University of York Web Team

History of the University - an interactive timeline

noreply@blogger.com (Cieran Douglass) — Fri, 10 May 2013 10:32:00 +0000

Recently we published an interactive timeline on which you can explore the key milestones, facts and figures of the University's 50 year history. There are over 150 entries, including historical images, newspaper clippings and videos of the University's past, all in an easy to use and attractive interactive format.

Building the timeline

The timeline was built using Tiki-Toki, an cloud-based timeline product. We tested quite a lot of alternatives and nothing really compared; it's a great product.

Users can pan, zoom, enlarge and browse stories quickly and easily, including on tablets and smartphones. The timeline can be filtered to just show a particular category of story or searched for keywords. We've been really pleased with the response so far - everyone who has seen it seems to like it.

The Tiki-Toki authoring interface

From the creator's end, too, it is incredibly easy to use, requiring only a date and some text in order to place a story on the timeline. The software automatically places an entry in the relevant spot and manages the spacing of multiple stories. The ability to embed images, audio and video is also helpful, and has allowed us to develop a rich gallery alongside the textual information presented.

Top 10 press releases, features and public lectures on the web in 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Cieran Douglass) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 09:03:00 +0000

While it may be April, there are always things we can learn from evaluating past years, so we’ve decided to have a look over the most popular news, features and public lectures were on the University website in 2012.

Press releases

The University’s Press Office published over 200 press releases in 2012, resulting in media coverage around the world. The top stories on the University website were as follows.

10. Yoga: a cost-effective treatment for back pain sufferers?

Published mid-August, this story of the UK’s largest study of the health benefits of yoga describes how specialised classes could be a cost-effective way of treating back pain. The story had a second spike in visits in mid-Autumn as interest picked up again on Facebook.

9. University of York formally joins the Russell Group today

This article from August announces the University’s joining of the Russell Group, following its acceptance to the organisation earlier in the year.

8. University of York students celebrate success

Graduation was in the second week of July. A lot of traffic here came from Google, Twitter and Facebook.

7. Academic leaders help York to mark its 50th year

For its fiftieth anniversary, the University appointed sixteen new professors, as detailed in this article from July 4th.

6. Scientists discover new clue to the chemical origins of life

Published in January, this story describes a process which hints at how life on Earth first formed. Almost a quarter of the article’s traffic came through the University’s RSS feed.

5. Pioneering archaeology wins Royal award for University of York

On February 24th the Queen presented the University with an award for its archaeological research.

4. Gender equality influences how people choose their lovers

This article from September covers a study from the Department of Psychology on how increased gender equality has reduced gender differences in mate selection.

3. “Trust” provides answer to handaxe enigma

Almost three quarters of the hits on this piece from November 21st are attributable to links from archaeological news aggregator archaeologica.org. It covers research by the Department of Archaeology which suggested that paleolithic handaxes showed bonds of trust between specimens of homo erectus, challenging earlier theories of dominance and aggression.

2. Scientists “record” magnetic breakthrough

Our most-visited science article for the year was this one, detailing how physicists at the University were able to use magnets in a way which could potentially have big impacts on hard drive transfer speeds. The discovery was cited on tech news website engadget.com, where it inspired a spirited exchange in the comments thread.

1. The University of York is to become a member of the influential Russell Group of leading UK universities

The University’s invitation to join the Russell Group in March 2012 was by far the most viewed news story of the year, receiving almost three times as much traffic as the second place story (see the huge spike in the chart above). Over 10% of viewers came from Facebook.

Features

In addition to press release stories, we also publish feature articles which either delve deeper into academic work taking place at the University and tell other interesting stories. These were the most visited last year:

10. Ant behaviour tracked by tiny radio receivers in pioneering scientific study‌

After fitting one thousand ants with radio receivers, scientists at York tracked them to discover how they network and live.

9. York wins Outstanding Engineering Research Team award

While the article concerns the Times Higher Education Awards 2011 and was published in November that year, this article continued to receive significant numbers of visitors throughout the first half of 2012

8. You@York

Applicants who received an offer to study at York gain access to You@York, a personalised site providing information from the University and departments. The traffic patterns are interesting here, declining slowly over the year and spiking on A-level results day in August.

7. University of York wins Times Higher Education Award for Support for Early Career Researchers

The University won the award mentioned above, while several departments were shortlisted for other awards. The feature detailed the steps the University has taken in order to qualify, as well as information on the awards ceremony itself.

6. York celebrates ‘ideas’ with events for everyone

The annual York Festival of Ideas provided many experiences and exhibitions under the theme of “Metamorphosis”.

5. HRH The Princess Royal opens Diamond Wood at the University of York‌

HRH Princess Anne visited York to open the Diamond Wood at Heslington East in September 2012

4. “It’s behind you!” A look into the history of pantomime

An interesting entry on the history of pantomime, this was originally published in January 2011 and saw consistent hits throughout the year followed by a significant boost in the run-up to Christmas. Almost all hits were directly from Google, where the page ranks highly in searches for “pantomime history”.

