
• Information about research centres and institutes, research projects, research funding and research partnerships will be located in an improved 'Research' section. > Current example
• Information about student wellbeing and support is located in 'Current students'.

New initiatives

• The current information architecture (IA) is under review, including top menu items and second-level navigation options.
• Work to improve the site search is underway.
• Scoping work to improve staff profiles is underway. It is proposed that they are located in one 'repository', are easy for staff to update, are made up of relevant content fields, and are visually appealing. There is also the opportunity to make profiles available to postgraduate/research students. 
• Scoping work is underway to provide an information page that sits 'behind' every site page, and can be accessed by staff. This would provide detail on the page's purpose, target audiences, content owner, date last updated, analytics (eg, number of views of the page, average time spent on page) and similar things. The Web Team will start providing content owners with monthly analytics reports in the near future.
• A review of the Research section of the homesite will be carried out in phase 3 of the WIP2 project, which looks at Postgraduate information. 
• The effectiveness of both News and Events is being considered and solutions developed to bring about content and functional improvements.   
• The WIP2 Project Team is developing a short guide for faculties and schools about which channels to use for communicating with students.  

A new approach for faculty and school sites

Overview

• There will no longer be distinct sites, but there will be an area or subsection for each faculty and each school (unless they are combined, or wish to be combined on the web, in which case there will be a blended area). See attachment for how these could be presented in a flattened IA. Combined areas could be provided for: Law, Engineering and CS, Architecture and Design, and Faculty of Education/School of Education: Te Kura Māori (to be discussed).
• The faculty and school areas will be located in About us > Faculties and schools. These areas will be much simpler than the current sites. 
• Faculty areas and school areas will be different from each other: they won't have duplicate content, and each of the two types of area will be focused on a clear purpose and identified target audiences. 
• The faculty and school areas will have a new design that matches the homesite and works well on mobile devices.
• Content will be improved as part of the redevelopment. It will be written for online readers, have more visual elements and be more engaging. 
• Some content that is centrally 'authored' will be pulled through to faculty and school areas (as appropriate). This includes news, events and staff profiles. Courses, subjects and programmes will be 'discoverable' on school sites.
• There will be clear links to information that is centrally located, such as centres and institutes; research projects; and student wellbeing. 
• Content that is distinct to the school or faculty will be located in the faculty or school area.
• Features ('profiles') will be rationalised: we'll plan more carefully what they cover, align them more closely with News, and include more multimedia. 

The Faculty of Graduate Research will be addressed in the postgrad phase of WIP 2 (phase 3).

Content management

• Consideration is being given to the proposal that three full-time professional web writer/publishers (new roles) could work alongside the Comms 'account managers' and provide the web content writing and publishing services that faculties and schools need. (There could be room for staff who are currently web admins in F&S  to remain involved in web publishing, if they wished to do so.)
• The WIP2 Project Team are creating a 'best practice guide' to content management, which will include advice on content planning and tools and techniques for keeping content current.

School area

Purpose

• Provide a profile of the school and its activities, demonstrating its strengths and distinctiveness.
• Provide a base for school-specific study and research information and materials for current students.

Primary audiences

IA

Content

Home

About / About the school

Campus

Student info

Purpose: School-specific info for current students by coursework and research students that wouldn't fit into the generic content on the homesite.

Content will vary by school - below is indicative only.

Notes

Other areas with important 'local' content for current students can be added to this subsection as needed - although eventually this may be incorporated into the homesite.

Examples:

• Law has 'local' content on overseas exchanges: http://www.victoria.ac.nz/law/study/overseas-exchanges
• VBS has 'local' content on case competitions: http://www.victoria.ac.nz/vbs/study-careers/student-opportunities/case-competition
  
  

Content to be moved:

• Content on clubs to go here 
• Scholarships to go here
• Prizes to go here (needs improvement) - eg, Linguistics, Maths.

To be moved into the Research section of the homesite:

• All profiles of research projects (extensive) - take across current projects and significant past projects
• All research reports (extensive and diverse) - consider principles of open information (provide access to full versions whenever possible).

To be moved into the new Postgrad info on the homesite - info on Research with a student focus - eg:  

• Research grants and funding (info for students on what's available. Info on tools such as the Oracle Grants Management System).
• Research groups (info for students on what's available in the school. See School of Chem.)

New page: Wonder if we should create a new page in Current students > New students telling them what channels to use to get updates, how to sign up to them, etc. Make sure they know all they need to about BB, Fbk, Vic email addresses, and so on. 

Faculty area

Purpose

• Provide an overview of the faculty, including its purpose, roles and responsibilities; structure and affiliations
• Provide faculty-specific administrative material for current students.

Primary audiences

Primary audiences

IA

Content

Home

About / About us

Student help