Web Project Update - October 2019

The new University website is coming soon, with a new look and an enhanced customer journey. Here�s an example of what you'll be seeing soon!

The website has been designed to improve the student recruitment experience further, and many different groups of key stakeholders have been involved in the research and development process.

"Eleven workshops were run by Granite Digital, the company which successfully tendered for the work, earlier this year. The groups included sixth formers at local schools, current students, local businesses, alumni, and staff from each Faculty, who all helped to identify and prioritise the information which is most crucial to their journey towards studying at or engaging with the University," says Digital and Creative Services Manager, External Relations, David Allen.

Feedback from the workshops coverd a number of things including:

• prospective students wanted to see who would be teaching them on course pages, so the new design is linked to staff profiles, and pulls in staff profile images for lead tutors on each
• prospective students wanted to learn more about not just what they'd study, but what life is like more generally on campus and in the city, so this has more prominence in a new 'University Life' section
• local businesses wouldn't automatically think our website was the place to go for business support, but would access it if it directly a provided a link
• all audiences wanted easily digestible pages, which were less text-heavy
• each audience did a card sorting exercises to rank content in temrs of importance to them as a target audience, the new site structure will now reflect this

"From this research, a new site structure and design was proposed by Granite, and then approved by the Website Development Project Steering Group, ready for the new website's go live date."

The website is due to go live on Monday 21st October 2019.