3. Welcome to the University of York!

This feature provided links to resources that new students at the University would find useful. Most of its attention was focussed very clearly on the week running up to Welcome Week.

2. Public in the swim at York Sport Village

The £9m York Sport Village opened in August, featuring a swimming pool for both students and the public. The opening of such a large development generated a lot of interest, with the bulk of traffic coming directly from Google searches.

1. The Times Higher Education 100 Under 50

When the University was named one of the top ten “young” Universities in the world in May 2012, this feature summarised our achievement and the areas in which University excels. The page received almost eight times as many hits as our number two feature, including a large spike on first publication but then a steady stream of additional visits throughout the year (the page was linked prominently from most web pages using our standard design).

Public lectures

The University puts on a large number of free public lectures each year, attracting many people from both within the University and from the local community. The lectures cover all sorts of topics and are well worth attending - look out for the summer programme for this year coming soon.

In 2012, the most visited public lecture web pages were:

10. Sounds which can't be heard: The hidden secrets of an MP3 player

Professor David Howard from the Department of Electronics gave this lecture on the compression techniques used to shrink MP3 files.

9. Did Twitter save Bletchley Park?

As part of the Athena Swan programme, Dr Sue Black from University College London delivered this lecture on the efforts to save the World War Two codebreaking headquarters at Bletchley Park from decay.

8. Music and Physics

Professor Peter Main from the Department of Physics gave this lecture on the intermeshing of science and art, receiving a lot of attention in February.

7. Divided Britain: The causes and consequences of income inequality in the UK

On the theme of economic trouble, former Director-General of the Council for British Industry, Sir Richard Lambert delivered this lecture on the causes and consequences of the wealth gap in the UK. Interestingly for a lecture, this received fairly consistent traffic throughout October and November, instead of a large rise then fall.

6. Remembering the past: Protecting the future

York’s own Dr Jane Grenville delivered this lecture as a part of the events surrounding Holocaust Memorial Day

5. The Public Secret

Royal Holloway College’s Professor Robert Eaglestone delivered this lecture about public awareness of genocide as a part of Holocaust Memorial day.

4. Austerity or stimulus? How Keynes and Hayek shape our economic debate

This economics lecture was delivered by journalist Nicholas Wapshott and discussed how modern economic theories impact the global economy. Traffic to the page gradually rose before the event itself, before falling once it was over.

3. What do animals think?

This Royal Institute of Philosophy lecture was delivered by Cambridge’s Professor Tim Crane and focussed on questions of consciousness and existence.

2. Unemployment in recession

This topical lecture from Professor Christopher Pissarides of LSE covered modern thoughts on unemployment and its causes. Traffic followed a U-shape, peaking both when tickets became available and on the day of the talk itself.

1. Paradox: The nine greatest enigmas in science

Professor Jim Al-Khalili of the University of Surrey delivered this lecture on mysteries and questions that people have about science. As expected for a popular figure in science education, demand for tickets drove traffic particularly high in the weeks preceding the talk.

Campus Investment redesign

noreply@blogger.com (Cieran Douglass) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 08:42:00 +0000

We've been working on a redesigned Campus Investment section of the website, trimming down a lot of the content which was either out of date or no longer relevant, leaving us with a significantly more streamlined set of pages.

All projects have been organised into categories - past, present and future - for those which have happened and are archived (such as Goodricke or Langwith colleges), those ongoing (such as the Chemistry redevelopment) and those yet to begin (such as College 9).

We hope you enjoy browsing through the listings; they've got a lot of pictures which are more prominent than before, giving a much clearer insight into how the University's campus is developing.

Are homepage carousels effective? (AKA the Brad Frost Carousel Challenge)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Kelly) — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 18:14:00 +0000

After reading Brad Frost's blog post about the effectiveness of carousels a couple of months ago, I decided to take up his challenge and see just how well the carousel on the University homepage was performing.

We put a lot of effort into producing a steady steam of features to go into the carousel, but does anyone actually read them?

The University of York homepage, complete with carousel in the top right

Our carousel is of the auto-advancing variety, with controls for pagination and pause / resume provided below. We didn't previously set a limit on the number of items that could be displayed in the carousel, but there were often eight or nine items to cycle through at any one time.

The results are in

We started tracking clicks on the carousel slides towards the end of February, along with clicks on the pagination and play/pause controls below. Technical details of the tracking setup can be found towards the end of this post.

For the first two weeks of tracking (20 February to 5 March), the distribution of clicks on the carousel slides looked like this:

Click distribution on carousel slides, 20 Feb to 5 March

It didn't come as too much of a surprise that the slide in first position got the most attention, but I wasn't expecting to see such a large skew. Around half of the clicks were on the first slide, with numbers dropping off rapidly after that. The poor slides in position eight were barely ever seeing the light of day.

