Welcome to the new Digital Developments Team blog. As with our previous Web Team blog, we’re going to use this blog to talk about digital developments, technical challenges we’re facing and test out new ideas.
In this first post, I’m going to briefly touch on our recent team name change and talk about the project we’re currently working on to redevelop the York St John University website.
Who we are
You may have noticed that we recently changed the name of our team from the Web Team to the Digital Developments Team. This name change reflects some key changes in our team’s responsibility and how we want to work with the rest of the University moving forward. Our key objectives of this change are:
- We want to move away from being associated with just one platform. Whilst the website is still at the heart of our work, we want to use our expertise to support the development of other digital platforms, such as the staff intranet and digital signage around campus.
- We want to instil ownership of the website across departments and teams. Web teams are often viewed as the owners of website content. We’re not the owners of the content – we just provide the platform for content editors to manage their content.
- Our value to the University comes from our ability to research, implement, test and iterate digital developments. By including developments in our team name, we are making a commitment to improving our digital presence and this always being a priority within our team.
Enhancing our digital presence
We have commenced a large-scale project to redesign and rebuild the York St John University website. This is a huge project and is taking up the majority of our current workload.
The website rebuild has a number of ambitious deliverables that we believe will have a big benefit for the University. As part of this project, we will:
- Deliver a completely new design and layout to support the University’s upcoming rebrand, better connect with our target audience and improve user experience.
- Build a flexible, scalable digital pattern library.
- Rebuild our whole navigation structure to move from a departmental structure to a task and topic based structure.
- Redevelop our content based on user stories and user needs.
- Comply with the recently implemented accessibility legislation.
- Improve our organic search engine optimisation performance.
- Review and rebuild the implementation of our website in Terminal Four to make it easier for editors to create engaging, accessible content.
- Implement a new editing and publishing model to make it easier for editors to publish content to the website.
Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll use this blog to take a deep dive into each of these deliverables. We’ll talk about why we’re making the change and how we’re planning on doing this.
In the meantime, we would really value any feedback you have on our current website.