The pause / resume button is rarely used, with less than 300 events registered (257 pauses, 36 resumes) since we've been tracking it. This suggests that the button is probably not noticeable enough.

Fewer carousel slots = more clicks?

Given that the items in positions outside the first few slots weren't getting much attention, we decided to reduce the number of items we have in the carousel to a maximum of five.

Total numbers of carousel clicks, 20 Feb - 27 March

We reduced the number of slots to 5 on around 15 March. Since then we've seen consistently more clicks on the carousel than we did when there were more features to choose from.

A possible explanation is that some of stories that we've had in the carousel over the last couple of weeks have been a bit more high-profile than usual (the announcement of our new Vice-Chancellor, BBC Question Time being broadcast on campus and our China graduation ceremony), which may have generated more interest anyway.

A more interesting theory is that we're seeing the paradox of choice in action - that giving people more choices creates anxiety and results in them not choosing anything. By reducing the number of items available to choose from, it's easier to make a choice and click on something.

We'll come back to this in a few weeks and see if we're still generating more clicks with fewer features.

The technical bit

If you're interested in how we're tracking this, read on.

Clicks on each of the carousel slides are tracked as events in Google Analytics. Analytics requires three values when tracking an event (category, action and label), which we're tracking as follows:

Event Category: Carousel
Event Action: slide-N clicked
Event Label: Destination URL

So an example event might look like:
'Carousel', 'slide-1-clicked', 'http://www.york.ac.uk/50/events/china/'

The call for each event is automatically assembled with jQuery, so there's no manual tagging required each time a new item is added to the carousel.

Categorising events in this way seems to work well as it allows us to view the data in quite a lot of different ways within Analytics.

Look out for

Something that tripped me up at first was that not all of the clicks on the carousel were registering with Analytics, and were appearing as 'cancelled' requests within Chrome's inspector panel.

Look out for cancelled requests (shown in red) in Chrome's inspector panel

The simple solution to this is to delay the request by a fraction of a second so that the event has time to register before the destination page starts to load. See Google's documentation on tracking outbound links for how to do this.

Direct Edit: a quicker way to edit your CMS content

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Kelly) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 15:38:00 +0000

Some of you may have noticed the appearance of a new 'Direct Edit' link in the footer of your web pages in the last few days. If you've not tried it yet, Direct Edit is a really quick way to make edits to your web content, especially when you just need to make small changes.

The link to Direct Edit is available from the bottom right of every page published from the CMS

When you're looking at a published page, selecting the Direct Edit link will take you into the CMS (you'll be asked to login if you haven't already done so) with a view that might be new to you. Instead of the usual listing of your content items, you'll see a view of the page with dotted red lines around each of the content items.

In the Direct Edit view each of your content items will have a dotted red line around it

When hovering over any of the dotted boxes an option will appear to modify that content, which will let you make your changes. You can also delete content items and see the page history from within Direct Edit.

Direct Edit works with most of our templates, but not all of them just yet. If a template can't be used in Direct Edit then you won't see the red dotted lines around that particular content item.

The other link in the footer is 'Modify', which takes you the same view you would see when selecting 'Modify content' from within the CMS (we renamed this from 'Edit' to clarify the difference between this and Direct Edit).

Happy editing!

Hello from a new member!

noreply@blogger.com (Cieran Douglass) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 08:34:00 +0000

Hello, I'm Cieran!

I'll be working with the Web Office for the next few months, helping out with general projects and anything that arrives. I've just transferred over from Student Support, where I was redesigning the International Support website. One of my first jobs will be working on an interactive timeline for the University's Fiftieth Anniversary website. I'm looking forward to all the new challenges I'll be facing over the next few months working here!

Mapping with TileMill

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Kelly) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 17:33:00 +0000

When we launched our interactive campus map last year, we were using a third party company called CloudMade to generate our custom map tiles from OpenStreetMap data. CloudMade weren't making updates to their map data quite as often as we needed, which is problematic when you've got a big campus expansion project on the go that means new buildings are appearing all the time. So we went looking for a replacement.

Finding a replacement

Ideally a replacement tile provider would give us the same functionality as Cloudmade, just with more frequent updates.

We looked at a lot of alternatives, but nothing was looking too promising. Some of the options we rejected were:

Google Maps - half the campus is still missing.
Stamen - beautiful watercolour maps, but too light on details to be practical.
MapQuest Open - nice enough looking maps, but not enough detail.

The best option was looking like MapBox, which would give us the control and level of detail we needed, but that looked like it could be a bit pricey.

Enter TileMill

My search continued and led me to TileMill, an open source project by MapBox.

TileMill is different to the other options I had been looking at: rather than being a service that provides tiles itself, it's a piece of software that lets you design and publish your own interactive maps.

Campus taking shape in the TileMill interface

TileMill takes all sorts of different data formats as an input: ESRI Shapefile, KML, GeoJSON, GeoTIFF, PostGIS, CSV, and SQLite.

You then have full control over how your data looks through a language called Carto. Carto is similar to CSS but has extras like variables and functions that make it much more powerful.

The map data

If you really wanted to you could download OpenStreetMap's data for the entire planet and work from that, but that's a 250GB XML file that I'm not sure my PC could cope with.

I came across a company called Geofabrik that provides more manageable shapefiles of smaller parts of the world (often down to individual cities), which are updated every few days and can be downloaded for free from http://download.geofabrik.de/. In the end we paid Geofabrik for some extra data to be included in a custom set of shapefiles, so it wasn't completely free.

Making it look nice

Getting started with Carto is easy enough if you already know CSS, but I found the most time consuming part was deciding exactly what to show at all the differing zoom levels. When you've looking at a bird's eye view of the whole campus you only want to see the major landmarks, with more detail being revealed as you zoom in, down to the names of individual buildings and car parks.

Luckily there are a few examples bundled with TileMill that help you get the hang of what works best at different levels.

An example of some of the Carto styling rules used on our map

It also takes a bit of thought to get all of your layers appearing in the correct order. At various points I ended up with bridges going underneath roads and the entire campus looking like it was underwater!

Outputting the tiles

Once you've got your map looking how you want it, it's time to export it. TileMill gives you several formats to choose from for your export.

In order to use this with our existing maps setup (see the previous behind the scenes post), we needed the individual map tiles. TileMill doesn't quite let you do this directly, but you can export to a single MBTiles file, and then use a utility called mbutil to extract the individual tiles from that.

Our map covers central York (up to the outer ring road) at six different zoom levels, which resulted in about 15,000 tiles. You can easily end up generating hundreds of thousands or even millions of tiles if you go down to very high zoom levels for large areas. Be prepared for a wait (and have plenty of spare storage space) if you decide to do that!

Making it live

The final step was to put the tiles on the web and change a single line within the map application code to point to our own tiles instead of Cloudmade's servers.

The interactive map with new tiles in place

We're now able to make much more regular updates to the map, and TileMill looks like it could come in handy if any other projects involving maps come our way.

Building the York Research Database

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Wiggle) — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 17:01:00 +0000

Today we launched the brand new York Research Database to the public. This is a web view of all York's research activity, as stored in Atira's Pure, the University's CRIS (Current Research Information System). It's been a long time in gestation while the data has been cleaned and updated, but I think it's been worth the wait.

Encouraging discovery

Initially the Web Office's involvement was just to help skin the public view of the data that shipped with the product. We did that, but something felt lacking - if you knew what you wanted then you would find it, but then what? We wanted people to explore and discover the breadth and depth of the research going on at York, and our first implementation didn't quite nail that.

We worked closely with our local Pure project team and the team at Atira to build features that would encourage a deeper dive into the data. Development work was being handled by Atira so we went through several rounds of generating ideas, building mockups and then liaising with them about implementation. It was a great process, covering everything from adding big features to me being very pedantic about micro-copy in the pages, and the whole team at Atira were brilliant throughout.

Eureka

I confess I was sceptical when I first looked at web views of research data, both York's and at other Universities; they never really held my interest. My 'eureka' moment with our system came when I was testing the latest iteration of our work with Atira one day and realised I'd stopped testing and was just browsing computer science research. If the system could distract me from nitpicking about the design and features, I was confident it would encourage others to dig deeper too.

Features to help exploration

A few of the things we added to the vanilla product which I think make a big difference:

'Refine your results' links, with indicators to show how many results you'll get with that refinement applied, on search results pages. These just apply advanced search filters, but make them much more visible and easier to toggle on and off.
'By the same authors' and 'From the same journal' sidebars on publications pages. These are great for following a trail of related content.
'Recently viewed' links in the footer of every page. Each record in the database that you look at during a visit to the site stacks up in a series of lists in the footer of every page so that you can easily get back to the things you've seen already.

Links from staff profiles and department pages

Now that the York Research Database is live, we've enabled a field in the staff profile template in the CMS to make it easy to link to your profile page. There are more details on the Pure web pages for staff, including images to use to make links from departmental research pages and elsewhere too.

Measuring success

I'll be poring over Google Analytics in weeks to come to see whether we've managed to make the site as engaging as I hoped. You can let us know what you think in the comments, by tweeting us @uoywebteam or by emailing me direct at dan.wiggle@york.ac.uk.

New pages, and a new design, for the 50th Anniversary

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Wiggle) — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:18:00 +0000

The University is celebrating its 50th anniversary throughout 2013 and we're happy to have just launched some new web pages about the celebrations taking place and reflecting on our history: www.york.ac.uk/50/

We'll be adding more features reflecting on our achievements and documenting the events that are coming up as the year progresses, so check back occasionally to discover more.

A new design

The design is quite radically different from our standard template. We've been working with an outside agency on a revised design which ultimately will roll out across much of the website and this is the first pilot project using some of what we've been working on.

Many of you will no doubt have questions about the design change. I can answer a couple of likely ones straight away: For the enthusiasts I'm afraid, no, you can't have the design for your site just yet. For those a bit more cautious, don't worry, this is an early pilot and there is a long way to go before this will affect your pages. We'll share more details about the wider project soon.

We hope you like the design and the content. If you've any feedback then we'd be happy to hear it - leave us a comment or drop us an email at web-office@york.ac.uk.

Streaming graduation

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Wiggle) — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 09:30:00 +0000

Around 1,600 students graduated over the course of three ceremonies last Friday and two on Saturday, alongside four honorary graduates and several thousand family and friends. For the first time, we also streamed the ceremonies online so that remote audiences could share in the event.

As this was a low-key pilot of running a live stream of the ceremonies, we only announced that they would be viewable online the day before the first ceremony. At that point we put a prominent link on the University homepage, on the graduation web pages and shared the news on our Twitter and Facebook presences.

Viewing stats

We were pretty pleased with how the streaming went. A large number of people accessed the stream, including many who watched for extended periods. A very simple summary in numbers:

~2,500 unique pageviews of the video page
Visits from 68 countries
20% of visits from mobile devices (inc. tablets)
450Gb data streamed from server

I put together a few slides containing a more detailed breakdown which you can see below.

Behind the scenes

For the techies reading, I'll attempt to describe how the footage made its way to the web, but my involvement (and expertise!) was pretty well limited to putting the embed code in a page to display the player. The fine folk in our AV team dealt with the on-site setup and encoding, and we used a third-party to handle the streaming broadcast.

The video footage itself was being produced and directed live by a third party supplier, Visions Unlimited, who were on site to film the ceremonies for DVD (you can buy a DVD of any ceremony since 2010).

We ran the video footage through a PC running Flash Media Encoder, and uploaded it to a third-party streaming video provider. They took care of trans-coding the footage into two formats - one for Flash-supporting devices and one for everything else (principally iOS devices) - and load-balancing the traffic so that we could scale up the provision if a lot of people tuned in. The footage was embedded into the page using JWPlayer, with a separate link for non-Flash devices.

Team Movember

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Kelly) — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 18:03:00 +0000

If you've had any meetings with us or popped into Web Office HQ recently, you'll have noticed that the male members of the team are currently sporting moustaches.

It's all in aid of Movember, to raise awareness and funds for men's health issues in the month formally known as November.

If you'd like to make a donation, or just admire our progress, head over to our Movember team page.

Making meta data 'descriptions' more visible

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Wiggle) — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 18:39:00 +0000

We've recently made an update to the way meta data is published by the CMS which makes entering good meta data for University web pages much more worthwhile.

Getting people to enter good meta data into pages can be a losing battle, but hopefully I'll persuade you that it's worthwhile! I'm as bad as anyone at forgetting to do it, so I'm going to try to take my own advice too :)

Meta descriptions in search results

The change we've made means the University's internal search engine will now use the description field as the default text in search result snippets if it exists. External Google will also use the data, though it's a little less predictable (it tries to judge whether your description is 'good' or not, which is pretty subjective).

This increased visibility of descriptions leads to two recommendations:

If you don't have meta data in your pages, you really should add some
If you do have meta data in your pages, it's worth making sure it's informative and well written

Writing good meta descriptions

Google provide plenty of information about how to write good meta descriptions (see the latter section of that page, but while you're there you should read the top section about titles too!) and sites such as SEOmoz have good coverage too.

The key is to be descriptive: Tell someone enough about what's on the page to help them decide whether that's the page they should look at or not. Don't just state the obvious - saying 'Department of XYZ homepage' tells users that it's your homepage, but nothing else. 'The top XYZ department for student satisfaction in the UK. Discover more about our undergraduate and postgraduate courses plus world-leading research.' is more much more informative.

How long should a description be?

We recommend between 100 and 150 characters.

Google displays between 150 and 160 characters, so going over that risks your description being truncated.

At the other end of the spectrum though, if your description is particularly short Google may supplement it with content pulled from the page. This has happened with our maps page:

The first line in the snippet is our 'description'; the second is pulled from page content

Since you can probably write a better description of your page content than Google can automatically generate, it's worth providing enough content to stop it deciding to supplement what you provide.

Adding descriptions in the CMS

In addition to making meta descriptions more useful when published, we've made it easier to add them in the CMS too.

Meta data is added in the same place as always - the 'Meta' tab in the Modify Section screen - but we've removed all the other fields apart from description and keywords so it's much easier to get straight to the correct field to fill in. Any Moderator can add or amend meta data fields and there's no approval needed of any changes; they'll go live with the next publish automatically.

Seeing the effects

Search engines take a while to re-index pages, so if you change your meta descriptions don't expect search results to update instantly. Give it a few days, maybe up to a couple of weeks, and you should see the effect of your change.

Happy meta data updating!

Linking to individual tabs on tabbed content pages

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Kelly) — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 16:29:00 +0000

We've recently made some changes to how our tabbed content templates work in the CMS, so it's now possible to link directly to an individual tab, whether that's the careers tab on a course page or the publications tab on a staff profile.

This change also means that as you navigate through multiple tabs on a page, pressing the back button in your browser will now take you to the previous tab you were viewing, rather than the previous page.

Saying goodbye to Internet Explorer 7

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Kelly) — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 09:36:00 +0000

I was digging around in Google Analytics last month and noticed a slightly worrying trend: while IE6 usage has gradually been gradually falling to an almost insignificant amount, the number of visits from IE7 users has been showing hardly any sign of waning over the last year, holding steady at around 6% of all our traffic.

Surprisingly, a very large chunk of the IE7 traffic was coming from devices on the University network, even though most people are running either IE8 or 9. It turned out that this was because there's a setting in IE9 to 'Display intranet sites in Compatibility View' (where Compatibility View makes IE9 behave as if it's IE7), and this was enabled by default for york.ac.uk.

A couple of quick emails to IT Services later, and a change was pushed out to all supported desktops to turn this setting off (unless the user had manually set it).

The change was immediate:

Change in internal IE7 traffic after disabling Compatibility View for intranet sites (the regular dips are weekends)

We're now down from 18% to 6% for our internal IE7 traffic, and overall it's come down a couple of percentage points from 6% to 4%.

New staff homepage

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 09:34:00 +0000

Following the launch of the improved current students site last October, we’ve been working on making a lot of the functionality from the student homepage available to staff too. Due to go live mid-September, the new staff homepage will include:

Personalised content including your timetable, library record and news from YorkExtra. This will be particularly valuable as the desktop widget for YorkExtra is no longer available for PCs that have been upgraded to Windows 7.
Upcoming public lectures, latest press releases and the University Magazine.
Quick contacts search and quick links to core services.
A refreshed design throughout the staff site, providing quick access to frequently used services and content from every page.
Improvements to the search facility to bring you more relevant results.

Content from the current site can now be accessed from the left-hand menu and footer. We hope that the homepage will be a useful starting point for staff, giving them an overview of what’s going on at the University.

Links on the current homepage are now available via the left-hand navigation

The development for this is continuing alongside development of the student site as a collaboration between the Web Office and IT Services.

Your feedback is essential to us creating an effective site for staff. You can send it to us via email to web-office@york.ac.uk or, once it’s launched, via feedback form.

Welcome to new undergraduates

noreply@blogger.com (Web Office) — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 11:12:00 +0000

We've just launched a set of web pages to welcome new undergraduates, giving them easy-to-digest information about everything they need to know before they arrive, that they can dip into as and when.

What looks like a simple set of pages has actually taken about nine months to put together, given the huge amount of content planning that was needed before the web team could start building web pages.

A small group of people in the Academic Registry spent weeks reviewing what is sent to new undergraduates, when and who by, in an effort to reduce the amount of paper that's posted out and tell people what they need to know in a way that doesn't overwhelm them. The results were translated into a web structure and content by our Internal Comms team.

We want give students a warm welcome before they get to campus, so there are eight short welcome videos from student reps and members of staff - people who new students will regularly hear from or meet when they get here.

But by far the most popular video on the site is the 'Unofficial official guide to the University'. This came from an idea originally suggested by Tim Ngwena while he was YUSU president. He realised that most students don't understand the way the University is organised and how they fit in, and wanted to do something about it. This cartoon is the result.

Put together by Tim (now working for the Alumni team) and talented student cartoonist Hugo Brook, it's been scripted to give a short, friendly, informal guide around the University's structure. Something that could be a very dull read has been brought to life - we think it's brilliant, and we hope you enjoy it too.

The Social Web Team

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 08:19:00 +0000

You can now hear the latest tales from the basement of Heslington Hall on our official Twitter account.

We’ll use it to keep our followers updated about new and current projects we’re working on, the latest news and information from the team, and our thoughts on web issues and developments.

Support queries and requests for work are tough to answer in 140 characters, so please send those to web-office@york.ac.uk as normal.

You can follow us at @UoYwebteam

You can also see the latest University news on the University's official twitter, @UniofYork, and Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/universityofyork.

New Centre for Lifelong Learning site goes live

noreply@blogger.com (William Mackintosh) — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 12:00:00 +0000

The redeveloped Centre for Lifelong Learning site is now live, powered by the Web CMS.

Before:

After:

Web CMS Upgrade Coming Soon

noreply@blogger.com (William Mackintosh) — Thu, 31 May 2012 16:04:00 +0000

We're upgrading Site Manager to Version 7 in June, so here's a quick rundown of the improvements that make it much easier to use.

Big improvements to the look and feel

When you log on to the new version of Site Manager you'll notice a difference immediately. The layout and menus are much clearer and easier to use. You can navigate down into the section you're working on without losing your place, as it no longer refreshes the page. And there's no more Tools menu - you'll find the Media Library under the Content menu.

Improved media library

You can upload an image while you're editing text: just go to the media library from the content edit screen and you'll see a new option there. It's much easier to find out where photos and files are being used - select a 'usage' tab in the individual media item and you'll see a list of locations. And find media much more easily by adding keywords when you put them into the media library - you can search on them now.

Drag and drop to move sections

It's really easy to move content around: just pick up a section with your mouse and drag it to where you want it to be. All the links will update automatically.

Save as draft

You can now save a piece of content as a draft - anyone using blogging software will know how handy this is. This means draft content doesn't appear in the approvals queue, so it can't accidentally be published.

Easy to preview your content

There's now an option to preview your page from the drop down menu in the content tab, meaning you don't have to preview while editing the content itself.

We are really excited about these changes because we know they will solve a lot of problems for you.

So when is all this happening?

We are testing the software at the moment and subject to no unforeseen problems, we will work on the upgrade from 09:00 on Monday, 25 June until the evening of Wednesday, 27 June, 2012. It's a major upgrade and the Web CMS will be out of action for three days: we're giving good notice so you can plan around it and let us know (web-office@york.ac.uk) straight away if the dates clash with a major event within your department. During the upgrade, all pages produced by the Web CMS will remain visible on the website. However, it will not be possible to edit content.

We're revising our help pages and training notes, so these will be available for you at the time of the launch of the new software.

New Languages for All site goes live

noreply@blogger.com (William Mackintosh) — Wed, 09 May 2012 12:39:00 +0000

The redeveloped Languages for All site is now live, powered by the Web CMS.

Before:

After:

New team member - Helen Fisher

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 May 2012 07:39:00 +0000

Two weeks ago I started as Web Project Assistant in the Web Office, and as a new member of the team I’ve been asked to write a blog post as a short introduction to myself.

I’ve worked with web content and various content management systems for the past six years. My last role was as a Web and Project Assistant at the University of Leeds. I’ve been involved with most parts of the web life cycle but have a particular interest in information architecture and content strategy.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be starting to work on a variety of projects which I’m looking forward to getting involved in. I'm still learning my way around and getting to grips with a new place to work so feel free to say hello and help with directions!

Behind the scenes of our new map

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Wiggle) — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:15:00 +0000

Last week we quietly released a preview of the University's new online map. Our map launch blog post introduces the map's features and some future developments. This follow-up post delves a little deeper to examine how we put the map together.

Early sketches of the interactive map

There are a few components all stitched together to make the map work: map data, map tiles, a map user interface and some York-specific data which we drop onto the map. We'll go through each in turn.

The map data

Map data is drawn from OpenStreetMap.org. This is basically the Wikipedia of maps, and we're able to add and edit buildings, paths and more as the campus develops. As Paul mentioned in our earlier post, we're really grateful to the folk who worked on the YUSU iPhone app last year because they did a lot of work getting OpenStreetMap data up to scratch for their map features.

The campus on openstreetmap.org

You can see the campus on openstreetmap.org directly, but if you do you'll notice that it looks quite different to on our version. That's because we're using custom map tiles...

Custom map tiles

The map starts to get a bit cluttered if we include absolutely everything from OpenStreetMap, so in order to emphasise the most important features of campus we use a custom map style which we developed using tools from CloudMade.com.

CloudMade's Style Editor allow us to choose which types of elements to display on the map, and what colours to use for each element.

The CloudMade Style Editor

Every month or so CloudMade take a snapshot of OSM data, which is then used to generate map images (tiles) using the rules defined in our custom style, which we use on the website.

The monthly updates might not sound ideal, especially for a rapidly developing campus such as ours. But when balanced against the ease with which we can make updates and the flexibility that these methods offer us, we think it's the right choice and will allow us to build a better online map than any of the alternatives.

The map user interface

Hopefully when you browse and zoom the map it feels instantly familiar. If it does, that's because it works exactly the same as Google Maps. Indeed, it is Google Maps, at least in terms of the controls you use to interact with it.

The Google Maps API is the set of programming tools Google provide to let anyone have a go at building something with their technology. It has a relatively little known feature which allows map tiles from any source to be loaded into their interface. So, we can load our OSM map data, which we've transformed to a York-tailored style with CloudMade, directly into a familiar Google interface.

Using Google's maps API brings some other benefits too. We get satellite view, which although it hasn't kept up with developments on Heslington East too well, gives an interesting aerial perspective on campus. We also get StreetView, so you can drag the 'pegman' onto campus and see what it looks like at ground level. But possibly most importantly, at least for those of us working on building the map, we get to use some of the most robust and widely used mapping code around, which is invaluable when feeling your way through a project like this. Which brings us neatly to...

York's custom data

A draggable, zoomable overview map of campus would have been a big improvement on the previous static version even without anything extra. But, if there's one thing we've learned from our own use of the map, reports from other people and, most tellingly, from watching other people in usability tests, it's that finding somewhere you've never been before can be incredibly frustrating. A nice 'slippy' map doesn't help much if you don't know where to look.

Alongside the map we load a list of locations, and clicking any one drops a pin to show you exactly where that is. We know there's more to do - search and directions are features we hope to add in the future - but as a first step we think this should prove pretty handy.

We maintain our list of locations in a Google Spreadsheet, which we publish to the web for anyone to see if they know the link (take a look at the map location data). Doing this allows us to retrieve the data in some other formats using Google's data API. Unfortunately none of these formats are much use for loading straight into a web page. Fortunately, the web can do magical things, and we can use Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) to fetch our location data from Google in CSV format and translate it into a JSON data object. We load and process the JSON data using a bit of JavaScript and populate the list of locations alongside the map.

Location data stored in a Google Spreadsheet

We cache a copy of the JSON data rather than fetching it live from YQL every time, but that's just for speed and to reduce the number of possible points of failure. Even with the caching, managing our locations list like this means we can add or amend a location in a few minutes.

Putting it all together

Taken together, we think the combination of OSM data, Cloudmade custom-designed map tiles, the Google Maps API, a Google Spreadsheet, a simple YQL query and a sprinkling of homegrown JavaScript (although actually, even that uses JQuery and an onhashchange plugin so isn't completely our own) make for a pretty decent version 1 of a new online map.

We've got a big list of future feature ideas, most of which we're confident we can build on top of the foundations we've laid with this first release. All things considered, we think it's not bad at all for zero budget and just a few odd days of effort grabbed here and there.

Missed anything that you're interested in? Feel free to ask in the comments and we'll be glad to fill in any gaps.

Introducing our interactive campus map

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Kelly) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:25:00 +0000

We're really pleased to unveil our new interactive map of campus, which we've been working on over the last couple of months.

Easily find your way around campus with the new interactive map

With the new map, you can really quickly find any department, building or any of around 150 locations across campus. As well as departments and buildings, you can also see University services and facilities, colleges, cafés, bars, restaurants, shops, cash machines and car parks. So no more excuses for being lost around campus.

Within each category you also have the option to see all locations, useful for things like cafes and cash machines where you just want an idea of what's nearby.

"Show all" lets you see all the locations for any given category. Here's all the places to eat and drink on Heslington West

Anyone who has used Google Maps before will be familiar with the interface, which allows you to easily pan and zoom around the campus, and works great across all sorts of mobile devices.

Because we're using the Google Maps interface, you can switch to a satellite view of the campus and see what it looks like from above.

Looking down on the University lake with satellite view

In some parts of campus, you can also drag the orange "pegman" onto the map to enter Street View and see what the buildings look like.

Street View of Heslington Hall, home to Web Office HQ

Other improvements

We've made improvements to the rest of our maps and directions pages too, giving them a general tidy-up and have added a journey planner to campus, powered by Google Maps.

Get driving directions to campus from pretty much anywhere

Still to come

This is the first version of the interactive map, and there's plenty more to come in the near future. At the top of our list we've got:

Searching for locations by typing in their name, rather than browsing a list
Walking and cycling directions between any two locations on campus
Clickable pins to provide extra information about a location - such as an image of the building, links to websites, opening times
Bus stops with live information about when the next bus is due

We're keen to hear what you all think would be most useful, so please let us know in the comments or via our feedback form.

We're really grateful to YUSU for sharing some of the work that they did for the map in the YUSU iPhone app. This gave us a great head start and meant that we could do this a lot quicker than we would have done otherwise.

Check ~~back soon for~~ our second post about the new map, where we~~'ll~~ go into the technical details of how it all works.

New Centre for Housing Policy site goes live

noreply@blogger.com (William Mackintosh) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 11:22:00 +0000

The redeveloped Centre for Housing Policy site is now live, powered by the Web CMS.

Before:

After:

We're hiring!

noreply@blogger.com (William Mackintosh) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:39:00 +0000

Web Projects Assistant (Ref: 2165)

The University is in the midst of a major redevelopment of its website, including migration to a web content management system and development of numerous supporting web applications.

One important strand of this work is the development of a completely revised student-facing website. The enhanced student site will provide personalised news, alerts and links to relevant content in addition to a full range of information to support students throughout their University lives. A one year temporary post has been created which offers exciting opportunities to play a key role in this ambitious project.

The purpose of this role is to provide support to team members working on the student website and other projects. This will involve working closely with the team and colleagues in the Web Office on iterative design, implementation and assessment of web-based products and working with internal customers to support their web-based activities.

We are looking for someone with experience of producing high quality, professional and engaging websites. You should have the ability to write and edit high quality web content and a solid understanding of HTML, CSS and basic JavaScript. Excellent communication skills and a keen interest in the web are a must.

The role would be ideal for a recent graduate. It will also be of interest to other candidates looking to gain experience of working on a large, high traffic site.

Previous applicants for this post need not apply.

Salary will be within the range £23,121 - £28,401 per year. The post is available immediately for a period of up to 12 months.

Further information is available via http://www.york.ac.uk/jobs/